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Boeing workers listen to union leaders speak as Boeing's Washington state factory workers vote on whether to give their union a strike mandate as they seek big salary gains from their first contract in 16 years, at T-Mobile Park in Seattle, Washington, U.S. July 17, 2024.
Bloc by Bloc: Can Dems win back the working class?
This GZERO 2024 election series looks at America’s changing voting patterns, bloc by bloc.
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One of President Joe Biden’s biggest selling points was his “Scranton Joe” appeal to working-class voters — who have increasingly voted Republican in recent years. Kamala Harris, on the other hand,was said to embody the college-educated, coastal elite the Democratic Party is accused of increasingly gearing itself toward. Switching candidates, many argued, could come at the expense of key “Rust Belt” states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
These states will be battlegrounds this year, and working-class voters will play an outsized role in deciding which way they’ll sway. In fact, in all six key swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — the working-class voter population is higher than the national average.
Who are working-class voters? People who do not have a college education – around 62% of the US – or those who receive an hourly wage rather than a salary. Forty-six percent of Republicans consider themselves working class, compared to 35% of Democrats.
How are the candidates competing for their votes? According to Eurasia Group analyst Noah Daponte-Smith, Trump is making the same promises he made in 2016 and 2020: “that he will bring back working-class manufacturing jobs, make the economy better than ever, and fight for the interests of the common man.”
Meanwhile, he says, Harris is trying to attract working-class voters “by emphasizing Democrats’ economic record, pointing to the risks of a Trump presidency, and nominating a VP candidate with working-class roots.”
According to the Split Ticket crosstab aggregator – a comparison of polls and candidate preferences by demographic subgroups – Donald Trump leads Harris by 11 points among non-college graduates. That number jumps to a 28-point lead among white non-college graduates. But there are discrepancies: A new UMass Amherst poll shows her eight points ahead among low-income voters.
Still, Princeton professor Robert Wuthnow, who has spent much of his career researching rural and working-class voters, expects the majority of the working class – and an even larger portion of white working-class men – to side with Trump. “I tend to think that white working-class men are going to have difficulty – for some because of gender, for some because of race,” says Wuthnow about the likelihood that Harris can win their vote.
“There is a growing division between the working class and the elite, or people they perceive as having professional jobs and better educations than they do,” says Wuthnow. “Kamala will have a difficult time bridging that gap.”
Daponte-Smith agrees. He believes that while Dems can “somewhat abate” the trend, they can’t fully reverse it.
One way Harris is trying to bring back the working class is with her vice presidential pick. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is a former teacher and US Army National Guard veteran who has been a champion of unions. He graduated from a regional branch of the University of Minnesota and is the first Democrat on a presidential ticket in half a century not to have attended law school.
“My sense is that Tim Walz, as Harris’s VP, is geared precisely toward attracting the kinds of moderate, working-class, salt-of-the-earth people that Obama won in 2008 and 2012 but who defected to Republicans in the last two cycles,” says Deponte-Smith. “He is an extremely effective communicator who has extensive experience in winning over working-class, right-leaning white voters. So I think he’s an asset to Harris in this respect.”
Meanwhile, Trump – even after spending four years in the Oval Office – is still painting himself as the outsider, or at least a change agent in a system that many working-class Americans do not believe represents their interests. That belief is backed up by the numbers: Fewer than 5% of Congressmen come from working-class backgrounds. Trump was a millionaire by age 8, but he is trying to boost his blue-collar credentials by choosing JD Vance – who grew up in extreme poverty in rural Ohio – as his running mate.
Early on, third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr. attracted a considerable number of working-class voters, but he has since sunk in the polls to a mere 5%.
What about non-white working-class voters? Much of the working class in the US is Black and Hispanic, which is even more important to recognize since Dems have just nominated the first Black female presidential candidate in US history.
“Trump appears to know that he has a strong base of support among the white working class, and has been aiming to attract Black and Hispanic working-class men,” says Daponte-Smith. “If that’s successful, it will boost him in the swing states.”
“The working class in the upper Midwest is much whiter than in the Sun Belt,” says Daponte-Smith. “This means the working class will likely be much more Republican-leaning in the Upper Midwest,” meaning Harris has a better chance at winning in swing states like Arizona or Nevada.
How are unions leaning? Although the power of unions has been declining for decades, Wuthnow says their endorsements still play a significant role in shaping how members vote.
On Wednesday, the United Auto Workers endorsed Kamala Harris – a disappointing blow to Trump, who made a show of courting unions during the Republican National Convention by giving the Teamsters President Sean O’Brien a keynote speech despite the Teamsters declining to endorse either candidate. However, surveys shows that the majority of members of both the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers support Trump.
It’s still the economy, stupid. The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act was a $500 billion bet that investing in US manufacturing and infrastructure would help Democrats repave inroads in working-class communities. Despite progress, the bet is not paying off politically because stubbornly high inflation is exacerbating frustration at over 40 years of stagnated wages.
Today’s real average hourly wage of $29.03 has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. Meanwhile, the prices of some critical big-ticket purchases like housing, higher education, and healthcare have been getting steadily pricier. “Their real living wage has been stagnant for a very long time, and it’s also declining relative to the salaries of college-educated workers,” says Wuthnow.
Harris’s early campaign ads have made promises that should appeal to workers, including bringing down insulin prices, taking on the power of the big banks, corporate price gouging, and other concerns that most working Americans can relate to.
Trump, meanwhile, wants to slash illegal immigration, raise tariffs, and increase the minimum wage – policies that may appeal to voters hurt by the exodus of manufacturing and stagnating wages. But the proposed tariffs – including a 100% tariff on foreign vehicles – are expected to further raise consumer prices and are unlikely to generate a significant number of manufacturing jobs.
The Democrats’ biggest challenge is helping voters make the connection between the party’s policies and lower prescription costs or the new manufacturing jobs popping up across the country. “If Kamala can make that case that the Biden administration has been good for working-class people, then I think she’s got a chance of appealing to some of those voters,” says Wuthnow.
“The difficulty is that the messaging on the Trump side is so disconnected from anything in the real world that he can make lots of arguments about inflation or the threat of immigrants coming in and taking away jobs, and probably have quite a bit of mileage.”