PPI - Radically Pragmatic
  • Donate
Skip to content
  • Home
  • About
    • About Us
    • Locations
    • Careers
  • People
  • Projects
  • Our Work
  • Events
  • Donate

Our Work

“Populist Crossfire”

  • March 30, 2010
  • Ed Kilgore

Over the weekend Ron Brownstein wrote up the nightmare scenario for Democrats in terms of their appeal to white working class voters:

[P]olling just before the [health reform] bill’s approval showed that most white Americans believed that the legislation would primarily benefit the uninsured and the poor, not people like them. In a mid-March Gallup survey, 57 percent of white respondents said that the bill would make things better for the uninsured, and 52 percent said that it would improve conditions for low-income families. But only one-third of whites said that it would benefit the country overall — and just one-fifth said that it would help their own family….Obama has already been hurt by the perception, fanned by Republicans, that the principal beneficiaries of his efforts to repair the economy are the same interests that broke it: Wall Street, big banks, and the wealthy. The belief that Washington has transferred benefits up the income ladder is pervasive across society but especially pronounced among white voters with less than a college education, the group that most resisted Obama in 2008. Now health care could threaten Democrats from the opposite direction by stoking old fears, particularly among the white working class, that liberals are transferring income down the income ladder to the “less deserving.”

Brownstein calls this dynamic “an unusual populist crossfire.” The antidote, he suggests, might be two-fold: continuing to stress the benefits for the middle class, and to the country, of health reform, while spending more time reinforcing a Democratic message on the economy and the financial system that makes Republicans, not Democrats, defenders of Wall Street and the wealthy. The White House and congressional Democrats seem to be moving briskly on both those fronts, and how well they succeed could be fateful in November. At the same time, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that perceptions (which Brownstein also documents) by poor and minority voters that health reform does in fact help them and help the country produce a greater willingness to vote this year than would normally be the case in a midterm election.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Related Work

Blog  |  September 17, 2025

This Week in RFK Jr.’s Vaccine Conspiracy Theories

  • Alix Ware
Feature  |  September 16, 2025

PPI in The Nevada Independent: Nevada Democrats Advised to Lean in on Economic Issues, Ease up on Cultural Wars

  • Will Marshall
In the News  |  September 15, 2025

Marshall, Ainsley in Politico EU: How Britain’s Labour Party is (quietly) keeping up with the Democrats

  • Will Marshall Claire Ainsley
Blog  |  September 3, 2025

RFK Jr. Wants Us to Trust Health Tracking Devices and Apps. Should We?

  • Orsi Feher
Op-Ed  |  August 29, 2025

Marshall for The Hill: Trump is Sinking, but Democrats Aren’t Rising — Here’s Why

  • Will Marshall
Op-Ed  |  August 12, 2025

Ware for The Hill: Republicans are Making Boogeymen of Their Own Voters on Medicaid

  • Alix Ware
  • Never miss an update:

  • Subscribe to our newsletter
PPI Logo
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Donate
  • Careers
  • © 2025 Progressive Policy Institute. All Rights Reserved.
  • |
  • Privacy Policy
  • |
  • Privacy Settings