Who could have seen this coming – an administration that, for all of its chatter about “shovel ready jobs” and “infrastructure”, is hog-tied to its allegiance to academia and liberal plutocrats, having big trouble with working class voters, especially white ones? 

As the price of fuel, staple foods, education and healthcare skyrocketed, all that talk of blue-collar work evaporated. 

Glenn Reynolds writes:

That was actually an original part of Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, but it was derailed by feminists within the Obama coalition who thought it would produce too many jobs for men. Christina Romer, then-chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, reported: “The very first email I got … was from a women’s group saying ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’ ”

Well, if you’re offended by jobs for burly men, you probably won’t do well with working-class men, or with the working-class women who are often married to burly men. And, as Joel Kotkin notes, many other Obama policies — promoting urban density, which creates fewer construction jobs; fighting oil and coal extraction, thus targeting industries that create high-paying blue collar jobs; and even opening up immigration, which drives down wages for the working class — all seem designed to punish people who work for a living, even as expanded benefits for the poor seem designed to reward people who draw government checks for a living.

The parallels in Minnesota are – or should be – tantalizing to conservative Republicans; the DFL is even more the lapdog of urban academia and plutocrats than the national party; I’m not sure how Rick Nolan beat Stewart Mills, and I’m not sure he’ll do it again.  And when Collin Peterson finally retires in the 7th CD, that district will be Republican for a generation or two…

…entirely on the dynamics in Reynolds’ article.