TRUMP

194 ANATOMY OF A MONSTROSITY
coverage is difficult to overstate. 606 ) The Democratic Party needs to
realize that poor white voters notice when you trash them as morons.
And black voters notice when you incorporate sophisticated analyses
of diversity and intersectionality into your policy statements, but
would pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to send your children to
private school before you would allow them to attend a public school
in a black neighborhood. And they don’t necessarily buy it when you
go from cheering the largest-ever expansion of the country’s prison
system 607 to embracing the Black Lives Matter movement. 608 Voters
aren’t actually stupid; they pick up on the messages that are sent, and
the message the Democratic Party has consistently sent is: we talk like
we care about you, but we don’t actually.
And yet there is a certain sense of entitlement that Democrats feel
to working people’s votes. Thomas Frank says that among those he
knows in elite D.C. circles, there was a phenomenally arrogant sense
that people had to vote for Hillary Clinton, that she deserved to be
president: “They really think that they’ve got this thing in the bag.
They think they’re in charge.” 609 After the election, Lena Dunham
voiced her shock that something that was meant to happen had not
happened, complaining “It wasn’t supposed to go this way. It was
supposed to be her job. She worked her whole life for the job. It’s
her job.” 610 It’s precisely because Democrats have felt that people are
supposed to vote for them, rather than feeling like they are supposed to
persuade people to vote for them, that people around the country, at
all levels of government, have stopped voting for Democrats.
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Unfortunately, after the election, signs were not promising
that Democrats had learned their lesson. Despite representing
the worst tendencies of contemporary Democratic politics, Nancy
Pelosi was swiftly reelected as the leader of the House Democrats,