On Democrats' quest to win back working-class voters

A few good articles have been published on this topic in recent weeks, and I'll highlight just two here that were published in the New York Times. 

The first is an essay by Alec MacGillis titled "Tim Ryan is Winning the War for the Soul of the Democratic Party." The dateline is Zanesville, Ohio, population.  , and the lede follows:

Tim Ryan is a “crazy, lying fraud.” That’s how J.D. Vance, the best-selling memoirist turned Republican Senate candidate from Ohio, opened his remarks at his September rally alongside Donald Trump in the middle of the congressional district Mr. Ryan has represented for two decades.

Mr. Ryan seems like an unlikely object of such caustic rhetoric. A 49-year-old former college-football quarterback, he is the paragon of affability, a genial Everyman whose introductory campaign video is so innocuous that it might easily be mistaken for an insurance commercial. His great passions, outside of politics, are yoga and mindfulness practice.

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For years, he has warned his fellow Democrats that their embrace of free trade and globalization would cost them districts like the one he represents in the Mahoning River Valley — and lobbied them to prioritize domestic manufacturing, which, he argued, could repair some of the damage. 

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After years of being overlooked, Tim Ryan is pointing his party toward a path to recovery in the Midwest. On the campaign trail, he has embraced a unifying tone that stands out from the crassness and divisiveness that Mr. Trump and his imitators have wrought. A significant number of what he calls the “exhausted majority” of voters have responded gratefully.

And his core message — a demand for more aggressive government intervention to arrest regional decline — is not only resonating with voters but, crucially, breaking through with the Democratic leaders who presided over that decline for years. The Democrats have passed a burst of legislation that will pave the way for two new Intel chip plants in the Columbus exurbs, spur investment in new electric vehicle ventures in Mr. Ryan’s district, and benefit solar-panel factories around Toledo, giving him, at long last, concrete examples to cite of his party rebuilding the manufacturing base in which the region took such pride.

The second piece is Shane Goldmacher's "The Battle for Blue-Collar White Voters Raging in Biden's Birthplace."   The dateline is Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the lede follows: 

The fate of the Democratic Party in northeastern Pennsylvania lies in the hands of people like Steve Papp.

A 30-year veteran carpenter, he describes his job almost poetically as “hanging out with your brothers, building America.” But there has been a harder labor in his life of late: selling his fellow carpenters, iron workers and masons on a Democratic Party that he sees as the protector of a “union way of life” but that they see as being increasingly out of step with their cultural values.

“The guys aren’t hearing the message,” Mr. Papp said.

Perhaps no place in the nation offers a more symbolic and consequential test of whether Democrats can win back some of the white working-class vote than Pennsylvania — and particularly the state’s northeastern corner, the birthplace of President Biden, where years of economic decline have scarred the coal-rich landscape. This region is where a pivotal Senate race could be decided, where two seats in the House of Representatives are up for grabs and where a crucial governorship hangs in the balance.

Post-election postscript:  Democrats did ok in Scranton.  Democrat Matt Cartwright, who has long represented the district, was re-elected.   Also, John Fetterman, the very embodiment of a blue-collar dude, narrowly defeated Dr. Mehmet Oz to win the open U.S. Senate seat from Pennsylvania.