Which workers did Trump win?

Matt Karp argues that Trump's success mirrors, and broadens, his 2016 victory. Heres how.

Matt Karp, a Center for Working-Class Politics board member, has a new election post-mortem up at the New Left Review. In it, he details what Trump’s victory looked like on a granular level:

On first glance, Trump’s second victory map looks rather different from the first. This year’s most dramatic ‘red shifts’ came not in the Rust Belt but in an improbably far-flung set of locations: the Mexican border region of South Texas (where Hidalgo County, 92 per cent Hispanic, swung to Trump by 20 points), outer-borough New York City (where supermajority Asian precincts in Queens swung 34 points), black belt Alabama (where Montgomery, cradle of the civil rights movement, swung 16 points), and the Yupik districts of Alaska along the Bering Sea (also 16 points).footnote⁵ In the crucial swing state of North Carolina, the single largest shift to Trump came not in the rural white piedmont or the buzzing suburbs of Charlotte, but Robeson County in the swampy southeast, home to the largest American Indian tribe east of the Mississippi. About forty per cent native Lumbee and twenty per cent black, Robeson had quietly entered Trump’s column in 2016; this year his margins ballooned by a further nine points, four times the statewide swing.

Karp outlines some of the trends that surprised Democratic Party pollsters and analysts. Not only did non-white working-class voters swing against Democrats but so too did urban working-class voters:

While Harris held her ground in wealthy, credentialled Brooklyn neighbourhoods like Boerum Hill and Park Slope, tens of thousands of Biden votes disappeared in blue-collar Bensonhurst and Brownsville. Across Chicago’s distressed South Side, both Democratic support and overall turnout rates fell precipitously. So too in poor and mostly black precincts in West Philadelphia, Southeast Washington, North St Louis and Akron, Ohio.

In New York and a few other blue-state hubs, working-class frustration with Democrats spilled over into a small-bore maga surge: Trump won more votes in the Bronx than any Republican since Reagan in 1984. In the precinct containing Chicago’s largest jail complex, the swing toward Trump reached 45 points.footnote16 Yet across most cities, downscale suburbs and poorer rural areas, the main factor was again the vanishing of Democratic votes—as in metro Seattle, much of the Great Plains and the entire state of Mississippi, where Harris’s tally sank in 81 out of 82 counties. In Ferguson, Missouri, birthplace of the Black Lives Matter movement ten years ago, Trump gained no new support but Harris notched 25 per cent fewer votes than either Biden or Clinton.

While these developments caught many liberals by surprise, any observer who paid attention to the class dynamics of the party and the campaign could easily see that these defections were a long time coming. As Senator Bernie Sanders argued shortly after the election:

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well.”

Karp’s latest analysis hammers this home. It’s not just rural workers, or white workers, who are slumping away from the Democrats, it’s formerly loyal voters in their own, starkly unequal, urban backyards.

The whole thing is well worth a read, you can find it at the New Left Review’s website.

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