Yahoo Finance Working-class Americans: Tell us what you want
There are roughly 104 million working-class Americans, but few of them write books about themselves. Among the intelligentsia, however, there’s intense interest in how working Americans think and what they want.
A shelfful of new books probes the fortunes of the American working class and the battle among politicians to claim their allegiance. There’s an obvious reason: Working-class voters have political clout and will likely determine who will prevail in the 2024 presidential and congressional elections.
So we’re going straight to the source. If you consider yourself a working-class American — generally defined as someone without a college degree who earns hourly, not salaried, pay — please take our survey. Working-class Americans: Tell us what you want. We’ll report on the results in an upcoming story.
For decades, a majority of working-class Americans belonged to the Democratic Party, as George Packer recently explained in the Atlantic. In the new book Ours Was the Shining Future, New York Times writer David Leonhardt catalogues many Democratic policies, starting with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, that helped ordinary American workers became the world’s most prosperous middle class.
Starting around 1980, income inequality began to worsen as unions and manufacturing jobs declined and the European and Japanese economies finally recovered from the devastation of World War II. American political parties also shifted. Democrats increasingly represented college-educated urban elites, while Republicans drew more blue-collar support.
Democrat Barack Obama got 52% of the non-college-educated vote in 2008 and 51% in 2012. His Republican challengers got 46% and 48%. But Republican Donald Trump flipped those numbers, in part because of his appeal to working-class whites. Trump got 51% of the working-class vote in 2016, while Democrat Hilary Clinton got 45%. In 2020, Trump got 52% of the working-class vote, while Democrat Joe Biden got 46%.
Biden fashions himself a child of the working class and the “most pro-union president in American history.” He has promoted and signed legislation meant to boost union jobs, and last September he was the first president ever to join striking workers on a picket line. That support for unionized auto workers in Michigan was clearly meant to appeal to working-class voters in Midwestern swing states who have become crucial to presidential election victories.
Yet Biden’s standing with Joe Six-Pack is weak. In Gallup’s latest polling, Biden’s approval rating among voters without a college degree is 35%, 6 points lower than his overall approval rating. Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in this year’s election, enjoys 50% approval among the working class, 8 points higher than his overall rating. If those portions hold on Election Day, Biden’s performance among working-class voters would be the worst of any Democrat in modern times.
Biden does have the edge among college grads, with 53% approval, while just 26% of that group approve of Trump. That’s a big edge for Biden, but not a decisive one. Just 38% of American workers have a college degree, while 62% don’t. So it’s better to be popular among the lower echelons of voters than the higher rungs. The catch is that college grads are more likely to vote, so turnout is key for Trump to capitalize on his working-class popularity.
Drop Rick Newman a note, follow him on Twitter, or sign up for his newsletter.
In economic terms, it's not surprising that lower-income Americans would be fed up with Biden. Inflation has been the worst economic problem of Biden’s presidency, with food and rent prices persistently high. Wealthier Americans who own their own homes and were able to refinance their mortgages when interest rates were at record lows may not be concerned about inflation anymore, given that the annualized increase in prices is almost back to normal. But workers with a thinner financial cushion are still feeling the sting of prices that have gone up and stayed there.
Part of the shift of allegiances among political parties also involves cultural issues, which have become more important to some voters than economic concerns. Trump’s blatant disdain for immigrants and his overall crassness connect with white Americans uneasy about the rise of minorities as a portion of the population and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs to overseas labor. Trump also provides a stark alternative to racial, gender, and sexual “wokeness” that some people consider excessive.
Still, it’s probably a mistake to regard working-class voters as a monolithic bloc of Americans all interested in the same things. While the image of an assembly-line worker may come to mind, manufacturing isn’t even among the top 10 industries employing working-class people any more, according to a 2023 report from the Center for American Progress. The top three working-class industries are construction, restaurants, and healthcare, while the top occupations are drivers, sales workers, freight handlers, and janitors. Many of those jobs were never unionized, and are unlikely to become so.
Biden and Trump and their respective political parties may all think they have a formula for snaring Joe Six-Pack, but Mr. Six-Pack may sip box wine or canned cocktails or kombucha these days. No menu satisfies everybody, especially in politics.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.
Click here for politics news related to business and money
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
