Benjamin Hart interviews Ruy Teixeira on the topic, “Can Kamala Harris Win Just enough of the Working-Class” for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer. An excerpt:
You wrote a piece the other day that pushed back on the idea that Kamala Harris is reassembling the Obama coalition. But she is certainly doing considerably better than Biden was in polling just a couple of weeks ago. Would the loss of working-class voters among Harris voters matter if there are offsetting gains among college-educated voters? In other words, does the composition of her coalition matter so much?
If you gain among group A and those gains balance out your losses among group B, then it’s a net benefit. The question is always “What is the net?” I’m just trying to point out how different the Obama coalition was, and how relatively high the support rates were among working-class voters in general, including both whites and non-whites — that Obama’s coalition was much less dependent on white college-educated voters. It was just a different look.
Things weren’t as class-polarized under Obama as they are now. The Republican and Democratic coalitions haven’t exactly traded places, but they have certainly changed in some important ways. So what Harris is doing right now shouldn’t be confused with reassembling the Obama coalition. Really, what she’s been able to do at this point is push back against some of the losses that Biden was experiencing in his 2024 coalition, relative to the Biden 2020 coalition. In other words, Harris, with her recent success, is getting a little bit closer to where the Biden coalition was in 2020, but that in and of itself is quite different from the Obama coalition.
You’re talking about young and Black and Hispanic voters that she seems to be winning back to some degree, which had been Biden’s big weakness in polling relative to his 2020 results.
It’s a little hard to tell exactly where the gains are coming from, but certainly I think what we’re seeing is that she’s doing a bit better among younger voters, a bit better among Hispanic voters, a little bit better among Black voters, but not necessarily much better among working-class voters. And it appears like she might actually be doing worse among white working-class voters. So that’s the nature of the beast at this point. How all that nets out in terms of building a coalition that can actually win is yet to be determined. Right now it seems to have brought her close to something like parity, but parity is not what you need. As Nate Silver has observed, you need about a two-and-a-half-point national popular-vote margin to actually be favored within the Electoral College, given the biases attended upon the Electoral College today.
She’s not there yet, but she’s getting there, and the question is, where is she going to make further gains? The thing that would bulletproof her coalition would be to bring those working-class numbers in general back at least closer to where they were under Biden in 2020, even if they won’t get to the Obama coalition level. In other words, to try to reduce some of the class polarization in her coalition. And also, critically, she’s got to stop the bleeding among white working-class voters in particular. Because if she does significantly worse than Biden did among these voters, that’s going to filter down to a lot of the key states she needs to carry. If you lose white working-class voters by ten points more in a state like Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, that’s a big hill to climb.
There’s a lot of talk about the white working class, less about the Black and Hispanic working class. We know Harris is winning back some Black and Hispanic voters, but do you have any sense of how that breaks out in terms of education level and how she’s doing among that populace, or is that impossible to tell right now?
We really don’t know. But certainly if you look at where the non-white working-class share is in the Times poll — one of the few people to break it out — she’s clearly doing better than some of the recent Biden results. On the other hand, she’s still 20 points below where Biden was in 2020. So just because she’s making progress doesn’t mean she’s getting to where she needs to be. If she’s increasing the margin she has among Black and Hispanic voters, it would be unusual if she weren’t at least making some progress among the working-class component of those two groups, especially when they’re heavily working class.
It still could be the case that she’s making more progress among college-educated and working-class Blacks and Hispanics. That’s certainly possible. But one thing that people really don’t pay enough attention to, and it’s really important and interesting, is how class polarization has now come to Black and Hispanic voters. That didn’t used to be the case. As I pointed out in my article, if you go back to 2012, Obama does better among non-white working-class voters than the college-educated. Now it’s the reverse. So that’s important. And there was some Pew data that was released before Biden dropped out, which showed pretty big differences between Black and Hispanic working-class and Black and Hispanic college-educated voters. So I think that’s totally something to keep an eye on. Again, we don’t know. The energy and excitement about the Harris campaign is really somewhat skewed toward the more educated, engaged parts of those populations.
To read the entire interview, click here.
