A Matter of Degrees
Trump’s strength with non-college-educated voters is sinking progressives.
Unless Democrats can bring more working-class voters back to their side, they risk losing national politics to the Right for the foreseeable future.(Mark Makela / Getty Images)
Donald Trump may be a billionaire, but he’s managed to get millions of working-class Americans to vote for him. Unless Democrats can bring more of these voters back to their side, they risk losing national politics to the Right for the foreseeable future.
As the first table shows, working-class voters (those without a four-year college degree) made up the majority of 2020 voters in each of the five key swing states, with working-class whites alone making up an outright majority in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Next, the table reports the change in vote share between 2016 and 2020 for the working class as a whole and among working-class whites only. Joe Biden lost working-class support in three of the five states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and made up ground among working-class voters in Arizona and Georgia.
Finally, the last two rows compare the changes in working-class support for Democratic presidential candidates between 2016 and 2020 to Biden’s 2020 margins of victory in each state. In other words, were the changes large enough to explain Biden’s wins in those states? The numbers in red mark where changes in voting patterns were sufficient to account for the difference between winning and losing, as was the case in Arizona and Georgia. In these two states, Biden’s improvement relative to Clinton among working-class voters amounted to 2.3 and 8.5 times his margin of victory. Biden’s gains among working-class voters in Arizona and Georgia, states with comparatively large nonwhite working-class populations, were not driven by working-class voters of color alone. Indeed, changes among working-class white voters were 3.6 and 2.5 times as large as Biden’s margins.
Even in the states where changes in Democrats’ performance with working-class voters amounted to less than Biden’s 2020 margin, they were still substantial, ranging from around one-third in Michigan and Pennsylvania to over two-thirds in Wisconsin.
None of this means that changes in the working-class vote caused Biden’s victory in these states, but it does show the strategic importance of these voters in close elections.
Beyond the electoral horse race, however, winning over a larger percentage of working-class voters is also critical for building the kind of coalition needed to pass progressive economic policies. We can’t achieve transformative changes in the United States without a major party whose base is pushing party leaders to implement broad-ranging, pro-working-class reforms.
As the figure below shows, working-class voters are consistently more progressive on economic issues than their “enlightened” middle- and upper-class counterparts. For example, working-class voters are 20 percentage points more favorable toward pro-worker trade policies than middle- and upper-class voters, 15 points more likely to believe the US government should help declining industries, and nearly 10 points more likely to favor labor unions. Overall, non-college-educated voters are 3.7 percentage points more likely to favor pro-worker economic policies than their middle-class counterparts.
Trump Is Killing It With the Working Class
Working-class support for Democratic candidates in this century peaked at 57% with Barack Obama’s first election before steadily declining over the next two election cycles, particularly between 2012 and Trump’s election in 2016, when, as the figure below shows, it dropped from 54% to 48%.
And it is not just working-class whites who are leaving the Democrats. As the charts below show, according to large-scale voter file analyses such as those by the progressive analytics firm Catalist, support for Democratic presidential candidates among working-class voters of color dropped from 84% to 75% between 2012 and 2020 (support from college-educated voters of color also dropped, but only by 5 points rather than 9 among non-college-educated voters of color). Likewise, Democrats saw their vote share among male voters of color fall from 80% in 2012 to 69% in 2020 (support from female voters of color also dropped, but by 5 points rather than 11).
Is There Anything We Can Do to Turn Things Around?
Just because Trump has made significant inroads with working-class voters does not mean all hope is lost. Studies have identified a range of strategies progressives can employ to improve their odds.
First, candidates should use strong economic populist messaging that explicitly takes elites to task for screwing over workers and calls for the working class to have a greater say in politics. A 2024 study by the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) found that Democratic congressional candidates in 2022 performed significantly better than other candidates in areas with a high percentage of white working-class residents when they employed anti–economic elite rhetoric. Unfortunately, the same report found that Democratic candidates in 2022 typically avoided economic populist messaging, with less than 20% mentioning the rich or wealthy, Wall Street, billionaires, the 1%, or corporate greed in their campaign messaging.
Finally, progressives can reach working-class voters more effectively by running candidates who don’t come from elite backgrounds. One of the strongest takeaways from the 2023 CWCP study was that the messenger matters: working-class voters like candidates better when they are from a similar (or at least not totally distant) class background. They viewed working-class candidates favorably and professional and upper-class candidates negatively. For example, the figure below shows that respondents without a four-year college degree viewed candidates from blue- or pink-collar backgrounds (teachers, warehouse workers, etc.) more favorably by 6 percentage points than they did candidates with professional backgrounds (lawyers, corporate executives, etc.). Again, however, working-class candidates today are extremely scarce; the CWCP’s 2024 report found that just 2% to 6% of Democratic congressional candidates in 2022 came from working-class backgrounds.
While these approaches show real promise, in the long run progressives will only be able to win back the trust of working-class voters by going beyond messaging and delivering sustained, large-scale policy gains that materially improve their lives.