Forgot Where They Came From

Walsh: Working-Class Trump Voters ‘Forgot Where They Came From’

The progressive Boston mayor fits the profile of a Trump voter. And if Democrats want to win them back, he says they need to stop with the abstract talk and get real.

By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

Marty Walsh is a college drop-out and recovering alcoholic who grew up in a union household and worked his way up through organized labor and local politics. In many ways, he fits the profile of the kind of white working-class man who put Donald Trump in the White House.

He also happens to be the Democratic mayor of Boston, and he has a bracing assessment of the blue-collar white voters backing Trump: They “forgot where they came from.”

Walsh warns that his party’s never going to get those voters back with broad and abstract conversations about transforming the economy, like those which tend to come out of prospective presidential frontrunner and his own home-state senator Elizabeth Warren, as much as he likes and respects her.

“Those people that voted for Trump, they live in working-class neighborhoods. [The] banking industry really does not impact on them, unless they have a bad mortgage. They’re not sure about that,” Walsh told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast.

Walsh picks at a fundamental problem for Democrats: it’s not that voters don’t think they deliver, it’s that they suspect they are delivering for other people, but they’re still paying for it anyway. That haunts many of their proposals, from health care to raising the minimum wage to free tuition and more as their national conversation tilts more toward democratic socialism.

“Bernie Sanders was talking about college and things like that. And you know, what he needs to talk about if he’s going to talk about stuff like that and get people energized: how’s he going to pay for it? He left that out in that presidential campaign,” Walsh said.

Since the moment Trump won, Democrats have been on a quest for the Marty Walsh voters all across the country. They’re the Obama-Trump voters, Americans who’ve taken on a near-mythic status among pundits and consultants and will somehow explain the current moment and light the way to the future, despite the fact that turnout numbers since 2016 show a massive uprising of new voters who don’t fit the old models. They’ve been scoured in polls and focus groups. Books have been sold about them. And not without some basis in reality: college education has become one of the most reliable indicators of whether people are Democrats. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in June that showed an overall 38 percent approval and 60 percent disapproval rating for Trump also found white men without college degrees approving of him, 68 percent to 29 percent.

Then there’s Walsh, who fits that profile but is an intense defender of Obamacare, immigrants, unions and a vocal supporter of full equality for LGBTQ Americans. (Of the Supreme Court justices who voted to allow a cake shop to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple, Walsh said, “I hope when they go to a family party, their family says to them, ‘Really?’ Because I think it’s just sad.”)

Walsh, who despite dropping out of college eventually earned a degree from Boston College’s extension school, says it bothers him how many of the people he grew up with and worked with—or fit that same profile all around the country—support Trump policies.

Walsh has quickly pushed himself forward into conversations that go far beyond the reach of the Charles River, all while building up a power base of his own in Boston and beyond, including into neighboring New Hampshire, throwing himself into the primary race for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Looking ahead to 2020, he talks up fellow mayors Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles and Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, though he says the first name that comes to mind as a candidate who can take on Trump is the man Walsh invited to swear him in for his second term as mayor: “Joe Biden gets it.”

But what is “it”? What’s the way for Democrats to grab the Marty Walshes whom they’ve lost? Walsh said the answer is advocating for healthcare, Social Security and the rest of the New Deal, and leaning hard into diversity and immigration.

Every time Trump has talked up about immigration, Walsh has jumped forward in the opposition, to the point of offering to house immigrants in his office and the rest of City Hall if the administration ever follows through on its threats to crack down on sanctuary cities.

Convincing struggling workers who’ve turned into anti-immigrant hardliners should be easy, Walsh said.

“Explain what’s going on in Boston. Twenty-eight percent of the people that live in our city are foreign-born. Forty-eight percent of the people in our city are first generation. We have immigrants in this city that are citizens. We have immigrants in this city that have green cards on pathway to citizenship. We have immigrants in this city that are undocumented,” he said. The result: “We have $11 billion worth of construction going on in our city. We’ve had 85,000 new people move in the last four years. We are one of the safest cities in America.”

Two experiences form Walsh’s core: spending four years in chemotherapy as a child to fight off Burkitt’s lymphoma, and 20 years later, waking up from a bender and deciding he needed to go to start going to Alcoholics Anonymous. He still goes to meetings, still hands out his cell number to anyone who asks, still takes on the people who he thinks he needs to be the one to help. Recovery grounds him, Walsh says. It’s really the filter through which he sees everything, from his own approach to life to his sense of what works in politics—and both what needs to work in politics, as well as the limits to what it can do.

Of the government’s slow and stumbling approach, on all levels, to the opioid crisis, “we’re getting wrong the fact that we think we can fix it with government intervention,” Walsh said. “Governments don’t fix cancer. Governments don’t necessarily fix cystic fibrosis. We assist in the disease, in the treatment.”

There needs to be more self-policing in companies, he says, and more emphasis on funding for treatment, as he’s tried to do in Boston.

Then there’s what no program will do.

“When I got sober, I had to deal with the person first. I had to deal with my outside and deal with the fact that I craved alcohol. And a drug addict has to deal with the fact that they crave drugs,” he said. “You’ve got to deal with the craving and then you have to figure that out. And then after you get sober and you get some clean time, the next thing you have to deal with is who you hurt, and how do you deal with that? You can ignore it, but if you ignore it, that will always be in your head.”

Being mayor of Boston tends to be an effective lifetime appointment, and Walsh was re-elected with 65 percent of the vote last year. He insists, “I won’t be mayor for 20 years,” Walsh insists, and he fobs off the speculation that he might want to run for governor. “I mean, I live my life a day at a time.”

But for all of Walsh’s proud and competitive partisanship—he’s been known to brag in private about how Hillary Clinton’s margin over Bernie Sanders in the Massachusetts primary was smaller than what he turned out in his old neighborhood in Dorchester and beyond—he won’t take a swing at Gov. Charlie Baker, whose popularity and election chances remain extremely high, despite being a Republican in the most Democratic state in what could very well be the most Democratic election cycle in decades.

Walsh and Baker have a good working relationship, and though the mayor says “anyone can be beaten,” when pressed if Baker should be, he responds, “that’s something the voters will decide—should he be or should he not be.”

Walsh says he can work with Baker, and does. His worry is about Washington, and 2020.

“This election has to be covered in the sense of not ‘Trump versus person X.’ It has to be covered in ‘where America is today,’” Walsh said. “We need more stories about where is our water system in America? I don’t think the people understand how fragile our water system is in America. I don’t think people understand how bad our infrastructure, roads, and rails are in this country. I think they think they have a good road system—we really don’t. It’s crumbling. I think people need to understand what’s happening in the environment in our country that, in Boston if we don’t really focus on building protections on the Harbor, what could happen if a Superstorm Sandy comes, and then what’s happening in the Midwest with forest fires.”

“What’s at stake in this country is not necessarily undocumented immigrants, what’s at stake in this country isn’t some of the things that they’re talking about,” he said. “It’s exactly our own backyard, what’s happening.”