Same people, different description

Nixon got a lot of blue-collar votes. Reagan got more. In our earlier lives, Democrats represented the working man. Republicans were for the rich. So why is it that Republican working voters are often styled racist and ignorant by Democratic candidates? Aren’t they the same people (or from the same families) who were OK when they voted Democratic?

‘Does the GOP Need the Educated Class?’

“In the aftermath of the Republican disaster of 2008, some conservative writers hoped that the party could gain support from elite demographics—'the educated class,' as David Brooks calls it, meaning not so much 'everyone who graduated from college' but more like 'the kind of people we knew at school.' The results of the 2010 election, hugely encouraging for Republicans, indicate that the party’s gains came from almost all parts of the electorate except the elite demographic. I think it is extremely risky in a period of what I call open-field politics to make straight-line extrapolations from the results of one election to the next. But I also think that those conservatives aiming their pitch at their fellow Ivy League graduates, etc., are aiming in the wrong direction.”

http://www.american.com/archive/2010/december/does-the-gop-need-the-educated-class-1

Linked from maggiesfarm.