Hillary Clinton Needs To Expose the Lie at the Center of Trump’s Campaign

To most educated Americans, Donald Trump’s coarse language and barely concealed bigotry is shocking. So it’s no surprise that Hillary Clinton has made criticism of Trump’s language and temperament a central attack in her campaign. Among the educated, this strategy seems to be working. Donald Trump will likely be the first Republican nominee to lose college-educated, white voters in 60 years.

But to many working class voters, Trump’s language may not seem so exceptional. I say this not to pass judgement on the working class, but as a simple statement of fact — they inhabit a different linguistic universe, one where aggressive language is more acceptable. And although Donald Trump inherited a tremendous fortune, he also inherited what comes across as a working class accent from his upbringing in Queens. (Also, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, a penchant for vulgarity seems to transcend class lines in New York City in a way that it doesn’t in the rest of the country). Trump combines this accent and his pugnacious demeanor with a fragmented, conversational style of speech that makes him relatable to voters who distrust the more rehearsed speaking style of establishment politicians. To a lot of working class Americans, Donald Trump seems like the first candidate for President who speaks their language.

The left’s frequent criticism of Trump’s language may reinforce the notion that liberal elites traffic in unwritten “speech codes” that working class Americans feel discriminate against them. And they have a point — it can be hard to know the right things to say when you weren’t raised that way. As blue collar work moves increasingly towards service-oriented jobs and customer-facing roles where speech conduct is important, many working class Americans, especially older ones, feel they are being left behind by a changing economy. So while Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party are running up the score among the educated, they are falling further behind with the white working class.

This dynamic has allowed Donald Trump — billionaire, inheritor, human embodiment of conspicuous consumption — to assume the mantle of Working Class Hero. For those familiar with Donald Trump’s long history of screwing over the little guy, this seems like a preposterous circumstance. From stiffed construction contractors and unpaid employees at bankrupt companies, to the defrauded students of Trump University, Donald Trump is no friend of the working man.

Yet the Clinton campaign’s criticisms of Trump chiefly focus on his outrageous statements rather than his actions. This strategy plays right into Trump’s hands. Not only does it backfire with the working class, it allows Trump to control the news cycle and it deflects attention away from his real crimes. This is the essence of Donald Trump’s anti-politics. He keeps everyone talking about what he just said rather than his decades of unscrupulous business practices.

For many working class people who are just trying to make ends meet, verbal invective and bigotry that doesn’t directly impact them isn’t very important. Not all working class whites are racists, but Democrats hurt their chances with these people when they focus on racial disparities rather than the broader issue of inequality and class struggle. But what may get their attention, what may sway working class whites to be more skeptical of Donald Trump, is stories about people like themselves who were wronged by him. To defeat Trump, Hillary needs to focus less on what he says about people, and more on what he has done to people.

To the Clinton campaign’s credit, they have cut two ads featuring people swindled by Donald Trump. One features a bookish New York architect, and the other features a piano dealer. Though these ads are a step in the right direction, these particular gentleman are not that relatable to working class voters. And while there’s nothing wrong with Hillary shoring up her base, why not go after Trump’s base? As George W. Bush’s campaign architect, Karl Rove had one important insight about American politics — the best strategy is to attack your opponent’s strength rather than his or her weakness. In the case of Donald Trump, his demographic strength is with the white working class, particularly men. No doubt, that describes a lot of the people who have been victimized by Donald Trump.

Let’s hear from some of those construction workers who never got paid for their hard work — the general contractors, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and painters. There are hundreds, if not thousands of such people. While construction may not make up the majority of blue collar jobs, like manufacturing it has symbolic value to Americans. It embodies hard work and pays well, and it’s one of the few ways left for men to earn a decent living without a college education. In a changing global economy that seems to have diminished the value of working with one’s hands, stories about construction workers being swindled will have currency.

Surely at least a handful of these workers who were wronged by Trump would be willing to appear in an ad for Hillary Clinton. Even a single great ad could change the dynamic of the race if given enough exposure, but there should be enough material for a whole series of such ads. With enough content, it may be be possible to micro-target these stories to voters based on their demographics and employment. Social media, specifically Facebook, makes it possible to target such ads to voters in a way that wasn’t possible in the past.

This strategy can also be used to win over workers in the hospitality industry by focusing on Trump’s conflicts with labor at his resorts and casinos. In Nevada, a key swing state in this election, nearly a third of the workforce is in the hospitality and gaming industries. Stories of Donald Trump getting sued for not paying waiters and hiring foreign guest workers instead of American citizens will likely resonate in that particular swing state.

Ultimately, politics is personal, and a good campaign knows that appealing to personal issues is a better strategy for winning than obsessing over the zeitgeist of the twenty four hour news cycle. This is especially true when trying to win the hearts and minds of working class people who are just trying to make ends meet. Many of these people may not even like Donald Trump as a person but they are willing to vote for him if they believe that doing so will improve their lives. It’s time to shatter that myth.

The last thing to consider is that less educated voters have historically tended to be less partisan. The polarization of politics along lines of class and education is relatively recent, so there may be more room for Democrats to improve with less educated whites than conventional wisdom seems to believe. At the very least, we can probably stop a lot them from voting for Donald Trump, even if they aren’t willing to vote for Hillary Clinton.