What's the Matter With Pennsylvania?

Working-class support goes to Trump or Harris depending on how you define "working class," while the middle class (income $30,000-$100,000) prefers Trump.

How do you solve a problem like Pennsylvania? 1895 railroad map, courtesy Library of Congress.

In a better world, Jacobin would not have been able to create a few years ago something called the Center for Working Class Politics because the name would already have been taken. In this vale of tears we inhabit, the name was available. The working class remains the most important Democratic constituency, in spite of its having voted in 2020 for the loser, Donald Trump. The victor, Joe Biden, lost the working class vote by four percentage points. He was the first Democrat in 100 years to enter the White House without a working-class majority.

I have written that the Democrats would be insane to assume they can win this year without a working-class majority, defined as voters lacking a four-year college degree. This constituency is often mistaken for the white working class, which since 1964 has supported only one Democratic presidential candidate (Bill Clinton in 1992). You can lose the white working class and still become president because white people no longer represent the majority of working class voters. You can’t lose the multiracial working class, or at least lose it by very much, and become president, because the multiracial working class—white, Black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, etc.—represents about two-thirds of the electorate.

Which brings us to a poll, released today, by the Center for Working Class Politics, which is so rigorously independent that on occasion it advises candidates not to do what Jacobin says. The new poll is about Pennsylvania. The most important swing states for Democrats this year are Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and among these Pennsylvania is, if you’ll forgive the expression, the keystone. So it’s good to know that Harris is, according to this poll, winning in Pennsylvania, 46.8 percent to 44.7 percent. Still, that’s a little too close for comfort. Let’s dig deeper.

The poll (crosstabs here) doesn’t say how Harris is doing with Pennsylvania voters who lack a four-year college degree, referred to generically as “noncollege” voters, which is the metric I tend to use, and the metric I’ve used in this post thus far. Instead, it separates those who have only a high school diploma or less from those who have an associates degree, a vocational degree, or “some college,” but no four-year college degree. In a thoughtful essay this week for Politico, my friend Paul Glastris points out that this group, which might generically be called “some post-high-school education but no bachelor’s degree,” constitutes 25 percent of the population, and that when you add this group to college graduates what you get is more than 60 percent of the population with at least some post-high-school education. A near-majority of these college grads attended regional public colleges or universities, and when you add in the holders of associates or vocational degrees and the “some college” folks you will probably find that a clear majority of the at least some group attended regional public colleges or universities and not private colleges or universities, which (Paul suggests) should be considered a separate, more privileged cohort.

The Center for Working Class Politics Pennsylvania poll does not break out the at least some category, but it does seem to suggest that its two components vote similarly. Holders of associates or vocational degrees, combined with “some college” folks, favor Harris 49.5 percent to 42.3 percent, while holders of bachelor degrees or higher favor Harris 51.1 percent to 40.4 percent. Paul’s at least some category thus favors, albeit narrowly, Harris over Trump. Among noncollege voters, it’s the holders of a high school degree or less who don’t like Harris, with 49.6 percent favoring Trump against 41.8 percent who favor Harris. Even there, though, Trump doesn’t have a majority.

There’s unambiguously bad news in this poll, plus some weirdly equivocal news. The absolute worst news is that past or present union members favor Trump 47.1-43.2 percent. What the hell? Union membership is supposed to virtually guarantee a Democratic majority. More bad news: In the middle-class income categories of $30,000 to $60,000 and $60,000 to $100,000, Trump wins, respectively, 44.9-44.3 percent and 49.9-45.3 percent. That’s not good! The weirdly equivocal news is that among manual workers Trump crushes Harris, 55.9-36.2 percent, but among service and clerical workers Harris beats Trump 47.7-42 percent. Manual workers and service/clerical workers are both plausibly working class, but their preferences diverge.

Anyway. In my latest New Republic piece I argue that working class voters appear to be drifting toward Harris, at least a little bit, at the national level, but that it’s hard to say what’s going on in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. I wrote without benefit of this new poll from the Center for Working Class Politics, which provides much food for thought but does not say who’s winning noncollege voters, the subject of my New Republic piece. You can read my case for mild optimism here.