Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley tweeted on election night 2020, “We are a working-class party now. That’s the future.” Although unions only represent 10 percent of the working-class labor force, since 1980 Democrats have not dipped below 51 percent of working-class support. However, as the data below shows, most working-class Whites have become Republican voters.
Using Vanderbilt data, most White working-class voters voted for Republican presidential candidates in seven of the last 11 elections, from 1980 through 2020. Since Bill Clinton’s elections, only in Obama’s first race has a Democrat won the majority of White working-class voters. However, Obama dramatically lost their support in his second election, with 57 percent of these voters going to Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
How to define working-class folks?
Like most surveys, the 2021 report defines the working class as people without a college degree. However, it added that they also belong to the bottom half of the household income distribution. (This eliminates those who don’t finish college but still go on to earn high salaries, like Bill Gates.) I’ve used Vanderbilt’s definition where possible but note when data is based only on education level.
The Vanderbilt Project’s Political Science Professors Noam Lupu and Nicholas Carnes found that among GOP voters, working-class Whites (using their definition) have remained at the 31-percentage level the Republicans achieved in 2012 when Mitt Romney ran against Obama.
Have they become Republicans?
Lupu and Carnes take solace in saying, “Trump’s term in office stalled a long-term trend of White working-class voters moving to the Republican Party.” However, they did measure the proportion of those who voted Republican in past elections, which provides a less optimistic trend. The White working-class voter proportion going for a Republican president reached new heights with Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns.
Before Trump’s 2016 campaign, the proportion voting for a Republican peaked at 57% when Obama ran for reelection in 2012. Trump raised it to 62 percent in 2016, which remained high at 59 percent when he lost in 2020. Lupu and Carnes have not posted any data analysis on the 2024 election. However, an exit poll by TRT World of the 2024 election was available. It defined working-class voters as those without college degrees. In 2024, 42 percent voted for Kamala Harris, while Trump took 56%, marking a six-point increase over his 2020 election against Biden.
According to Pew Research, White working-class voters, defined solely by not having a college degree, comprise 41 percent of all eligible voters, while college-educated White adults make up just 24 percent. Traditionally, these educated voters tipped Republican, but in the past four elections, they have favored Democratic candidates, but not as enthusiastically as the White working-class workers favoring Republicans.
Men are the core of Republican White working-class supporters. That began with Ronald Reagan’s campaigns. The Washington Post reported that an exit poll by ABC News found that Reagan won 54 percent of the votes of White males in the working class and 57 percent of those in the middle class.
Trump repeated that pattern in 2024 by receiving 56 percent of White males with no college degree and 51 percent of middle-class workers.
In brief, the majority of White working-class voters have drifted to Republicans over the past 40 years. Unless Democrats recapture a chunk of these voters, they could lose future elections because there are more White non-college-degree class voters than college-educated White voters.
Do White working-class voters shun Democrats because of cultural concerns?
The pro-Democratic public opinion research center Blueprint did a study posted on X, finding that the third-most cited reason voters in swing states had turned away from Harris was because “she focused more on cultural and social issues, like transgender rights, rather than helping the working class.”
A 2012 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) defined White Americans without a four-year college degree who hold non-salaried jobs as working class. These Americans make up roughly 36 percent of all Americans. The survey showed that White working-class voters are more culturally conservative than White middle-class voters, being 150 percent more likely to identify as evangelical Protestants. Overall, Romney also enjoyed a 2-to-1 advantage over Obama among Protestant voters. White working-class voters stood out, with 70 percent believing that God has granted America a special place in human history — a view held by only 42 percent of college-educated White voters.
Despite this religious orientation in 2012, the positions of such voters appeared to be much more liberal than they are assumed to be today. Only half (50%) of the White working class were opposed to allowing gay and lesbian couples marrying legally. By that same percentage, they said abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
More importantly, the survey found that “only 1-in-20 White working-class Americans say that either abortion (3%) or same-sex marriage (2%) is the most important issue to their vote.” By contrast, a majority (53%) of them say the economy is their most important voting issue. The bottom line is that White working-class voters are more concerned with achieving financial security than with solving cultural grievances beyond their community.
