by Manzanita Miller
There was a time when the Democratic Party maintained a moderately believable facade as the voice of the middle class, claiming to represent the interests of blue-collar families and rural America while condemning Wall Street elitists, but that political dichotomy belongs back in the 2010s.
The modern Democratic Party is now inarguably the party of coastal elitism, censorship, and distain for the working class, with Democrats concentrating themselves into a few extremely wealthy regions with economic and political climates that do not represent the rest of country.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) is one Democrat who recognizes her party’s rapidly diminishing power among middle-class voters and has been sounding the alarm bell that her party risks losing these voters to Republicans if they don’t figure out how to reverse course.
Data circulated by Kaptur’s office shows of the ten wealthiest Congressional Districts in the country, nine are ruled by Democrats, while Republicans represent the vast majority of working class Congressional Districts.
In the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans won back the House of Representatives largely by continuing to make inroads in the most economically distressed districts, but also in middle-class districts. Democrats meanwhile managed to hang on to a majority of wealthy districts. If Democrats are unable to appeal to voters beyond a consolidated set of elite districts, their power will be weakened considerably in future elections.
Data from the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan research group, shows the trend of GOP representatives increasing their share of lower and middle-income Congressional Districts is something that has been accelerating since 2020.
In 2018, under Former President Trump, Democrats won the House back from Republicans, but since then Democrats have experienced a decline in overall votes in both consecutive elections, with the greatest losses occurring in economically distressed regions.
As shown below, Democrats strongly outperform Republicans in prosperous districts, narrowly outperform in comfortable districts, and lose to Republicans in the remaining districts but particularly in distressed and at-risk districts.
The data is crystal clear. The Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class and fixation on fringe issues is driving economically distressed voters to vote Republicans into office because they believe Republicans better represent their interests.
Another piece to this puzzle is the accelerating exodus of individuals from high-tax, crime-ridden states like California, Illinois and New York to safer and freer states like Florida, Montana, Idaho, and North Carolina. As I wrote last month, liberal states are losing population at an alarming rate, and when reapportionment occurs after the next census in 2030, Democrat states could find themselves without enough residents to hold onto their current number of Congressional seats.
This historic political alignment is prompting some Democrats to question, why is this happening? Rep. Marcy Kaptur who is circulating the data on working class districts moving to the right said as much in an interview with Business Insider. “The other way you could look at it is: how is it possible that Republicans are representing the majority of people who struggle?”, Kaptur mused. This is a good question. How is it, that despite a barrage of social engineering from the mainstream press and globalist institutions insisting that Democrats represent ‘the little guy’, Democrats are consistently losing middle-class voters?
Political elites love nothing more than condescendingly remarking from their wealthy perches that Republicans are voting against their own economic interests, but the reality is a great wave of Americans are seeing the economic and cultural destruction caused by the globalist agenda.
Americans know that the Democratic slate of priorities such as releasing criminals into American cities, sewing racial and gender discord at every turn, refusing to close the border, taxing small businesses into oblivion, ensnaring ourselves in costly foreign wars, and refusing to expand energy independence are destroying the American Dream, and they realize they have the power to reverse this.
Democrats will continue to lose – and they should – if they continue to dismiss vast swathes of the country who do not share their self-serving and simplistic worldview. To answer Kaptur’s question with another question, how do Democrats expect to win a group of people they spend most of their time berating, dismissing, dehumanizing and refusing to understand?
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Manzanita Miller is an associate analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
