How paradoxes of class will shape the 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 collegeeducated 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.
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. 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 percent to 45 percent, pointed to each candidate's class challenges. Among White registered voters with college degrees, Biden led Trump 60 percent to 34 percent. Those without college degrees gave Trump 58 percent to Biden's 37 percent.
Meanwhile, the survey showed Trump doing better among Latino and Black voters than he did in 2016 or 2020. Because Biden will need both large margins and high turnout from
Black and Latino voters, this could be a big deal.
But before the hand-wringing gets out of hand, it's worth noting that Democrats have been hemorrhaging White workingclass voters for a long time because of White racial backlash and the rise of new cultural and religious issues. Trump has aggravated this problem for Democrats; he didn't create it.
Still, a lot has changed since the 1970s and 1980s, including a decline in industrial employment, a related drop of union membership and a sharp rise in immigration. More recently came the Supreme Court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision undercutting abortion rights and, of course, the rise of Trump himself.
If immigration and crime remain Republican go-tos, they had less impact since 2022 than the GOP hoped because Democrats regularly made abortion rights matter more. On the flip side, Republican pollster Whit Ayres said in an interview, Trump has bundled together all the resentments felt by voters experiencing both economic decline and cultural estrangement.
“His message is anti-expertise, anti-immigration, anti-intellectual, anti-media and anti-establishment at a time when many jobs have been sent overseas, particularly blue-collar jobs, and when many families were ravaged by the opioid crisis,” Ayres said. “There is an audience for that message.”
That audience is especially large outside the major metropolitan areas, so what's often cast as a class split may be even more a place divide. It's described dramatically in a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman, “White Rural Rage.” Political scientist Daniel Schlozman, co-author with Sam Rosenfeld of the forthcoming book “The Hollow Parties,” said in an interview that one of the most important contributors to polarization is the gulf between urban/suburban America and small-town/rural America. Given the workings of the Senate and the electoral college, that gives the GOP outsize influence in elections and government.
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 percent of the popular vote. Trump remains stuck in the polls at the 46 or 47 percent 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.