Many Working Class Voters Helped Elect A Plutocracy
Yesterday, Greg Ip claimed that cutting the deficit is easy—it’s just unpopular. He’s right about the second asserton; the first— not so much. “The federal deficit,” he wrote, “reached $1.8 trillion, or 6.4% of GDP, last fiscal year, a record outside of war, recession or emergency. Musk and Trump have promised to attack it by cutting federal spending. One simple step would be to stop adding to it. And yet last week neither stood in the way of Congress’s largess. Musk posted in favor of the money for disaster victims and farmers. The vice president-elect, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, co-sponsored the Social Security expansion. The reason is obvious: Spending is popular with voters and both parties. This is why commissions, think tanks and earnest outsiders have been papering Washington for decades with ideas to cut spending and the deficit— and mostly gotten nowhere.” And no one wants to spend as much as Trump does, no matter how much lip-service he pays to Musk, the oligarchy and the remnants of the Reagan Republicans— more and more of it, alas, now the right-wing of the Democratic Party.
At the same time, Tim Craig, noted that after backing Señor T, low-income voters hope he doesn’t slash their benefits. Lawrence County in far Western Pennsylvania on the Ohio border, north of Pittsburgh, has turned red. New Castle is the county seat and it was there that Craig began his story. The county is 95% white and both the city and the county have precipitously declining populations. 49.5% of the voters are registered Republicans and just 38.5% are Dems. The last time the county went for a Democrats was in 2000, when Al Gore beat George W Bush by over 6 points. It has been a solid Democratic bastion since 1960. Today both state senators, both state Reps and the congressman are Republicans. Kamala did worse than any Democrat since 1924 when Calvin Coolidge beat John Davis in the county, 64.6% to 9.7%, with Socialist Robert La Follette taking 21.7%. Last month, Kamala took 32.7%. At least in part, her inability to lay out and stick with an authentic, cohesive message for the working class killed her and her party in Lawrence County. One Trump voter told Craig that Trump “is more attuned to the needs of everyone instead of just the rich. I think he knows it’s the poor people that got him elected, so I think Trump is going to do more to help us.”
“Trump,” wrote Craig, “carried the Pennsylvania city of New Castle by about 400 votes, becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to win here in nearly 70 years. More than 1 in 4 residents live in poverty, and the median income in this former steel and railroad hub ranks as one of the lowest in Pennsylvania. New Castle’s poorest residents weren’t alone in putting their faith in Trump. Network exit polls suggest he erased the advantage Democrats had with low-income voters across the country… [L]ow-income Americans who voted for Trump say they are counting on him to keep their benefits intact even while his Cabinet picks and Republican lawmakers call on him to reduce federal spending.”
Billionaires Musk and Ramaswamy and their DOGE team, plus Russ Vought, Trump’s Project 2025 architect, the next White House budget director, seem headed towards slashing these benefits, particularly food stamps and Medicaid, which are crucial for the working poor, half of whom, nationally, admit they voted for Trump and are still largely unaware about what's going to happen to them and their families.
Federal benefits have helped keep residents afloat, and today that safety net is deeply interwoven with daily life. The 8.5-square-mile city includes 10 public housing projects. About 60 percent of the houses in the city are rental properties, and federal housing vouchers help countless families afford rent. Many residents also receive Medicaid and food stamps.
More than half of the Lawrence County Community Action Partnership’s $32 million budget comes from federal aid, said Scott, the organization’s leader. That helps it do things like shuttle low-income residents to medical appointments and offer rental assistance. Federal aid is also key in keeping New Castle’s children fed. About 90 percent of students come from low-income families and qualify for free school lunches, and many are sent home with food to eat over the weekend.
“It’s a very depressed area, so if our funding were to go away, and I have not heard it will, but if it were to go, we would be some in serious, serious trouble,” said Gregg Paladina, superintendent of the New Castle Area School District.
…New Castle was a bastion for Democratic votes up until this year. But in larger Lawrence County, the shift toward the GOP has been ongoing. White, working class Americans were increasingly drawn to Republican candidates, in part because of their messaging on security and immigration.
Well… guess who’s paying for Trump’s lavish inauguration? It’s not the working class voters who put him in office again. It’s the banksters, Silicon Valley predators, big drug makers and the rest of the oligarchy, looking for more tax breaks at the expense of the programs that the working poor depend on. No working poor voters will be allowed to get anywhere near the festivities being put on for the 6 and 7 figure donors who will have a lot easier time making their cases to fellow billionaires and multimillionaires who populate the impending Trump regime for government aid than the folks back in Lawrence County.
