Biden shouldn’t concede the ‘working class’ vote to the Republicans
Did you ever think we’d be in a situation where blue-collar workers would vote Republican?” President Biden asked people over 40 during a speech last month to Democratic National Committee members. “A lot of them came to believe we stopped paying attention to [the] working class the way we used to.”
Officials in both parties, members of the news media and even regular voters often express these same general sentiments: “Blue collar” and “working class” are synonyms; those terms describe a distinct group of Americans with similar values and priorities; and those Americans recently switched from voting Democratic to voting Republican.
Who are these blue-collar and working-class voters the president was talking about? A Biden adviser confirmed that he was referring to the voting patterns of Americans without four-year college degrees.
By this definition, Biden is generally correct. He lost to Donald Trump by about six percentage points among people without four-year degrees in 2020. Republicans also carried the votes of people without fouryear degrees in last fall’s midterms.
But there are four major flaws with the idea that the Republicans are the party of a collective working class because the majority of Americans without four-year degrees currently back them.
Not having a bachelor’s degree doesn’t make you ‘working class’ or “blue collar.” Many people without four-year degrees have jobs that pay more than the national average or don’t involve manual labor. Some people with four-year degrees have jobs that don’t pay much and do involve manual labor.
Income is a better proxy for class than education. And Democrats often win the lowest-income voters. In all presidential elections since 1992, the Democratic candidate won the lowest-income cohort (usually people in households with less than $50,000 of income.)
Americans without a fouryear college degree are an enormous group of people, about 60 percent of adults over 25. It’s larger than the number of male or female voters. It’s very difficult to argue that such a large mass has any kind of collective politics. About two-thirds of Republican voters don’t have a four-year degree. But around half of Democratic voters also don’t have a bachelor’s.
Americans without four-year degrees aren’t uniformly Republican — at all. Young, nonreligious, Asian, Black and Latino Americans without bachelor’s degrees lean decidedly toward Democrats, as do people without degrees who live in blue states. Factors such as race, religion and geography appear to play a much bigger role in Americans’ voting choices than education status.
Let’s not pretend though. Biden and others discussing “the working class” in terms of electoral politics are almost always really referring to white voters without degrees, particularly in a handful of states in the Midwest.
They do tend to be more conservative than their college-educated counterparts on issues such as immigration. The rise of Black Lives Matter and Trump, in particular, made issues of race and identity the center of American politics. So some White voters without four-year degrees who might have agreed with Democrats on economic issues or just always voted Democratic in the past are now voting Republican.
People without college degrees have long been open to voting Republican. Democrats have lost among white voters without bachelor’s degrees in every presidential election for the last four decades except for 1992 and 1996.
There is one new wrinkle. Biden is the only recent presidential candidate to decisively lose the vote among those without bachelor’s degrees but still win the White House. That’s because people with at least a bachelor’s degree are about 40 percent of the electorate, the largest number ever. And they are increasingly Democratic-leaning, favoring Biden by about 20 percentage points in 2020.
This flawed electoral analysis pushes the country toward bad policies. The United States is not a nation cleanly split between college graduates and non-college graduates, with the former thriving and the latter in need of help, as politicians and the media sometimes imply. White families in which no one has a college degree have much higher wealth on average than Black households that include a college graduate.
Biden, in particular, has an electoral strategy that he can’t state openly (woo white people in the Midwest who are moderate to conservative on issues such as immigration.) So the administration was leery of canceling some college debt ( which would benefit lowwealth Black people in particular), but is eager to tout its plans for jobs for people without four-year college degrees in heavily White areas.
But his implies that voters without bachelor’s degrees should be voting Republican, because the Democrats have become the party of overeducated snobs who ignore people if they didn’t spend four years at Princeton. I hope the Democrats fully lean into policies that help everyone and get enough support from White voters in the Midwest to win elections.
I think those two goals are possible without misleading rhetoric that centers a certain group of white people, absolves them of the ideological, racial and religious factors driving their votes, and ignores the leftleaning voting patterns of so many people who by every definition are blue-collar and working-class.