Biden and the paradox of class
It’s a political paradox: President Joe Biden 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.
A recent warning for the GOP came in South Carolina, where Donald Trump beat Nikki Haley by a 3 to 2 margin in this year’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. And these were GOP primary voters in a very conservative state. His education problem could haunt him in swing states.
The Democrats’ challenge gets more attention partly because Biden seemed to be the ideal man to restore his party’s standing with working-class voters As he’ll make clear in his 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 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. 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 survey showed Trump doing better among Latino and Black voters than he did in 2016 or 2020,. Authors John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira found that between 2012 and 2022, Democrats lost 25 points off their advantage among non-white working class voters. Because Biden will need large margins and high turnout from Black and Latino voters, this could be a big deal.
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, along with a decline in industrial employment, a related drop of union membership and a sharp rise in immigration. More recently came the Supreme Court decision undercutting abortion rights and the rise of Trump himself.
For Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, the last two have radically altered the political terrain. Trump’s sheer “vulgarity,” she argued, has pushed many college-educated voters away from the GOP and cost him votes among women across the board. The Republicans’ troubles around the abortion issue have overturned an earlier calculus that saw social issues as primarily a problem for Democrats.
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.
Political scientist Daniel Schlozman said 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.
One telling example is West Virginia. In 1980, it supportedJimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan. Now it is one of the most Republican states. North Dakota and South Dakota had four Democratic senators in 2004; now, they’re all Republicans.
This only underscores an irony: Brookings makes clear that many of the biggest beneficiaries of Biden’s investments live in economically distressed areas that support Trump.
Mark Muro, one of the report’s authors, argues that the full impact of this has not yet been felt, so it may be too early for Biden to get political credit.
Biden and his party can’t give up on working-class voters. But, in the short run, his strategy for victory will require big margins among better-off voters who might not be turned on by Biden’s blue-collar loyalties but are horrified by the alternative. The money pouring into struggling red counties is likely to matter less than the size of Greenberg’s anti-vulgarity coalition.