Class Dealignment Hasn’t Gone Away
Working-class voters may be having second thoughts about MAGA, but they’re still abandoning the Democratic Party. Democrats’ reliance on college-educated suburbanites is arithmetically insufficient and politically unsustainable.
If progressives want to build a durable political coalition, they need to break their reliance on college-educated suburbanites before it’s too late. (Melissa Sue Gerrits / Getty Images)
Recent polling suggests that working-class voters have soured on the Trump administration over the past year. The president's approval ratings have cratered, war and tariff-induced inflation is on the rise, and some commentators have begun to wonder whether the much-touted exodus of working-class voters from the Democratic toward the Republican Party might be reversing itself. It is tempting, after months of watching Trump flail from one disaster to another, to declare the crisis over.
But it isn't. Whatever short-term movement we see in the polls, the structural trend that has defined American politics for decades remains firmly in place: working-class voters continue to abandon the Democratic Party. The 2024 election confirmed and accelerated this pattern among non-white working-class voters, and the fact that the Democrats aren’t reaping the rewards we’d expect from Donald Trump’s disastrous poll numbers (at least not yet) is a clear sign of the party’s continued working-class woes.
The Long Decline in Democratic Party Identification
The most basic measure of partisan alignment is party identification, or whether voters think of themselves as Democrats, Republicans, or Independents. On this measure, the trend toward dealignment is unambiguous. Data from the American National Election Studies (ANES), stretching back to the early 1970s, show that working-class Americans, defined as those without a college degree and in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution, identified as Democrats at rates as high as 65%. That share stayed well above 50% until 2016. By 2024, however, that figure had fallen to 42%, dropping an alarming 9 percentage points between 2020 and 2024. Over the same period, college-educated, upper-income voters moved in the opposite direction, with their Democratic identification rising to a whopping 68% by 2024.
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