Opinion: The ‘abandon whites’ fantasy

Democrats don’t need to win the white working class. They need to do better with it. View in [Browser]( | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. [The New York Times]( [The New York Times]( Friday, August 3, 2018 [NYTimes.com/Opinion »]( [David Leonhardt] David Leonhardt Op-Ed Columnist For goodness sake, stop obsessing over the white working class. Most white voters who have abandoned the Democratic Party aren’t coming back. It’s time for the party to realize this and to focus on its natural constituencies: African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans and college-educated whites. This is an [increasingly popular]( view on the left. I also think it’s wrong, as regular readers of [this newsletter]( may know, and I want to highlight two excellent new debunkings. One is [the latest episode of “The Wilderness” podcast]( from the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau. He gets the right balance: Democrats should neither compromise on civil rights nor abandon the entire white working class. Here is one telling statistic: More than one-third of the votes that Barack Obama received in 2012 came from whites without a college degree. Obama still lost this group, badly, to Mitt Romney. But he did well enough to win the election. In 2016, Hillary Clinton fared worse among non-college whites — and lost the election. One reason, unfair as it may be, is that this demographic group has outsize power in the Electoral College. I especially like the argument for a muscular “multiracial populism” by Heather McGhee of Demos during the podcast. The second debunking is [a Times Op-Ed by Thomas Edsall](. As usual with his work, it’s grounded in social-science research. Vacation notice. Earlier this year, [I asked you]( which voices were underrepresented in op-ed journalism. You offered [many answers]( but the two most common were ideological: The Times and other mainstream publications, you said, don’t have enough truly left-wing voices (as opposed to center-left) and don’t have enough populist conservative voices. I’m about to take a three-week break from writing this newsletter, to recharge for the midterm campaign and the rest of the news. In deciding how to use this newsletter during those three weeks, my colleagues and I took your advice. We are going to broaden the conversation. Next week, this newsletter will be written by [Meagan Day]( and [Bhaskar Sunkara]( of Jacobin, the proudly socialist publication that I’ve cited here before. For a week in late August, the newsletter’s author will be [Chris Buskirk]( — a contributing Times Op-Ed writer and the editor of American Greatness, a conservative publication that’s often critical of the conservative establishment. For the other week, we’ll be doing something different — and just as interesting, I think. We’ve asked one of the best writers on the biggest news story of all — the Russia investigation — to be your daily guide. She is [Quinta Jurecic]( the managing editor of Lawfare, and she will also write about other legal and national-security issues. While I’m gone, I will miss talking to you and hearing from you. But I hope you will enjoy getting some different perspectives in the meantime. And I am grateful to Meagan, Bhaskar, Chris and Quinta for stepping in. I look forward to reading their work along with the rest of you. Again, Meagan and Bhaskar will go first, writing the week of Aug. 6. Quinta will go next, the week of Aug. 13. Chris will go last, the week of Aug. 20. I’ll be back Monday, Aug. 27. The full Opinion report from The Times follows, including [Kara Swisher’s debut on Facebook and the weaponization of social media](. 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