The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:
Democrats are not just happy, they are ecstatic. Harris has surged into a modest lead over Trump in national polls and is doing well enough in swing states for her to be a slight favorite (53-47) to win the Electoral College and therefore the election. The Democratic National Convention seems to be a smashing success with delegate enthusiasm at a fever pitch.
The enthusiasm is understandable. They thought they were going to lose, now they think they’re going to win. Everything is going great!
But that’s them—partisan, liberal-leaning Democrats who are no doubt fully reflective and then some of the increasingly college-educated character of their party. Working-class voters however can restrain their enthusiasm.
Let’s take a look at some data. First up, the new Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll.
1. In this poll, Harris is ahead of Trump by 3 or 4 points, depending on whether other candidates are included on the ballot test. But among working-class (noncollege) voters, Harris trails Trump by 7 points while leading among college-educated voters by 20 points. This is both somewhat worse than Biden did among working-class voters in 2020 (deficit of 4 points) and somewhat better than Biden did among college-educated voters (advantage of 18 points).
2. The same pattern applies to white voters; Harris is doing somewhat better than Biden 2020 among white college voters but somewhat worse among white working-class voters. And among nonwhiteworking-class voters she is still underperforming. Biden carried these voters by 48 points in 2020; Harris is ahead by only 29 points.
3. Among the working class, Trump gets a 47 percent retrospective job approval rating while Harris gets just a 34 percent rating. Among the college-educated, it’s just the reverse: Harris gets 47 percent job approval and Trump gets only 38 percent.
4. Working-class adults are still significantly more pessimistic about the state of the nation’s economy than the college-educated: 78 percent say the economy is not so good or poor compared to “only” 62 percent among the college-educated.
5. On the all-important issue of the economy, working-class respondents trust Trump over Harris by 15 points. But the college-educated trust Harris over Trump, albeit by a small margin (3 points). The pattern is exactly the same on inflation/rising prices, which was asked separately.
6. Despite Harris’s recent tough talk (well, commercials) on the border, working-class adults trust Trump over Harris to handle the border situation by 16 points while the college-educated deem them equally trustworthy. Interestingly, Hispanics actually trust Trump over Biden by 3 points to handle the border.
7. On crime and public safety, working-class adults trust Trump over Harris by 9 points, while the college-educated are the reverse, trusting Harris over Trump by 9 points.
8. Finally, Trump is slightly favored by the working class (one point) over Harris on “protecting American democracy” while the college-educated trust Harris over Trump by a wide margin (20 points).
The Democrats—still the college-educated party after all these years! Next up: The new CBS News poll. Several questions here highlight the different—and more jaundiced—attitudes of working-class voters compared to college voters. (Note: CBS does not report an overall education split but only whites by education.)
1. In terms of their personal/household situation, 60 percent of white working-class voters say, “I have just enough to meet my basic expenses” or “I don’t have enough to meet my basic expenses.” By comparison, just 35 percent of white college voters make such a gloomy assessment. And 72 percent of white working-class voters describe the national economy as fairly or very bad.
2. The poll asked voters what they thought would happen with the price of food and groceries if Harris or Trump is elected. White working-class voters believe by 43 points that these prices will go uprather than down if Harris is elected but believe by 26 points that these prices will go down not up under a Trump presidency. White college grads are less negative on Harris by 11 points and less positive on Trump by 21 points.
3. The poll also asked voters about what might happen at the border with migrant crossings under Harris or Trump. White working-class voters by 45 points think migrant crossings under Harris would increase rather than decrease, while under a Trump presidency they believe by an overwhelming 75 points that such crossings would decrease not increase. Again, white college voters are much less likely to see a Harris presidency as increasing border crossings or a Trump presidency as decreasing these crossings.
And finally, the latest Fox News poll.
1. In terms of favorability, working class voters give Harris a 44 percent favorability rating and Trump a 52 percent favorable rating. College-educated voters are basically the reverse: they give Harris a 54 percent favorability rating and Trump just a 38 percent rating.
2. Consistent with the Post ratings on which candidate voters trust on key issues, working-class voters prefer Trump over Harris on the economy by 13 points, on crime also by 13 points, on foreign policy by 17 points, and on border security by 27 points (on the latter, even Hispanics trust Trump over Harris by 17 points). In contrast, college voters favor Harris over Trump on the economy by 6 points, on crime by 7 points and on foreign policy by 10 points. And they “only” favor Trump over Harris on border security by 5 points.
