Good morning. We’re looking at Democrats’ biggest weakness, and why it matters in Georgia. |
 | | Voters in the Bronx, where President Trump improved his margin from 2016 to 2020.Desiree Rios for The New York Times |
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The Democratic Party’s biggest problem today is its struggle to win over working-class voters. |
After President Trump’s 2016 victory, some political analysts argued that this problem was really all about racism. And Trump’s appeals to white nationalism certainly won him votes. |
But it’s also clear that the Democrats’ weakness with working-class voters — defined roughly as people without a four-year college degree — is not only about race. Many Trump voters, after all, voted for Barack Obama in 2012, which suggests they’re not incorrigible racists. |
Perhaps even more telling is the shape of this year’s results. Not only did Trump again win by huge margins among working-class whites, but he also fared better among Hispanic voters than he did in 2016. Black voters strongly backed Democrats again, but their turnout appears to have risen less than turnout for other groups. |
All of which points to the same issue: The Democratic message is failing to resonate with many working-class Americans. |
If the Democrats’ struggles were really all about racism, several heavily Mexican-American counties in South Texas would not have swung to the Republicans this year. Nor would Trump have increased his vote share in the New York boroughs of Queens and the Bronx by about 10 percentage points versus 2016. He appears to have won a higher share of the vote in the Bronx, which is only 9 percent non-Hispanic white, than in affluent Manhattan, which is 47 percent white, Dave Wasserman of The Cook Political Report pointed out. |
This pattern leaves Democrats needing to attract a lot votes in traditionally Republican suburbs to win many elections. That’s a narrow path to victory. Georgia — where two runoffs on Jan. 5 will determine control of the Senate — is a good case study. |
Joe Biden was the only Democrat to win statewide this year, mostly because he made bigger gains in the Atlanta suburbs than other members of the party. Biden and other Democrats were crushed in heavily white rural areas, often winning less than 30 percent of the vote, and also fell short of their 2016 margins among Hispanic voters. “The Black share of the electorate fell to its lowest level since 2006,” according to a Times analysis of Georgia. |
 | | Nate Cohn, Matthew Conlen and Charlie Smart of The New York Times |
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How can Democrats do better with the working-class? It’s not an easy question. (Left-leaning parties in Europe are having similar struggles.) |
But there are some hints. Many working-class voters, across racial groups, are moderate to conservative on social issues: They are religious, favor well-funded police departments and support some restrictions on both abortion and immigration. On economic issues, by contrast, they tend to back Democratic positions, like a higher minimum wage and expanded government health care. |
For Democrats to do better with the working class, they probably need to moderate their liberal image on social issues — and double down on economic populism. |
Related: My colleague Astead Herndon, reporting from Decatur, Ga., asks whether the Georgia suburbs can help Democrats win the upcoming Senate runoffs. |
 | | A New York City subway platform in October.Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times |
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- With ridership having plummeted — and no federal aid yet forthcoming — mass-transit systems in Boston, New York and other cities are considering deep cuts. Atlanta has already suspended 70 of its 110 bus routes.
- Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, tested positive for the coronavirus and entered Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington. Giuliani has repeatedly appeared in public without a mask.
- Senate Republicans have invited an anti-vaccine doctor to be the lead witness at a hearing on coronavirus treatments tomorrow.
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 | | Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia debated her Democratic challenger, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, on Sunday.Pool photo by Ben Gray |
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- At a debate for one of Georgia’s two Senate runoffs, Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican, refused to say Trump lost the election. Loeffler is running against the Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democrat.
- In the other runoff, there was no debate because Senator David Perdue — a Republican under fire because of personal stock sales — refused to participate. Jon Ossoff, the Democrat, answered the moderator’s questions next to an empty lectern.
- Today is the deadline to register to vote in the Georgia runoffs. Eligible voters can do so here.
- Other Republican officials in Georgia yesterday pushed back against Trump after he called for state lawmakers to overturn Biden’s electoral victory. “I voted for President Trump,” Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan said. “Unfortunately, he did not win the state of Georgia.”
- Congressional Republicans have been less willing to acknowledge electoral reality. The Washington Post asked all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate who won the presidential election, and only 27 acknowledged Biden as the winner.
- Biden will nominate Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, to run the department of health and human services. Biden has also chosen Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Vivek Murthy, who served as surgeon general in the Obama administration, will do so again.
- Attorney General William Barr is considering stepping down before Trump’s term ends, sources told The Times. The president is reportedly furious with Barr for saying last week that the Justice Department has uncovered scant evidence of voter fraud.
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- The family of Roald Dahl apologized for anti-Semitic comments the author made during his lifetime. “We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words,” the family said in a statement.
- Around 100,000 people were still without power yesterday evening after a winter storm that battered parts of New England over the weekend.
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 | | A koala at the Lake Innes Nature Reserve in Australia.Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images |
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One koala, two koala: Australia is launching its first koala count in years, deploying heat-seeking drones, acoustic surveys and detector dogs to find the marsupials in the wild. |
The Media Equation: Michael Fuoco, a former Pittsburgh Post Gazette reporter and president of the local union, used his position to harass and coerce underlings for decades. Ben Smith, The Times’s media columnist, explains how both Fuoco’s newsroom and the union failed to rein him in. |
From Opinion: Elite athletes and coaches should be trained to monitor mental health as much as physical injuries, argues Alexi Pappas, an Olympic runner. Pappas shares her own struggles with depression in a new video. |
Lives Lived: Suhaila Siddiq was a renowned surgeon and Afghanistan’s first female lieutenant general. She died from complications of the coronavirus at the same Kabul military hospital she ran during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Afghan civil war and the Taliban’s rule. She was in her early 80s. |
 | | A shrine in Mexico dedicated to Jesús Malverde, a bandit who is popular with drug cartels.Brett Gundlock for The New York Times |
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The world of Cartel TikTok |
Tiger cubs, luxury cars, semiautomatic weapons and piles of cash: Welcome to Cartel TikTok, a growing genre of videos on the platform that glorify drug trafficking groups in Mexico. |
Drug cartels have used social media for years, to send messages to rival gangs, intimidate the public and recruit new members. Experts say the TikTok videos are the latest propaganda efforts designed to attract young recruits. “It’s narco-marketing,” Alejandra León Olvera, an anthropologist, told The Times. |
The hashtag #CartelTikTok has 38 million views on TikTok. The trend can be traced back to last month, when a clip of a high-speed boat chase went viral. TikTok’s algorithm helped the trend along by leading viewers to similar videos afterward. “As soon as I started liking that boat video, then there’s videos of exotic pets, videos of cars,” one 18-year-old told The Times. It’s “kind of like watching a movie,” he said. |
Though TikTok’s policy is to remove content that promotes illegal activity, new videos crop up just as quickly to replace them. It’s another example of how difficult it is for social media platforms to regulate their vast networks, and how easy it is for every new platform to be co-opted. |
 | | Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times |
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The pangrams from Friday’s Spelling Bee were daywork, workaday, workday and yardwork. Today’s puzzle is above — or you can play online if you have a Games subscription. |
Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David |
You can see today’s print front page here. |
Today’s episode of “The Daily” includes an interview with the Georgia elections official who called on Trump to stop spreading misinformation. On the latest Book Review podcast, David Sedaris talks about his life as an essayist. |
Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com. |
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