Can Dems win back blue-collar voters?
Some districts might hold clues for 2024 strategies
Karissa Waddick, Haley BeMiller and Margie Cullen
As the late-March sky lightened to a dappled purple, Tony Milidantri, 81, and his fellow retirees filed into Lori’s Corner Kitchen in Lake Ariel, Pennsylvania, to sip coffee and chat about the issues facing the country.
A union electrician, Milidantri commuted into New York City every day for decades to bring light to the skyscrapers. He took pride in the work and made enough money to build a lake house. Now he worries that rising costs are preventing others from finding the same opportunities.
It’s among the reasons he plans to vote for former President Donald Trump.
“They’ve changed tremendously,” Milidantri said of the Democratic Party, which he left around 2016. “They used to help people. Now it doesn’t seem that way.”
President Joe Biden’s path to holding the White House could hinge on his ability to win back blue-collar voters like Milidantri who live in Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District. The area is expected to serve as a barometer for disillusioned swing voters in post-industrial parts of the country.
Trump won the district in 2020. But it returned a longtime Democratic representative to the U.S. House in 2022. Only two other congressional districts – Ohio’s 9th and Maine’s 2nd – experienced the same trend.
Both Trump and Biden have heavily emphasized winning over similar voters in the past few weeks.
In 2016, Trump wooed working-class voters in areas like Pennsylvania’s 8th District with a message centered on economic grievances and a pledge to “make America great again.” He tapped into their anger toward politicians, whom many believed had discarded them in the global dustbin. It worked.
Luzerne County, a part of the district with a strong union presence, chose Barack Obama in 2012 by about five points. Trump won in 2016 by almost 20.
Thomas Shubilla, chair of the county’s Democratic Party, argued that it wasn’t so much that Democrats had “failed unions,” but that they had failed “to voice why Democrats are the union candidates.”
In 2020, Biden leaned into that by touting his own blue-collar roots and moderate message. In front of his childhood home, he unveiled an economic plan designed around building up American manufacturing by using government investments to stimulate the infrastructure, energy and health care industries.
Though Biden didn’t win the district, he built on Hillary Clinton’s lead in Democratic strongholds like Scranton and shrank Trump’s margins in the district’s rural communities.
However, Ben Toll, a professor at Wilkes University, suggested that the incumbent Democratic president might have a harder time this year.
“The mood of the country is still not supportive of Biden’s presidency,” he said.