Free Republic

On Friday’s broadcast of ABC’s “The View,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) said that Democrats shouldn’t “change the fundamental policies of the Democratic Party to move to the right to try to address” their problems with working-class voters because “The problem in the last election was messaging.” Co-host Ariana DeBose asked, “[W]orking-class voters have historically been a Democratic stronghold, until the last election, when either they voted for MAGA or they stayed home. Trump dominated issues on, like, trade, immigration, no taxes on tips, that sort of a thing. Do you think that Democrats have lost touch with the working-class...

Mayor Eric Adams said the Democratic Party has abandoned him – and everyday New Yorkers. “People often say, ‘Well, you know, you don’t sound like a Democrat and you seem to have left the party,’” Adams told host Tucker Carlson during an interview due to air Tuesday night. “No. The party left me and left working-class people.” Adams added that he believes the Biden Administration punished him for being vocal about the migrant crisis plaguing the Big Apple – claiming the White House response to his gripes about being a sanctuary city was: “be a good Democrat, Eric.” According to...

CNN’s Kyung Lah talks to members of an extended family who all live in Altadena, California, and who say they feel helpless about what to do next after losing their homes in the wildfires.

Elites are betraying the working class. This is how. She's not leaving the US for Israel. She's staying, despite the terrible state of the country, which she describes. Transcript linked below video.

Democrats are trying to figure out how they lost massive numbers of working class voters in historically blue areas across the country — but the evidence shows that the party simply left them behind. USA Today interviewed multiple former Democrats in the liberal enclave of Massachusetts who cast their votes for President-elect Donald Trump in the recent election, and their main reason was the economy. Mark Callahan, a 67-year-old from Lynn, a suburb of Boston, voted Democrat in nearly every presidential election prior to this year. Now, he said he hopes that Trump will “make a change.”

The battle for the City of Philadelphia may not be a slam-dunk for Democrats, and local and national officials are worried. They see the numbers—they’re not stupid. The Philadelphia Inquirer decided to get into the trenches in the brawl for the City of Brotherly Love, where they found Democrats have significant problems when it comes to keeping their historical voter blocs intact. It’s not about the result here since the city isn’t going to flip red. However, Biden only won Pennsylvania with 80,000 votes, and marginal shifts among the white working class can alter the race. To compound matters, non-white...

Working-class voters in the deep blue city of Philadelphia are showing dramatic signs of switching their support to former President Donald Trump’s Republican Party. “Democrats keep saying [Trump] is going to bring down the economy, but he was already president for four years, and taxes were lower,” former Hillary Clinton supporter Gabriel Lopez told the Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday. “We’re tired of the same politics. We got a different type of guy, and the people actually love him.” Lopez’s story appears to be indicative of many voters in Philadelphia, a city not immune to the ongoing political realignment. Democrats outnumber...

Former President Donald Trump is crushing Vice President Kamala Harris among working-class voters by the same margin with which he led President Joe Biden in June, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll. The poll, conducted September 3-6, 2024, and published on Sunday, shows Trump leading Harris by 17 points, 56 percent to 39 percent, among non-college-educated voters. In a poll taken in the days before the fateful June 27 debate, which marked Biden’s political demise, Trump had a 54 percent to 37 percent lead over Biden among working-class voters.

Victor Davis Hanson, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Distinguished Fellow at Hillsdale College, Pepperdine professor, syndicated columnist, bestselling author, and fifth-generation California farmer, argues in his July 29, 2024 article that American society is treating its citizens like lab rats, resulting in harmful outcomes. Read the article here: https://victorhanson.com/americas-lab... Transcript link below the video.

Well, it’s finally a race. On Tuesday, Kamala Harris selected progressive Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate in what has become one of the most exciting presidential campaign sprints in modern history. The Harris-Walz campaign now has just 89 days to take its show on the road before voters head to the ballot box on Nov. 5. Harris’ choice also did the impossible, uniting progressive and conservative lawmakers in Washington. Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) hailed Walz as an “excellent decision” and a leader who “won’t back down under tight odds.” Meanwhile, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) —...

Working class residents are fleeing New York City because it’s too expensive, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Monday. The congresswoman made the claim during a discussion of the migrant crisis and Mayor Eric Adams’ controversial across-the-board proposed budget cuts that would shrink the police force and trim spending on schools, libraries and cultural arts programs. During her tele-town hall meeting, she wondered why the mayor and council weren’t looking to boost taxes on the wealthy — such as pricey pied-à-terre or luxury crash pads for the jet-setting ultra rich.

