Why the Democrats are Blue is based on extensive archival footage and more than one hundred interviews with ordinary voters in southwestern Pennsylvania. This is the inside story of the bloodless coup in the Democratic Party that helped drive working-class and religious voters away from their ancestral home.
As late as 1968, Democrats were the party of Catholics and blue-collar workers. Now they are the party of cultural liberals and the upper classes. What happened? Through the voices of working-class, religious people who no longer vote Democratic, Why the Democrats Are Blue shows how and why the “party of the little people” has alienated its most reliable voters, reducing the base of a once-proud national party to the coastal enclaves that support cultural liberalism. The book traces the change to a little-known commission created at the epic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Designed to make the party’s presidential nominating system more democratic, the commission was overtaken by a small band of college-educated, antiwar activists who used anti-democratic measures to create a more upper-class-dominated coalition and presidential nominating system.