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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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Historically, winning the working-class voter has been the clearest path to electoral success in American politics. Barack Obama carried the working class in both of his successful elections and President Trump’s surprise victory was due in large part to working class Obama voters in the Midwest who flipped.

Going into 2020, working-class voters are once again in the spotlight as President Trump fights for reelection. However, if current trends are any indication, Democrats seem to be abandoning the working class.

This is staggering in the historical sense because Democrats have normally had the reputation as the working-class party, while Republicans were the party of the rich. Labor unions, the supposed voice of workers, still regularly give 90+ percent of their political donations to Democrats, and Democratic politicians return the favor. Just in the last week, for instance, Beto O’Rouke and Kirstin Gillibrand went to Michigan to court the union vote.

It would seem that Democrats are the champions of the working class, but behind the veneer of love and roses is an ugly reality: Democrats seem to be out of touch with the common worker.

One only needs to look at the makeup of the newly-elected House of Representatives to see this in stark view. After last year’s election, Democrats now control all 20 of the nation’s wealthiest Congressional districts, nearly all of which are clustered in coastal cities.

Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton and an economic strategist for Barack Obama, writes: “The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades, the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper-middle-class households in “swing suburbs.'”

As Democrats become more in tuned with wealthy coastal elites, can they be expected to truly look after the interests of the working class? The answer appears to be no, with one recent incident in California proving it.

To make a long story short, back in 2013, farm workers in California overwhelmingly voted to leave the United Farm Workers union (UFW) because the union had abandoned them for decades. However, the Agriculture Labor Relations Board (ALRB) blocked the vote, directly denying these farm workers their right to express their voices.

Luckily, after five years, massive protests, and burdensome legal battles, the courts let the votes stand and the farm workers were freed from ineffective union representation.

Rather than jump to the worker’s defense, though, Democrats sided with the unions. One legislator, Lorena Gonzalez-Fletcher even killed several Republican-led bills that would have prevented the ALRB from violating farm workers’ rights ever again.

What’s almost laughable about this incident is that Assemblywoman Gonzalez-Fletcher has campaigned on being the champion of the farm worker – yet proved herself instead to be a champion of big-spending union elites, and the farm worker’s greatest villain.

This is not a unique incident. All across the nation, Democrats like Gonzalez-Fletcher are taking actions that favor big-money special interests over the needs of working Americans.

Going into 2020, such actions by Democrats only threaten the party’s hopes for greater political gains. Abandoning the people who work the hardest is not only morally wrong but politically detrimental.

Regardless – whether you are a Republican or Democrat – we can all agree that we must put policies in place that help working Americans, not for political gains and scorekeeping, but for one simple reason – it’s the right thing to do.