Remember back in 2016 when Chuck Schumer confidently asserted that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia”? If there was any doubt before, there is none now: Senator Schumer was wrong.

All signs indicate that Donald Trump made substantial inroads among the working class in November. The best data currently available from AP VoteCast indicates that the Democrats’ share of non-college-educated voters fell from an already low 47% in 2020 to 43% in 2024. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris maintained strong support among college-educated voters, receiving 56% of their vote. Interestingly, given the Harris campaign’s considerable efforts to reach female voters, the data suggests that her support among college-educated women actually fell 4 percentage points relative to Joe Biden, whereas her support from college-educated men was only 1 point lower than Biden’s. Among college-educated white men, we even see a slight improvement over Biden in 2024.

If we look at income rather than education, the change is even more significant: support for Harris among voters making less than $50,000 per year fell to 48%, a 6-point decline from Biden in 2020. By contrast, voters making more than $100,000 per year showed only a very slight dip in support between 2020 and 2024, from 54% to 53%.

Democrats’ losses among working-class (noncollege) voters were not distributed equally across demographic groups. Indeed, though Harris suffered a small loss of working-class white support, dropping from Biden’s 37% to 34%, her support among non-white working-class voters fell by nearly three times as much. Whereas Biden received a commanding 73% share of the vote among the non-white working class, Harris garnered 65%. That is still a majority, of course, but it belies the notion that non-white voters’ support for Trump is somehow an aberration or a rounding error.

Since the VoteCast data does not provide estimates for Harris’s support among working-class black or Latino voters, we have to use preliminary county-level results to find which group is driving the change. The graph below shows the average shift in support for the Democratic presidential candidate between 2020 and 2024 in counties with increasingly high proportions of different demographic groups. While we still do not know which specific voters in each county cast their ballots for Harris or Trump, we can make estimates based on demographic changes within counties.

The figure below clearly shows that the decline in Democratic vote share between 2020 and 2024 was dramatically more pronounced in counties with a high proportion of Latino voters. Indeed, in the 50 counties where Latinos make up 75% of the population or more, Harris’s support dropped on average more than 8 points from Biden’s 2020 showing. That decline is four times larger than the average shift toward Trump in counties made up of at least 85% working-class whites and two and a half times larger than the shift in counties that are at least 90% working class or at least 65% black. This means that the overall decline in working-class support for Harris relative to Biden was likely driven largely by working-class Latinos.

There are many reasons why working-class Latino voters may have moved so strongly toward Trump in 2024, ranging from concern over Biden’s handling of the economy to a general decline in trust that Democrats can deliver for working people, or even possibly agreement with Trump’s views on immigration.

The trends we’re seeing among non-white working-class voters in the 2024 election are no historical blip. Instead, they represent a continuation of patterns that go back to at least 2012: Democrats’ support among working-class black voters had already dropped from 93% to 87%, and their share of working-class Latinos likewise declined from 68% to 62% between 2012 and 2022.

The fluctuations in support we see in the graph above show that these trends are not inevitable, but it is hard to deny that the Democrats have a working-class problem, and not just with working-class whites. If Democrats and progressives don’t look in the mirror and think very hard about why a party led by a billionaire has become the party of the US working class, we’re likely to see a replay of 2024 when the next election comes.