The Warning Signs Were Always Clear
The Warning Signs Were Always Clear
Without Blue-Collar Voters Blue Walls Fall
Donald Trump has once again won the presidency, and he did so by winning the working class. Researchers with the CWCP repeatedly warned about exactly this outcome.
Including on election day.
Milan Loewer, a research associate with the Center, argued that Democrats took “a gamble that could backfire massively.”
Backfire it has. Loewer broke down the main themes of the Harris campaign using data from the CWCP’s latest study to demonstrate just how unpopular Harris’s “democracy” message was with working-class voters.
By contrast, a strong populist message was widely liked by working-class voters. Loewer argues:
Since entering the national stage in 2016, Trump has portrayed himself as a champion for ordinary Americans, battling an antipatriotic establishment. The Trumpian narrative places liberals in control of many of the powerful institutions in American life — in government, law, philanthropy, media, universities, high-tech industries, health care, and even finance. There is some element of truth in this narrative, and as long as Democrats remain tethered to the politics of these powerful institutions and the professional classes that populate them, Trump will be able to refract anti-elite sentiment through a partisan and cultural lens. By ceding this territory to MAGA and failing to articulate a full-throated anti-elite politics of their own, Democrats have allowed Trump to claim the populist mantle, even as his policies represent a massive boon for corporate power.
Democrats have an uphill battle: a credible left-populist politics would involve actually cutting ties with some of the elites, interest groups, and constituencies that they have been cultivating since the 1980s. This isn’t without trade-offs; but it might cost Democrats even more not to do so.
Cost them it did. The Democrats not only underperformed their 2020 results, they lost the popular vote for the first time in twenty years. As Loewer feared, Harris didn’t come off as a populist with policies designed to meet the aspirations of working-class voters. Instead,
Harris almost appeared intent on doing Trump’s job for him. She was telling voters: “Washington insiders and reasonable billionaires agree, Trump is too dangerous to be president,” effectively positioning him as the enemy of a deeply unpopular establishment and status quo.
Read the whole thing at Jacobin: If Harris Loses Today, This Is Why
And yesterday, CWCP board member Matt Karp wrote that, while “Trump’s second election comes as a shock […] it can hardly be seen as a surprise.” Consistent with his past research, Karp argues:
Across the last decade, the defining pattern of national politics has been class dealignment: a vast migration of working-class voters away from the Democratic Party, matched by a flood of professional-class voters away from the Republicans. This was the decisive factor in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was toppled by the same Rust Belt proletarians who had elected Barack Obama. And it continued, more quietly but with unchecked motion, in the years when Democrats made up for their losses by winning more suburban professionals, in 2018, 2020, and 2022.
Harris, he continues, was “an embodiment of this shift.” Her weaknesses were baked in to the class base that she represents, despite the fact that she tried to play the populist in a few smart television ads.
Karp further notes:
Even as Harris herself tried to avoid the toxic identity politics of Hillary 2016, she was overtaken by the “shadow party” — a constellation of NGOs, media organizations, and foundation-funded activists who now constitute the Democrats’ institutional rank and file. Thus “White Dudes For Harris” and its kindred, the effort to promote Never Trump Republicans in media, and the embarrassing attempts to win over black men with promises of legal marijuana and protections for crypto investments. These shadow party interventions in the race helped raise historic sums of money — over $1 billion in just a few months — but also marked Harris as the property of an educated professional class, focused entirely on “democracy,” abortion rights, and personal identity but largely uninterested in material questions.
In the end, Harris succeeded in maximizing the professional class vote.
Harris won voters with college degrees by 15 points, a larger margin than in 2020. Voters making over $100,000 a year swung toward the Democrats in record numbers. The moderate Republicans in the suburbs, famously invoked by Chuck Schumer eight years ago, keep trickling into the Democratic coalition. It seems to serve them well enough in the midterms but not so much in the big-ticket contests.
But as the CWCP has demonstrated, the electoral math just doesn’t work. Decisively winning the white-collar vote cannot get the numbers needed for a durable majority.
This year, the Liz Cheney Democrats were dwarfed by a vast working-class swing toward Trump, in many flavors: rural voters, low-income voters, Latino voters, and black male voters, from Texas to New Hampshire. Even as progressive pundits hailed the post-Dobbs gender gap, boasting that Republicans had ruined themselves with female voters for a generation, non-college-educated women swung toward Trump by 6 points.
Above all, Harris and the Democrats failed to reach voters who have a negative view of the economy — not just Republican partisans but two-thirds of yesterday’s electorate. With her modest bundle of targeted economic initiatives, joined occasionally to a half-hearted populist rhetoric, is it a surprise that she failed to convince these frustrated voters?
No. It’s not. At least not if you were paying attention to working-class attitudes.
You can read the whole thing at Jacobin: It’s Happening Again.
In the coming weeks the CWCP will be publishing original analyses, dissecting new data, and presenting results from our latest research. The election, more than anything, has proven the fact that ‘as the working class goes, so goes the nation.’