Democrats and the working class

The New Republic -   Bill Clinton was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win the white working class (conventionally defined as “white non-college voters,” i.e., white voters who lack a college degree). In 1992, Clinton won 55 percent of this cohort, and in 1996 he won 53 percent. No Democratic presidential candidate has won the white working class since, even though it was once a core Democratic constituency. A lot of people say the reason is that Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Act into law and normalized trade relations with China, thereby beggaring American factory workers....

To say the Democrats lost the white working class after 1996 is not to say the Democrats lost the entire working class. A lot of people conflate these two groups, but the working class, which was overwhelmingly white when its political influence stood at its peak in the mid-twentieth century, is a lot less white now. And although the working class stopped voting reliably Democratic after the 1960s, no Democrat in the last century ever got himself elected president without winning the working-class vote—with one exception.

The exception was Joe Biden in 2020. It’s a great irony, since Biden was the most pro-labor president since Harry Truman and had a strong affinity for working-class people. Even so, Biden won the 2020 election while losing the working class—which is to say, the overall multiethnic working class—to Trump, 47 percent to 51 percent. ...

Winning back Latinos and Blacks who drifted to Trump in 2024 shouldn’t be that hard. In October, Axios reported Blacks (84 percent) and Latinos (70 percent) to be the two groups most dissatisfied with the country’s direction under Trump, and in January the BBC reported that Latino support for Trump had dropped from 49 percent at the start of his presidency to 38 percent. And that was before the Iran war sent oil prices through the roof. More