A week after November 5, the NYT headlined the news that “MANY DEMOCRATS SAT OUT ELECTION.” How politically astute an observation. 

When I went to bed on Election Day before the eleven o’clock news, I already had that figured out. Adding a week of the talking heads’ post-mortem analysis of how the Dems had abandoned a part of their natural constituency, I feel really well-informed. 

But maybe the facts are a little different. 

I grew up in a class structure of lower, middle and upper, mostly based on income but with education and occupation as considerations. The post-war boom grew the middle class, resulting in its reimagination as having lower, middle and upper portions, and the division of the entire income class structure into quintiles. 

The lower and upper classes also were subdivided; and I have never been convinced that the bottom of the barrel—the “underclass”—is within or outside the class structure because of behavioral characteristics. 

In any case, the original middle class occupied the three middle quintiles of classification, peaking at about two-thirds of the population. Then GOP policies (my guess is intentionally) dismantled it, especially that which was linked to industrial capitalism, and the middle class declined to less than 50 percent of the total. 

In fairness, the explanation by conservative apologists for the disappearance of the middle class probably has merit: some of the upper middle class segued into the lower upper class, in particular in fields producing neither goods nor services, but illusory paper wealth (i.e., most of the new economy). 

It is less a matter of the Dems leaving their traditional electorate, than that electorate vanishing, forcing the Dems to preach to a new choir (for which I do not forgive them). 

The explanation for the results of the election is much simpler: only a few states are really in play. Six of the seven swing states voted against a better female Democratic candidate in 2016 (and the seventh halved the margin of Obama’s victory in 2012). So, blame misogyny.

John A. MacKinnon
Lackawaxen, PA