As Oprah said, “older people, who were born, and bred, and marinated” in racism “have to die”.

The usual urban lefty sneer has been that the older generations of white working-class voters are racist coal miners and just need to die. Now they’re getting their gruesome wish and it’s tilting the white working-class vote further Republican.

White non-college-educated voters in the Rust Belt have historically voted to the left of their demographic nationwide. As Catalist notes, working-class whites in Wisconsin are about “2 to 3 percentage points” more Democratic than they are nationally.

Unfortunately, this relative liberalism is partly the vestige of a bygone era. It derives in no small part from organized labor’s erstwhile strength in the state, and an older generation of working-class whites, who came of age at a time when the Democratic Party was more closely associated with their communities.

In Wisconsin, 47 percent of whites 65 and over voted for Biden in 2020; among whites between the ages of 45 and 64, that figure was 41 percent. This discrepancy wasn’t new: In each of the last four presidential elections, white seniors in Wisconsin have voted to the left of the state’s white middle-agers.

Thus, as older Wisconsites pass from this mortal coil, white working-class voters in the state are growing less exceptionally liberal.

Translation, the older white people that Oprah and her fellow supporters dreamed would die off were actually more likely to vote their way. The younger generation of working-class whites with no college education have fewer union loyalties and came of age with a Democrat Party that has nothing but contempt for them.

In some heavily white blue-collar parts of Maine and Michigan, senior citizens actually vote to the left of those under 30.

Don’t trust anyone over 30.