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Despite President Donald Trump’s success with the white working class, Belcher said courting these voters shouldn’t be progressives’ first priority. “When people say they want to take their country back, we should stop pretending we don’t know what that frickin’ means,” he said. “Democrats, you’re not going to win blue-collar whites anytime soon. You’re not.”
Instead, Belcher said Democrats should focus on turning out minority voters—starting with more political groups run and staffed by minorities:
Stop funding these one or two organizations that, quite frankly—how do I say this, congresswoman? maybe it’s ‘passive bigotry of progressives’?—where you fund these one or two primarily white organizations … and they have to go communicate with people of color…. We shouldn’t go into another election cycle where there’s not a black or blown super PAC that has the funding that Priorities [USA Action] does.
Belcher said this progressive blind spot manifested itself in a central conceit of the Clinton campaign: that she’d do better than Obama among white women.
“She didn’t do better among white women,” Belcher whispered into his microphone, prompting nodding heads and murmurs of agreement in the crowd. In politics, he said, “race has trumped gender.”
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