WE MAY BE NEEDED, BUT WE'RE NOT WANTED.

WE MAY BE NEEDED, BUT WE'RE NOT WANTED. In the comments to Tom's post below, David asserts:

Working-class southern whites need the Democrats, and it should be the job of Democrats to figure out how to reach out to them while maintaining their socially progressive commitments -- not throw them to the sharks.

David then goes on to accuse Tom of snobbery for his unwillingness to help these Southern whites. As Paul Waldman helpfully pointed out, whatever Southern whites may need, they want Republicans. If you ask me, asserting that Southern whites "need" something that's obviously different than what they want is, well, the height of snobbery...As an addendum, the idea that the white South will suddenly rise up in support of Democrats as soon as they stop sipping lattes is not, in my experience, a belief held beyond a tiny fraction of the Southern Democratic political elite. Lexington isn't the best laboratory for this hypothesis, but whites I know who are both liberal and identify with the South are, generally, under no illusion that the region is prepared for some kind of grand return to the Democratic fold.

--Robert Farley