Democrats and the Working Class By The Numbers

The Democrats lost the majority of white working-class votes half a century ago, but until recently they could still make a claim on working class votes overall. Now that's slipping away too.

Democrats lost the white working class vote by 25 points in 2020 and by 33 points in 2022. That Democrats lost the white working class (conventionally defined as anyone who lacks a college degree) is not news. White working class support for Democratic candidates in presidential elections dropped abruptly from 55 percent in 1960-1964 to 30 percent in 1972. So working class whites haven’t been part of (whatever’s left of) the New Deal coalition for half a century. Writing in March 2016, I observed of Republicans and the white working class that “you can’t steal what you already possess.” It was a good line, but the piece was a bust; it was titled, I’m sorry to report, “Will Blue-Collar Dems Run To Trump? Fuhgeddaboudit!” I can never attend a high school reunion again because at my 40th, just a few days before the 2016 election, classmates lined up to ask me whether Trump might win and I assured them it was mathematically impossible.

This retrospectively faulty calculation was based largely on the fact that Democrats’ slice of working-class white voters had stabilized after 1972 at around 40 percent. That’s where it stood in 2012, in both the presidential contest (Obama v. Romney) and congressional races. What I didn’t know was that in the decade after 2012 the Democrats’ new normal among white working class voters would dip closer to 35 percent. That’s what Biden, a Democrat who prided himself on his appeal to blue collar workers, got in 2020. In the 2022 midterms, Democratic congressional candidates got 32 percent of the white working class.

(Something else I didn’t figure on was that Trump would out-poll Romney among Latinos, a group Trump had gone out of his way to piss off. When I asked a top Romney guy early in 2017 about that exit-poll finding, he said, “That’s pretty clearly wrong.” As we both would learn subsequently, it wasn’t wrong, just baffling. )

There’s some solace for Democrats in the fact that the white working class ain’t, numerically, what it used to be. In 1940, practically the whole country (86 percent) was white and working class. College was for ukulele-playing rich kids. The 1944 GI Bill changed that. Today about 38 percent of Americans graduate college and the working class is a lot less white. So now working-class whites make up only about one-third of the population.

The Democrats can still aspire, plausibly, to be the party of the working class because in most elections the working class vote (as opposed to the white working class vote) is split about evenly between Democrats and Republicans. But as I noted last November, in 2022 the Republicans expanded their share of the working class vote to 55 percent, better even than how they did in the annus horribilis of 2016. The reason was not further Democratic leakage among white-working class voters. It was Democratic leakage among non-white (mainly Latino) working-class voters.

All this sets the stage for my latest New Republic piece (“The Midwestern Voters Who Don’t Like Democrats, But Do Like Their Ideas”), which is about a new poll that suggests how Democrats can win back working-class voters, specifically in Midwest (largely white) factory towns. The good news is that a Democratic economic message beats a Republican culture-war message. The bad news is that a Republican economic message beats a Democratic economic message. Which makes no sense because, as I observed last May (others have, too), Democratic presidents have, by just about every reasonable metric, outperformed Republican presidents on the economy going back 100 years.

You can read my new piece here.