Who do Americans blame for their frail financial security?
Seven in ten (70%) of White working-class voters believe the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy, aand they also think corporations are getting too many benefits from the government. However, they don’t see corporations as the cause of their financial difficulties; they blame the politicians who give corporations advantages.
Trump recognized their anger and turned it against the government, Congress, federal agencies, and courts for being weak and wasteful. Voters who felt that the established Democratic and Republican leaders had done little to improve their lives. Such voters are willing to give Trump another try.
Democrats tend to assume the White working class’s economic populism is inherently conservative and broadly anti-government. They are partly correct since only 39 percent of the White working class thinks about the U.S. government as “our” government. Still, only 51 percent of the White middle class also feel that way.
White working-class Americans are a growing base within the MAGA movement, and they want solutions that meet their expectations. But fully 62 percent favor raising the tax rate on households with incomes over $1 million yearly, a policy promoted by the Democratic Party, not the Republican.
Trump sidesteps the reality of wealth disparity and taxes favoring the rich. He recognizes that polls show over half of Americans believe corporations moving American jobs overseas are very responsible for our current economic distress. His messaging identifies a simple step to quickly solve the financial stress of the working class and middle-class households, namely higher tariffs to keep our factories and businesses open.
Critical economists cite charts showing that higher tariffs will increase inflation. However, those facts do not puncture Trump’s message because they are abstract, not visual. Trump’s simple image of more workers in the factory and more sales of American goods and services has an intuitive attraction, and Trump is a damn good storyteller.
But the reality is that most working-class households have seen their annual incomes shrink, while their wealth has stagnated since 2008. This has created more significant concern about their future. Sen. Bernie Sanders noted that more see themselves as living paycheck by paycheck and fear returning to a lower economic status.
Donald Trump resonates as the untamed outsider who would return to days when household incomes have not stagnated.
People do not remember that Obama increased the median household income by 12% in his second term. Instead, they recall feeling better under Trump, probably because their household income had risen by 8.3 percent and contracted by 1.3 percent under Biden’s first three years. (In Biden’s defense, his term began as the Covid pandemic caused businesses to close and lay off workers.) Nevertheless, polls show that the public generally felt better during the Trump years than during Biden’s watch.
Ironically, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that unemployment declined for all races during Obama’s and Biden’s last term. Under Biden, unemployment rates fell, decreasing for Blacks and Hispanics at 5 percent, while Whites declined just 3.5 percent. Trump’s first administration, on the other hand, saw unemployment rates increase for minorities by 60 percent more than for Whites.
So, what was the result of these trends? Ironically, the Democratic administration that lowered unemployment lost elections while Trump, who ruled when unemployment increased, won. Voters do not dwell in a world of data analysis; their lives consist of listening and believing stories. Perception shapes reality, not data. As financial security has worsened for all working families under Republican presidents, their support for Republicans has grown.
Democrats don’t organize around economic issues
In 2024, 60 percent of American working-class folks were “living paycheck to paycheck,” and that one in five White working-class Americans do not have health insurance. Arguments to refute such data are presented in Democratic campaigns, but it is insufficient to convince the working class that Democrats prioritize solving economic problems over cultural ones.
As Sen. Sanders points out, Democrats are perceived as ignoring the needs of the working class by not pushing for specific solutions. Sanders notes a prime example: When the Democrats controlled the Senate under Biden, they did not even introduce legislation to raise the minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour, even though some 20 million people in this country are working for less than that amount.
Although Democrats do not control either chamber of Congress, they clearly need to highlight the distinction between promoting the nation’s general welfare and narrow financial interests. If Democrats want to reclaim working-class voters, they should introduce specific legislation in Congress and promote it through coordinated social media campaigns in every state.
