A white Democrat who uses the word "poverty"

New Republic -  In a hoarse baritone loud enough to be heard over a squall, oysterman Graham Platner said it. Poverty. The unsayable word. Naming poverty is unusual for modern American politicians. But naming poverty in Maine, tied with West Virginia for the title of the whitest state in the country (90.1 percent), is downright radical. So it may be the shrewdest part of Platner’s bid to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins that he isn’t beating around that wild blueberry bush. Maine, he said as he announced his candidacy, is now “unlivable for working-class people,” which is “driving our families into poverty.”

To understand just what a taboo Platner is breaking, it’s crucial to understand that, for at least two decades, both right and left have converged on a dangerous policy of folding all low-income white Americans into a raceless “working class.”

Year after year, our collective inability to see poor people as anything but Black—citing what liberals call white advantages and MAGA calls white superiority—pits the poor (always coded Black) against the working class (coded white).

For Democrats, this rhetorical move may have started as a well-intended effort to focus on racial inequities. For Republicans, it’s stock Southern strategy. But it amounts to the same thing.

And it has all but broken us. “In America, white people aren’t supposed to be poor. Period,” the Mississippi academic LaToya R. Jefferson-James wrote in 2021. The willful blindness to 66 million poor white Americans has undermined solidarity among the poor of all races by pushing low-income whites to identify more with their race than their economic status. Thus Republicans have been able to starve the poor to feed the rich, all while jacking up white racial grievances. Meanwhile, the left wrings its hands for one more decade over the refusal of the raceless “working class” to vote its interests.

In 2024, a slight majority of white voters in households making under $50,000 a year went for Trump over Kamala Harris, by 50 to 48 percent—the first time this indigent population has voted Republican in a presidential election since the 1960s. To spell this out: Poor white voters had chosen Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden but suddenly decided that Harris uniquely didn’t understand them?

I’m increasingly skeptical that racism or sexism explains this. As political scientist Kristoffer Ealy points out, Harris studiously avoided talking about race, stood with unions, and used the phrase “working class” so often that Ealy “started checking her podium for a swear jar.” But that phrase doesn’t capture the plight of poor white people who face hunger and live almost as far from unions as they do from the Ivy League. Though he had nothing materially to offer them, Trump could appeal to the whiteness of the white poor because the Democratic Party was blind to poor whites and turned instead to their richer relatives—union hardhats.

But there’s another reason, besides winning low-income votes, that Platner is spot-on to bring up poverty in Maine. In short, the numbers give no argument. White poverty pervades the state.  More