Last week, a shocking moment of truth broke through the huge effort elites normally put into hiding their disdain for the rest of us. At an event sponsored by the libertarian Cato Institute, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Adam Posen—a man who appears to be paid $450,000 a year—made clear his absolute contempt for the working class.

On Aug. 2, I watched as a majority of voters in the county where I grew up (Seward County) in rural Kansas — a county that went for Trump by 29 points in 2020 — voted against the proposed constitutional amendment that would allow for an abortion ban. Statewide, voters rejected the ban by a stunning double-digit margin. I am part of a new generation of Latina leaders in Democratic politics, and there’s buzz in progressive circles about that vote in Kansas. It boosted optimism for the 2022 election, with good reason — if we understand the right lessons.

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” Democratic strategist and CNN Contributor Paul Begala criticized proposals for President Joe Biden to forgive student loan debt by stating that “Democrats have gone from being the party of the factory floor to being the party of the faculty lounge.” And Democrats should “go back to their roots, which is, earn it.”

In the 2016 Republican Party presidential primary, decades of dissonance between the party's aggrieved grassroots and its blinkered elite spilled out into the open. For years, the chasm widened between the GOP's heartland base, the river valley-dwelling "Somewheres" from David Goodhart's 2017 book, "The Road to Somewhere," and the party's bicoastal "Anywhere" rulers. The foot-soldier Republican "Somewheres," disproportionately church-attending and victimized by job outsourcing and the opioid crisis, felt betrayed by the more secular, ideologically inflexible Republican "Anywheres." Donald Trump, lifelong conservative "outsider" and populist dissenter from bicoastal "Anywhere" orthodoxy on issues pertaining to trade, immigration and China, coasted to...

Just look at the issues the Democrats are pushing: defunding the police, which hurts mostly poor and working-class neighborhoods; critical race theory, which mostly interests woke white activists (and rich-and-guilty Dem donors) but which actually sends a message of inferiority to minority youths; gender ideology, which plays less well among the more traditional and more religious working-class minorities; environmental policies that produce higher gas prices and lower employment, while pushing food prices up; open borders that drive down wages for downscale workers; and so on. Donors and activists love this stuff. They live in neighborhoods that are mostly insulated from...

The attempted denigration of Jane Austen reveals how upscale, white elites view caring about anti-racism as a marker of status.The woke may regret going after Jane Austen. Last month it was reported that exhibits at the Jane Austen Museum were being revamped as staff are“re-evaluating Jane Austen’s place in ‘Regency-era colonialism’ in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests.” This attempt to evaluate Austen according to the American upper class’s current racial obsessions mostly reveals the blind spots those obsessions encourage. Many of Austen’s fans were furious at this attempted denigration of the great authoress. This anger was intensified by...

When half the working class is facing economic devastation and the other half still has to show up to work, are we really all in this together? I’m a lawyer in New York City, currently working from home due to the coronavirus shutdown. For me it’s working quite well. Almost all of my work was done on computer, internet, and phone even when I was doing it in an office, so doing it from a home equipped with a computer, internet, and phone is not really much of an inconvenience. In fact, comparing the distance from my home to my...

Democrat strategist James Carville warned that the smug, urbanist mindset is causing the Democratic Party to be distracted by the wrong issues. Democratic strategist James Carville unleashed on 2020 Democratic candidates for pulling the party too far left and warned Democrats are at risk of seeming “culturally arrogant” to the working class. His rant began on a viral MSNBC segment this week after the chaos of the Iowa caucuses, then he extended his admonishments in an interview with Vox.Vox Writer Sean Illing seemed to question whether Carville’s strong reaction was warranted. Are Democrats “really destroying the party?” he asked. “What...

Working class communities deserted Jeremy Corbyn and Labour in huge numbers after Boris Johnson's vow to get Brexit done, a damning new election analysis shows today. The Tories won over the DE social class made up of the unemployed and unskilled workers by 13 points, an astonishing gulf for a Conservative leader. The lead, 47 per cent to 34 per cent - swallowed up Jeremy Corbyn's three point advantage among the same group in the 2017 election. And it also dwarfs the eight point lead that Ed Miliband enjoyed in 2015, which prompted his resignation as Labour leader. In more...