Now, none of this is to say that Harris doesn’t have better issues with working-class voters that are important, particularly abortion but also health care. And it is also true that Harris has made up significant ground with these voters since Biden cratered in the polls shortly before he dropped out. But the yawning gap between the views of working-class and college-educated voters remains, as does the gap between their voting intentions (the latter confirmed by sources of running crosstab averages—see here and here).
When Democrats are feeling frisky, they would do well to remember this. Most of their activists live and work in environments where they are surrounded by other college-educated voters as do most of those who cover and write about politics. Their universe is different from that of working-class voters; what plays so well in their college-educated bubble does not typically play nearly as well in the universe inhabited by working class voters.
But, Democrats might say, we are working on this! Harris is taking backall of her unpopular stuff. We’re now tough(er) on the border—at least in commercials and in our platform (love the land acknowledgement!). We’re going to bring prices down with our anti-price-gouging plan! We’re trying on our patriotism hat again! And how about what Barack Obama said!
On the latter, it is true that Obama has not forgotten the ancient wisdom of the Obama era. But hey, he’s Obama so I’m not sure how many points the Democrats get for that.
In truth, most of what Democrats are doing and saying today amounts to, as befits their status as a Brahmin left party, a kind of Brahmin populism. It combines a mild-mannered and scattershot populism—a far cry from Bernie Sanders’ class-oriented populism of 2016—with an underlying commitment to a very wide array of social justice and “equity” issues that the working class detests.
The more-or-less plausible goal is to reconstitute the Biden coalition of 2020. They may or may not make it. But they shouldn’t kid themselves on the underlying weakness of their coalition. They are notreconstituting the Obama coalition or anything close to it, as I showedin a recent analysis. As Michael Cuenco tartly points out:
Consider that when Obama last ran, the Midwest was still known as an impenetrable Blue Wall, while Florida and Ohio were still purple states. When Bill Clinton gave his acceptance speech in 1996, the Democrats were competitive throughout large swathes of the South. During that period, they had gone on to win not just Clinton’s Arkansas and Al Gore’s Tennessee, but states such as Kentucky and Louisiana too.
The story of the last three decades has been one of political success for Democrats, who have won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight elections. Yet it is also one of narrowing political constituencies and pyrrhic victories, as the party attracted college-educated professionals at the expense of the non-college-educated majority. In particular, non-college-educated whites were lost, but in recent years they have increasingly been joined by significant numbers of non-college-educated minorities. As recently as 2007, “56 percent of voters without a degree were Democrats or leaned Democratic, while 42 percent were Republicans or GOP leaners”; today, Republicans hold “a six-percentage-point advantage over the Democratic Party,” according to Pew Research.
Of course, the selection of Tim Walz as Harris’s running mate is supposed to help the Democrats claw back some of that lost working-class support. Besides the obvious point that vice-presential picks typically don’t matter much, this seems doubtful given his own electoral record in Minnesota, where his support as governor has skewed toward highly-educated metro areas.
Indeed, even granting Walz the sincerity of his advocacy on economic issues, he fits quite comfortably into the Democrats’ current Brahmin populism. As Gregory Conti points out in an excellent Compact article on the vice-presidential picks:
Tim Walz’s ascension looks…to be fully in keeping with the [Democrats’ shifting coalition]. For if woke has peaked, Harris seems not to have known it when she selected him. Given that Harris appears now to want to backtrack from and minimize her distinctly far-left messaging in 2019-20—which ranged from the sublime (working to bail out rioters and affirming the righteousness of the disorder of summer 2020, calling to decriminalize illegal border crossings, endorsing a ban on fracking) to the ridiculous (getting sucked in by the Jussie Smollett hoax)—it is curious that she made Walz her running mate. For there is nary an enthusiasm of contemporary cultural progressivism that he has not indulged to the hilt. Reflecting the left’s recent hostility on the subject, he has no affection for—or understanding of—the American tradition of free speech. He was a Covid-maximalist, both in his personal conduct and far more importantly in public policy, having set up a snitch line for reporting transgressions of the state’s innumerable and ineffective NPIs and vigorously defending school closures. In contrast to the trend of European social democracies toward greater caution on the issue, Walz has made Minnesota a spearhead for gender-affirming care for children….This is not the record of Joe Biden in ’08, or Tim Kaine in ’16, but something close to a replay—and perhaps a magnification—of the Harris persona in ’20.
In sum, it’s a long road back to the working class for the Democrats. As they leave their convention, with visions of electoral sugar plums dancing in their heads, they should remember that they still have far to go.
