Why Working Class Voters Are Leaving the Democrats Behind
Democrats’ post-2024 soul-searching reveals deep losses among working-class and minority voters that had been in progress since Trump's first election.
Democrats’ decisive loss in 2024 has proven two political scientists right.
John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published Where Have All the Democrats Gone? in 2023. In between the midterms and the presidential election, their book was well-placed to warn Democrats about any impending election disasters.
Judis and Teixeira published before President Biden’s debate with Donald Trump, Biden’s drop out, and Kamala Harris’ campaign. Even though they missed the high drama of the late stages of the presidential race, their analysis of Trump-era elections held up:
“In recent years, elections have increasingly been decided by which party can make the other party’s radical extremes or the politicians who represent those extremes the main issue. In 2016, Donald Trump succeeded in making the election about ‘Crooked Hillary.’ In 2018 and 2020, the Democrats were able to make the election about Trump’s excesses. In 2022, Democrats won elections where the issue was Republican opposition to abortion rights and insistence that the 2020 election was stolen, whereas Republicans won when the issue was Democrats’ wanting to defund the police or decriminalize illegal immigration.”
The analysis has aged remarkably well. In 2024, inflation and immigration were the top two issues. Abortion and threats to democracy were among the most important issues to Democrats, but polling on both issues trailed behind immigration and inflation.
So, in the wake of Trump’s second term, Democrats are asking themselves, “Where have all the Democrats gone?”
Working Class Voters Left a Decade Ago
Working-class voters used to form the core of the Democratic base. FDR’s New Deal put ordinary workers at the center of attention, creating Social Security and federal jobs programs to put Americans back to work during the Great Depression. LBJ followed decades later by creating Medicare and Medicaid.
So, it’s less surprising to see Obama be the president to sign the Affordable Care Act into law and be among the last Democratic candidates to have a coalition that included so many working-class voters.
In 2016, “the Republican advantage among white working-class voters went up 6 points to a staggering 31 points.” The authors continued:
“Counties that shifted strongly toward Trump tended to be dominated by working-class whites and dependent on blue-collar jobs battered by automation and international trade. In addition, many of these communities had seen declines in civic life and increases in deaths of despair from alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.”
White working-class voters did not believe that Clinton or the Democrats were able to address their problems. Towns that were prosperous before competition overseas shuttered American factories broke hard for Trump, rejecting Clinton, whose husband signed NAFTA into law shortly after winning his 1992 election.
What About the 2020s?
After Biden reaped the benefits of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Democrats had to return to its hard lessons. Among those difficult lessons was that the Democratic hold on voters of color couldn’t be taken for granted.
The authors noted that from 2018 to 2022, Democrats lost Hispanics by 11 points, Black voters by 6 points, and Asian voters by 19 points. Biden’s attempt to revitalize certain manufacturing sectors helped with working-class voters, but culture war issues about race, gender, and immigration continued pushing voters who hadn’t gone to college to read the right studies or learn the correct terminology away.
The overlap between the decline in Hispanic support and the Democratic position on immigration is particularly illustrative:
“Democrats had also assumed that [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis’s involvement in flying migrants to Martha’s Vineyard would hurt him among voters, especially Hispanic voters. In fact, Florida Hispanics approved of both the Martha’s Vineyard flights and the law restricting the teaching of gender ideology. That’s one reason why DeSantis cleaned up among Hispanic voters, carrying Miami-Dade County by 11 points and Hispanics statewide by 13 points.”
Many Hispanic voters support immigration but done legally through the processes that many parents and grandparents struggled through. Other voters become more Republican over successive generations, viewing the Democratic Party as the “poor people” party.
Related: The Hispanic Republican explains the history of the Hispanic base of the Republican Party.
While many Democrats viewed the deceptive flights to Martha’s Vineyard as cruel, suburbs outside of Democratic cities like Chicago and New York stopped accepting migrant buses from southern states like Texas. Clearly, some northern officials were willing to embrace immigration restrictions when faced with the issue themselves.
Even though the 2022 midterms are long over, the lessons from the Trump era will apply to Democratic politics for years to come. Where Have All the Democrats Gone? remains a must-read for anyone hoping to understand how the Democratic coalition has changed and how Democrats could continue bleeding voters crucial to future victories.