I concluded last week’s column with the following: “…I believe that the Democratic Party needs to do far more for working-class voters – and not just in terms of discrete policies they can point to, but getting reacquainted with the 70 percent of America that does not have a college degree, and whose incomes have […]
Matt Talbot: Concluding thoughts on the Democrats and 2016
This is part 4 of my series discussing the progressive electoral failure of the Democratic Party over the last six years. There’s other stuff I’d like to talk about, so I think I’ll wrap this discussion up (for the time being) in today’s column. I’ve said before in this space that the most defining characteristic […]
Matt Talbot: Yet more about the 2016 election
In this series, I’m attempting to analyze the source of the decline of the Democratic Party — and not just Hillary Clinton’s defeat last month, but the broader and more comprehensive decline experienced by the Democratic Party that began in 2010 and that has gotten steadily worse since then – and lay out a roadmap […]
Matt Talbot: More thoughts on the 2016 election
In last week’s column, I said that the Democratic Party has been losing elections because it is not doing enough for working class voters: “Notice I didn’t say, white working class. I said working class, period – of every ethnicity. Let me define what I mean by working class: ‘people living the usual situation of […]
Facing reality, part 2
In last week’s column, I quoted an article in The Imaginative Conservative by my friend, the author John Medaille: “This is not an election about the head, but about the heart, and at the heart of American politics is a burning rage. Rage that our livelihoods have been sacrificed to abstract economic theories; rage that […]
Matt Talbot: Facing Reality, Part 1
In a column last fall, I predicted that Bernie Sanders would get the Democratic Party’s nomination for president this year. Putting aside the completely unforeseeable, it is getting hard to imagine a path to the nomination, given the delegate math and Hilary Clinton’s lead going into the upcoming California primary. She currently has a greater […]
Matt Talbot: Using the Dems’ majority to achieve enduring progress
AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL, the Democratic Party’s agenda is effectively crippled by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Because of Republican gerrymandering in the wake of the last round of redistricting in 2010, winning back the House is an uphill battle for Democrats in the best of years, at least for the time being. In my […]