How paradoxes of class will shape 2024 election
It’s the paradox of Bidenism: The president sees himself as the champion of the working class but can’t rely on its support to win reelection. To prevail, he’ll need a mountain of ballots from college-educated voters in metropolitan areas.
The flip side is the paradox of the Republican Party, which now depends on White working-class votes, especially in small towns and the countryside. Yet its economic policies remain geared to the interests of high earners and investors, many of whom have fled the party.
These twin paradoxes are central to the outcome of the 2024 campaign, though neither is new. Countless studies and polemics have examined the Democrats’ “working-class problem.” The Republicans’ problem has been growing quietly since the 1990s — and then Donald Trump turned a gradual trend into an acute predicament.
Even in victory, exit polling found Trump lost college graduates by 54% to 45%. His broader trouble in metropolitan areas was made clear by his 62% to 38% loss in Charleston County. And remember, these were GOP primary voters in a very conservative state. His education problem is worse outside Republican ranks and could haunt him in swing states.
The Democrats’ challenge gets more attention partly because President Biden seemed to be the ideal Democrat to restore his party’s standing with working-class voters of all races. In conversations over the decades, “Scranton Joe” invariably turned to his frustration with Democrats for failing to understand the “working middle class.”
As he’ll make clear in Thursday’s State of the Union speech, his economic policies have leaned their way, and not just on labor and trade issues. When he talks about his administration’s investments in infrastructure, technology and clean energy, he points out that the many jobs they’re creating — often by leveraging the private sector — are opening “a path to a good career” to all Americans “whether they go to college or not.”
These programs have pushed a lot of money into struggling communities that are at the heart of Trump’s electoral strength. In a study released last month, my colleagues at the Brookings Institution concluded that “economically distressed counties are receiving a larger-than-proportional share of that investment surge relative to their current share of the economy.”
Yet these efforts have yet to produce the working-class resurgence Democrats hoped for. A Quinnipiac poll released Feb. 21, which showed Biden leading Trump 49% to 45%, pointed to each candidate’s class challenges. Among White registered voters with college degrees, Biden led Trump 60% to 34%. Those without college degrees gave Trump 58% to Biden’s 37%.
The Brookings study makes clear that the biggest beneficiaries of Biden’s investments live not in loyally Democratic metro areas but smaller “micropolitan areas.” Brookings found that such places “account for about 25% of the nation’s employment-distressed population, but have secured 50% of all strategic sector investments going to distressed counties since 2021.”
Biden’s best hope is to sell these investments well enough to shave a few points off Trump’s margins in less-populous counties in key states, a movement his way he hopes to encourage by toughening his stand on the southern border. What’s unlikely is a redrawing of class lines to resemble anything like those of the New Deal era.
This means, Ayres said, that Biden will likely have to re-create roughly the same electoral coalition he had in 2020 that gave him 51% of the popular vote. Trump remains stuck in the polls at the 46 or 47% range he secured in the last election and seems to have little room to grow. If Biden does prevail, political analysts might ask themselves why they didn’t put more weight on the Republicans’ class problem.
Biden and his party can’t give up on winning working-class voters for both practical and principled reasons. The president has made clear he intends to keep bending his policymaking in their direction — and that doing so is the only way to heal the nation’s deep divides for the long term.
But, in the short run, his strategy for victory will require big margins among better-off voters who might not be turned on by Scranton Joe and his blue-collar loyalties but are horrified by the alternative. All that money pouring into struggling red counties is likely to matter less than the size of Greenberg’s anti-vulgarity coalition.