These twin paradoxes are central to the outcome of the 2024 campaign, though neither is new. Countless studies and polemics have examined the Democrats’ “working-class problem.” The Republicans’ problem has been growing quietly since the 1990s — and then Donald Trump turned a gradual trend into an acute predicament.
A recent warning for the GOP came in South Carolina, where Trump beat Nikki Haley by a 3 to 2 margin in last weekend’s primary. Even in victory, exit polling found Trump lost college graduates by 54 percent to 45 percent. His broader trouble in metropolitan areas was made clear by his 62 percent to 38 percent loss in Charleston County. And remember: These were GOP primary voters in a very conservative state. His education problem is worse outside Republican ranks and could haunt him in swing states.
The Democrats’ challenge gets more attention partly because President Biden seemed to be the ideal Democrat to restore his party’s standing with working-class voters of all races. In conversations over the decades, “Scranton Joe” invariably turned to his frustration with Democrats for failing to understand the “working middle class.”
As he’ll make clear in Thursday’s State of the Union speech, his economic policies have leaned their way, and not just on labor and trade issues. When he talks about his administration’s investments in infrastructure, technology and clean energy, he points out that the many jobs they’re creating — often by leveraging the private sector — are opening “a path to a good career” to all Americans “whether they go to college or not.”
These programs have pushed a lot of money into struggling communities that are at the heart of Trump’s electoral strength. In a study released last month, my colleagues at the Brookings Institution concluded that “economically distressed counties are receiving a larger-than-proportional share of that investment surge relative to their current share of the economy.”
Yet these efforts have yet to produce the working-class resurgence Democrats hoped for. A Quinnipiac poll released Feb. 21, which showed Biden leading Trump 49 percent to 45 percent, pointed to each candidate’s class challenges. Among White registered voters with college degrees, Biden led Trump 60 percent to 34 percent. Those without college degrees gave Trump 58 percent to Biden’s 37 percent.
Meanwhile, the survey showed Trump doing better among Latino and Black voters than he did in 2016 or 2020, underscoring the argument made by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira in their recent book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” The authors found that between 2012 and 2022, Democrats lost 25 points off their advantage among the non-White working class voters. Since Biden will need both large margins and high turnout from Black and Latino voters, this could be a big deal.
But before the hand-wringing gets out of hand, it’s worth noting that Democrats have been hemorrhaging White working-class voters for a long time (see Richard M. Nixon’s Southern strategy in the late 1960s and the rise of “Reagan Democrats” in 1980) because of White racial backlash and the rise of new cultural and religious issues. Trump has aggravated this problem for Democrats; he didn’t create it.
Still, a lot has changed since the 1970s and 1980s, including a decline in industrial employment, a related drop of union membership and a sharp rise in immigration. More recently came the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision undercutting abortion rights and, of course, the rise of Trump himself.
For Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, the last two have radically altered the political terrain. Trump’s sheer “vulgarity,” she argued, has pushed many college-educated voters away from the GOP and cost him votes among women across the board. The Republicans’ troubles around the abortion issue and the recent threat to in vitro fertilization have overturned an earlier calculus that saw social issues as primarily a problem for Democrats.
If immigration and crime remain Republican go-tos, they had less impact since 2022 than the GOP hoped because Democrats regularly made abortion rights matter more. “Women are in a totally different place,” Greenberg said, adding that Dobbs is scrambling working-class partisanship as younger, secular voters drift away from the GOP.
On the flip side, Republican pollster Whit Ayres said in an interview, Trump has bundled together all the resentments felt by voters experiencing both economic decline and cultural estrangement.
“His message is anti-expertise, anti-immigration, anti-intellectual, anti-media and anti-establishment at a time when many jobs have been sent overseas, particularly blue-collar jobs, and when many families were ravaged by the opioid crisis,” Ayres said. “There is an audience for that message.”
That audience is especially large outside the major metropolitan areas, so what’s often cast as a class split may be even more a place divide. It’s described dramatically in a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, “White Rural Rage.” Political scientist Daniel Schlozman, co-author with Sam Rosenfeld of the forthcoming book “The Hollow Parties,” said in an interview that one of the most important contributors to polarization is the gulf between urban/suburban America and small-town/rural America. Given the workings of the Senate and the electoral college, that gives the GOP outsize influence in elections and government.
One telling example is West Virginia. In 1980, it was one of only six states (plus the District of Columbia) to support Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan. Now, West Virginia is one of the most Republican states in the union. Another telltale: North and South Dakota had four Democratic senators in 2004; now, they’re all Republicans.
This only underscores the ironies of Bidenism. The Brookings study makes clear that the biggest beneficiaries of Biden’s investments live not in loyally Democratic metro areas but smaller “micropolitan areas.” Brookings found that such places “account for about 25% of the nation’s employment-distressed population, but have secured 50% of all strategic sector investments going to distressed counties since 2021.”
Mark Muro, one of the report’s authors, argues that the spreading of investment to left-out places will create “a healthier economy” but that their full impact has not yet been felt. As a result, he said, it may be “too early” for Biden to get political credit.
Biden’s best hope is to sell these investments well enough to shave a few points off Trump’s margins in less-populous counties in key states, a movement his way he hopes to encourage by toughening his stand on the southern border. What’s unlikely is a redrawing of class lines to resemble anything like those of the New Deal era.
This means, Ayres said, that Biden will likely have to re-create roughly the same electoral coalition he had in 2020 that gave him 51 percent of the popular vote. Trump remains stuck in the polls at the 46 or 47 percent range he secured in the last election and seems to have little room to grow. If Biden does prevail, political analysts might ask themselves why they didn’t put more weight on the Republicans’ class problem.
Biden and his party can’t give up on winning working-class voters for both practical and principled reasons. The president has made clear he intends to keep bending his policymaking in their direction — and that doing so is the only way to heal the nation’s deep divides for the long term.
But, in the short run, his strategy for victory will require big margins among better-off voters who may not be turned on by Scranton Joe and his blue-collar loyalties but are horrified by the alternative. All that money pouring into struggling red counties is likely to matter less than the size of Greenberg’s anti-vulgarity coalition.
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