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 both components 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.
How might that be done? That starts with the economy and the cost of living, these voters’ number one concern by far. Democrats have seemed flummoxed that working-class voters have not been suitably grateful for all the great programs they passed and recently robust economic performance, featuring very low unemployment, solid job creation, good economic growth, and cooling inflation. Some of the polling data in fact are pretty dire. In the latest ABC News poll only 13 percent say they are better off financially since Biden took office, compared to 43 percent who say they are worse off. And in the latest CBS News poll half of voters believe that if Biden wins in November, his policies in a second term would make them financially worse off, with just a fifth saying those policies would make them better off. In contrast, half of voters think Trump’s policies, if he wins, would make them financially better off, compared to 30 percent who think his policies would make them worse off.
Findings like these tend to make Democratic-oriented commentators furious. What’s wrong with these people, especially the working-class voters among whom these sentiments are particularly strong? They latch on to theories like it’s some sort of weird vibes thing, or partisanship or (that old reliable) the Satanic influence of Fox News and other sources of “misinformation”. But really this shouldn’t be so hard to understand. As economics commentator Roger Lowenstein notes:
The typical household’s living standard improved during the three Trump years before the pandemic. Under President Biden, Americans have (at best) struggled to keep even with inflation….[I]t is one thing to loathe Mr. Trump and hope for his defeat. It is another to wish away his successes or, as has become common, to ascribe his popularity to voter prejudices or weaknesses of character. The leitmotif in such arguments is that blue voters are rational political actors voting on merit while Trump is appealing primarily, if not exclusively, to irrational semi-citizens devoid of even self-interested calculation.
Obey
Article URL : https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-coming-working-class-election