What to know about Democrats losing the working class

This is still mostly about race

Jonathan Weisman’s substantial New York Times piece “How Democrats Lost the Working Class” is important and I commend it to your attention. But there are a few key points about US politics that one should recognize before digging into the article:

1. A substantial chunk — let’s say 90% — of the story about the working class leaving the Democratic Party over the past 50 years is a story about race. To simplify, it’s about working class whites starting in the 1970s, and Latinos more recently, being mobilized against the Democratic Party due to resentment toward Blacks.

2. We have never had a consensus definition of “working class.” It could mean people without a college education, or lower-income people, or people in specific types of jobs like manufacture or service, or something else. It is also a populist cultural designation — one that Donald Trump has exploited well — signifying the tastes of “regular” people (often somehow rural whites) who might have money but still want to stick it to elites. Just who has left the Democratic Party and when is highly contingent on one’s conception of “working class.”

3. Governing majorities do not exist to be popular. Indeed, the opposite is often true. The main job parties have, other than trying to win elections, is to steer the government to fulfill various policy commitments that they view as important and necessary but may invite electoral pushback. Democrats pushed health care reform in Obama’s first term knowing full well that it wasn’t very popular but would save a lot of lives. Republicans know that tax cuts geared toward upper incomes or votes against raising the minimum wage aren’t popular; they view these stances as important to their coalition and beneficial to the country even if they’re harmful in elections.

Okay, let’s get into some of the details of Weisman’s article. Again, it’s a smart piece, but I believe it over-emphasizes the economic story and under-emphasizes the racial one. That doesn’t mean the economic story is unimportant. Labor unions had much larger memberships and more political power fifty years ago, and decisions by both parties to prioritize international trade agreements and engage with China over boosting the manufacturing sector and worker benefits surely had some political effect. As this passage notes, this is a long-term story:

Many Democrats have blamed recent social issues like transgender rights or the “woke” language embraced by many on the left. But the economic seeds of Mr. Trump’s victories were sown long ago.

“One of the things that has been frustrating about the narrative ‘The Democrats are losing the working class’ is that people are noticing it half a century after it happened,” said Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “The resentment and movement away from the Democrats began long before they were for nongendered bathrooms. It was because their lives were becoming more precarious, their kids were leaving town, the pensions they expected were evaporating, and that took a toll.”

But as I wrote in this MSNBC piece, this fifty-year shift is largely about working class whites leaving the Democratic coalition. In 1968, 52% of white people who never attended college voted for Democrat Hubert Humphrey; in 2020, just 35% voted for Joe Biden. Last year, 32% voted for Harris. Importantly, back in 1968, Democrats were still benefitting from the overly-large New Deal coalition forged in the 1930s. But a coalition of liberals and conservatives, of Blacks and white supremacists, simply could not last forever.

Richard Nixon and his advisors recognized this and started using what tools they could to pull more racially conservative whites away from the Democratic coalition. He ran “law and order” campaigns, seeking to exploit white fears about Blacks, and embraced many white working class cultural signifiers, including hard hats, Archie Bunker, and country music. Ronald Reagan continued this trend during his presidency, running hard against “welfare queens,” a racially-freighted term that ginned up white resentment toward Blacks perceived as exploiting the social safety net.

But if this is about whites and their racial resentments, how does this account for Latinos shifting rightward in recent elections? As John Sides wrote recently at Good Authority, it’s important to note just which Latinos are moving right. Generally, it’s the ones with the strongest racial animus toward Blacks.

Relatedly, here’s what Trump pollster Patrick Ruffini had to say after the election:

I did a poll in Texas of Hispanics in Texas, where I asked them, “What is the No. 1 problem that you see today with the Democratic Party?”

The answer they gave wasn’t that it was too woke or the buzzword of “socialism.” The answer was very interesting, and it’s something you don’t see come up with virtually any other group you talk to. And that is they perceive the Democratic Party as being the party of welfare benefits for people who don’t work.

That’s just the Reagan welfare queen argument all over again! In other words, the biggest movement toward the Republican Party is by those former Democratic voters who think of Blacks as freeloaders.

In terms of campaigns, there’s a bit of a contradiction in Weisman’s piece. He argues that the working class lost faith in the Democratic Party in part because that party stopped talking about them. The Clinton administration prioritized a set of free trade policies that organized labor didn’t want. The Obama administration, after venting a bit of righteous class anger during the Great Recession, quickly backed off that, and Obama largely didn’t even mention unions. So why would labor stick with this party that’s embarrassed by them?

It’s an interesting point, except it’s belied by the last portion of Weisman’s article, where he notes that the Biden administration was the most openly pro-labor presidential administration in modern history. As he notes, Biden:

• worked to strengthen labor unions and labor rights

• worked to keep unemployment low during a pandemic to boost worker leverage

• boosted domestic manufacture in semiconductors

• incentivized domestic factory construction (at double the rate during the Trump administration)

• joined UAW workers on a picket line

Despite these and other overt signals of economic solidarity with the working class, Democrats continued to bleed working class support, Biden was still cruising toward a failed reelection bid, and his successor lost to Trump. If the working class was leaving because they were getting no love from Clinton and Obama, why were they still leaving after getting lots of love from Biden? Maybe this didn’t have much to do with how these candidates campaigned.

This is at least a little bit a Donald Trump story. As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson write in Let Them Eat Tweets, a conservative party in a democracy generally can’t win just on their economic policies, since wealthy people are invariably a pretty small minority. What they often seek to do is make alliances with some working class voters, through racial appeals, cultural signifiers, and other approaches. The idea is to become, in the authors’ words, plutocrats with pitchforks.

This was not the sort of thing someone like Mitt Romney could be. The Obama team portrayed him as an out of touch plutocrat and it was a fairly easy case to make. Trump was a different story. A billionaire who’d spent decades venting white working class resentments on TV seemed almost the apotheosis of what Hacker and Pierson were talking about.

But finally, to return to a point I made above: Biden was actually successful in terms of economic policy. Wages are up, especially among the poorest Americans. Manufacturing is up. In terms of domestic policy this has been a very successful administration. But that does not automatically translate into electoral success and never has.

The big international lesson of 2024 — that majority parties in every democracy that held an election lost seats — remains a key insight, and there’s no reason the U.S. should have been exempt from that trend. But also, parties pursue their policy goals because they believe those goals will be better for the country in the long run. Sometimes those goals are actually unpopular. More often, most voters just don’t notice them, and economic improvement rarely happen quickly enough to change voters’ impressions before the next election.

Let me conclude with a paragraph from my MSNBC piece:

In September [of 2023], as UAW members went on strike at multiple auto plants across the country, both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump sought to capitalize on the moment. Biden joined the picket line in Belleville, Michigan, near Detroit, signaling his support for labor, while Trump gave a rally at a nonunion auto parts manufacturer, also near Detroit, blasting Biden’s electric vehicle policies and calling on union leaders to endorse him. Each was trying to signal that he was on the side of “the working class.” Importantly, each had a different idea of what “the working class” is and how essential it is to presidential victories.

I would say that Biden’s approach was the more substantive one, but regardless, they were both trying to woo a working class that was up for grabs. I’m not saying Trump’s approached worked better, but I think it’s clear it didn’t do worse.