Free Republic

Donald Trump is so dependent on racial and ethnic antagonism that without it, he would be a marginal figure, relegated to the sidelines. Trump’s constant demonization of Black people and immigrants has inured the public to the fact that he is the first — or certainly the most explicit — modern president and party nominee to transparently generate, not to mention exacerbate, fear and white animosity toward people of color. Despite his appeal to a small if potentially crucial segment of Black and Hispanic men, racial bigotry has been central to Trump’s appeal from his initial quest, in 2015 and...

Apparently the plebeians supporting the candidates of their choice with small dollar donations represent a major problem for American society. At least, that’s what a condescending New York Times columnist argued. Thomas Edsall, who has an apparent obsession with telling the world how much he despises former President Donald Trump, also revealed a particular distaste for the grassroots Americans who helped propel his ascendance to the White House. “Small Donors Are a Big Problem,” read Edsall’s grossly elitist Aug. 30 headline. “Increasing the share of campaign pledges from modest donors has long been a goal of campaign-finance reformers, but it...

In the short term, should Joe Biden win the election and move into the White House, he would take office with a Democratic Party unified in its opposition to all things Trump. The question is how long would that last before leaders of every liberal interest group circling the new administration begin to get restless. In answer to this question, Carter Eskew, a top strategist on Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, wrote by email that Biden became a unity candidate in response to an overwhelming, almost feral desire to limit Trump’s damage to one term. When Trump leaves, Democratic unity, I...

The Democratic Party has never been more reliant on the support of upper-middle-class voters than it is today. And the economic fortunes of affluent Americans - and those of the typical working-class household - have rarely been more disparate. These twin developments have inspired much commentary about the class tensions beneath Team Blue’s “big tent”. There is little doubt that it would be easier to advance radical economic reform in an America where politics was sharply polarized along class lines, and working people of all races were concentrated in a single partisan coalition. It is absolutely true that a liberal...

Progressive New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall wrote on Tuesday that Democrats' embrace of Obamacare's redistribution scheme has angered and alienated working-class and middle-class Americans. "Even though midterm elections favor Republicans, the 2014 results show middle and working-class dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party rising to dangerous levels, which threatens the party's growing demographic advantages," wrote Edsall. As Breitbart News reported last Wednesday, the latest Gallup poll finds that President Barack Obama's approval rating with working-class white voters has hit an all-time low 27%. Moreover, the Gallup poll's findings were taken from opinion data collected prior to racially-charged riots in...

It's not something you often see talked about but there's basically an unwritten assumption in national political circles that if you're a political liberal and you're also a reporter, you should be willing to be a "team player" and not admit that you even are one.This point is important, you see, because conservatives are liars bent on "hurting America" (to use Jon Stewart's phrase), so anything that gives them comfort is something you should never do. That attitude was very much on display in an online chat today with former Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall. If you recall, Edsall was...

The mainstream media presents itself as unbiased, when in fact, there are built into it many biases and they are overwhelmingly to the left. Reporters vote Democratic by somewhere between 15 to 1 and 25 to 1. Those statements sound like something Rush Limbaugh would say. But they were spoken by Thomas Edsall, a Washington Post political reporter for a quarter century. In speaking with talk show host Hugh Hewitt, Mr. Edsall also noted that he is pro-choice and has never voted for a Republican presidential candidate. Fortunately for Mr. Edsall, he is one of the long-time Post reporters who...

In today's Washington Post, Howard Kurtz writes of comments made by Thomas Edsall, who until recently served as a political reporter for the Post. Mr. Edsall is quoted from an interview: (The) "mainstream media presents itself as unbiased, when in fact there are built into it many biases, and they are overwhelmingly to the left." He also mentions he's never voted for a Republican presidential candidate and estimates that reporters vote for Democrats by somewhere between 15 to 1 and 25 to 1. OK, so the mainstream media's persistent liberal bias isn't earth shattering news to most of us. Still,...