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 college-educated voters in metropolitan areas.
The flip side is the paradox of the Republican Party, which now depends on white working-class votes. 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. Countless studies have examined the Democrats’ “working-class problem.” The GOP’S problem has been growing quietly since the 1990s — and then Donald Trump turned a gradual trend into an acute problem.
A recent warning for the GOP came in South Carolina, where Trump beat Nikki Haley by a 3-to-2 margin in last weekend’s primary. 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. 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.”
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 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 at the heart of Trump’s electoral strength. Yet they 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%.
Meanwhile, the survey showed Trump doing better among Latino and Black voters than he did in 2016 or 2020. 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 working-class voters for a long time because of white racial backlash and the rise of new cultural and religious issues. Trump has aggravated this problem; he didn’t create it.
Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg said Trump’s sheer “vulgarity” has pushed many college-educated voters away from the GOP and cost him votes among women across the board. The GOP’S troubles around the abortion issue and the recent threat to in vitro fertilization have overturned an earlier calculus that saw social issues as primarily a problem for Democrats. “Women are in a totally different place,” Greenberg said, adding that Dobbs is scrambling working-class partisanship as younger voters drift away from the GOP.
Biden and his party can’t give up on winning working-class voters. The president has made clear he intends to keep bending policymaking in their direction, and that doing so is the only way to heal the nation’s deep divides.
But in the short term, 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.