How true is that? Poor people just don't vote, period. They're overworked, politicians don't listen to them, and in many states there are institutional barriers to casting a ballot even if one wanted to.

And it's not necessarily true among those who do vote either:

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/24/bubba-isnt-who-...

It's an old article and I don't doubt that 2016 has messed with the numbers, but the narrative of poor rednecks screwing themselves over every election is largely unfounded and smacks of classism.

Mostly because they believe and have been encouraged to believe that any protections/benefits would go to people who "don't deserve it" (also known as: whichever racial/ethnic demographic those voters have been raised to hate the most). They're very much in favor of discriminatory special-treatment programs that help them and only them, but very much against broad safety nets because they've been told such programs would only benefit the bad other people.

There's a lot to unpack here. First, neither party has the trust of the working class, whatever the rhetoric. Second, the candidate that talked about fixing the system, including healthcare, won -- that he was actually talking about breaking it further gets lost in the discourse around both candidates. There's a longer discussion to be had about how to build trust and what can be done about broken political systems, but it's not the parties that can act on that at this moment.

It will take something like the union/wildcat teachers' strikes, that forced Republican majorities with unified control of state governments to raise wages and increase funding, to do anything about healthcare or the many other structural challenges we face as a nation.