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 the new Book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:
Here is a simple truth: how working-class (noncollege) voters move will likely determine the outcome of the 2024 election. They will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all six key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average.
It follows that significant deterioration in working-class support could put Biden in a very deep hole nationally and key states. Conversely, a burgeoning advantage among working-class voters would likely put Trump in a dominant position.
This very trend explains a lot about Biden’s current poor position in general election polls, where he is running behind Trump both nationally and in most swing states. In 2020, Biden lost working-class voters by 4 points, while carrying college-educated voters by 18 points. Biden would have lost the working class by more (and perhaps the election) if he hadn’t actually done slightly better than Hillary Clinton among white working-class voters; among nonwhite working-class voters, especially Hispanic voters, he did sharply worse.
In current polls, we see a marked decline in Biden’s support among bothcomponents of the working-class vote with the decline among nonwhite working-class voters if anything larger than the decline among white working-class voters. The result has been a double digit falloff in Biden’s margin among the working class as a whole. The Split Ticket crosstab aggregator has Biden losing working-class voters to Trump by 14 points, a 10-point drop from 2020 and the New York Times/Siena poll has Biden’s deficit among these voters at 17 points, 13 points worse than 2020.
This sets up some unforgiving political arithmetic. The same polls show modest increases in the Democrats’ advantage among college-educated voters, but not nearly as large as the fall off among working-class voters. And it should be stressed that, given the preponderance of working-class voters in the electorate, to truly set off widening deficits among the working class Democrats would need margin gains among the college-educated that are 50 percent larger than their margin losses among working-class voters. Not impossible, but a steep hill to climb.
Inspection of results from swing-state polls indicates the same basic pattern: big Biden losses among working-class voters relative to 2020, with approximate stability or slight gains among college-educated—not nearly enough to counter-balance the working-class losses.
It therefore seems obvious that the key to victory for either side in 2024 lies in their relative performance among working-class voters. For Biden, he needs to bring down his deficit among these voters so it is much closer to the modest levels of 2020, allowing his college voter advantage to be decisive. For Trump, if he is able to keep his working-class advantage at current levels—or even increase it!—he has an excellent chance of surviving even a very large advantage for Biden among college-educated voters.
All of this may be true, but will we actually see an election campaign focused on working-class voters? That remains to be seen. Right now, it looks more like a “Brahmin Left” vs. “Populist Right” election.
“Brahmin Left” is a term coined by economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues to characterize Western left parties increasingly bereft of working-class voters and increasingly dominated by highly educated voters and elites. The Brahmin left has evolved over many decades and certainly includes today’s Democratic Party.
As a Brahmin left party, the temptation is great for Democrats to lean into their emerging strengths and just hope for the best among working-class voters. That is the natural inclination of the elites and activists who now dominate the party.
And indeed there are a couple of potent issues Democrats are planning to run on that are dear to the hearts of their Brahmin left base: abortion rights and defending democracy (“Democracy is on the ballot”, etc.) While for sure these are good issues for the Democrats, especially for your college-educated next door neighbor who would sooner take a bath in hot coals than vote for Trump, it must be recognized that these issues are not as potent and overriding for working-class voters. They are less convinced—far less convinced—that a great analogy for America today is Weimar Germany, 1932. Their concerns are more mundane, connected to their everyday material concerns and relatively conservative values.