How to get working class whites to vote in their own economic interest

“They vote against their own interests!”

This is a repeated statement expressing the frustration of liberals over the willingness of poor and working class white voters to support conservative Republican candidates committed to cutting the very programs they rely upon. I have heard this statement many times in my life as a political activist. It completely confounded many commentators and analysts in the wake of President Trump’s election. Just today, Thomas Edsall wrote a column in the The New York Times trying to explain this conundrum.

Certainly, race is a big part of the answer. It is easy for us to feel that people who look or speak differently from us are undeserving of government support. But a big part of the problem is that we have not personalized the risk each individual faces by voting against their own economic interests. In the abstract, it’s easy to say that we shouldn’t be giving away the store to minorities or immigrants. But if this message is challenged by an opposing message that “your vote will cost you $x”, designed with some specificity, people’s self-interest will overcome their in-group/out-group bias.

An example of this comes from the decline of unions. A study by James Feigenbaum of Boston University, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia, and Vanessa Williamson of the The Brookings Institution found that Democratic candidates have fared far worse in right-to-work counties than in comparable union rights counties…