Harris Lost the Working Class

While Biden made modest progress with working-class voters, Harris failed to hold these gains in 2024.

It will be months before we can get a more definitive look at what happened in 2024 in terms of demographic trends, but one thing is clear: Kamala Harris performed poorly among working-class voters.

Looking at the best preliminary data, AP Votecast indicates that the Democrats’ share of the overall working class (non-college) vote shrunk from 47 percent in 2020 to 43 percent in this election. These losses were concentrated primarily among non-white working-class men, whose support for Harris this year was down 11 percentage points compared to Biden in 2020 (69 percent for Biden; 58 percent for Harris). Exit polls tell a similar story, especially of a dramatic shift toward Trump among Latino men. Similarly, initial county-level analyses indicate that Harris’s support was down substantially in counties with a high density of working-class voters.

Ahead of the November election, those of us at the Center for the Working-Class Politics (CWCP) along with analysts like Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis at The Liberal Patriot, argued that the blue-collar vote was the key to the election—and sounded the alarm that Harris was losing it. We all warned that Harris’s prevailing message, haranguing voters about Trump as a threat to democracy, was a failing one. We feared that the Democratic Party, dominated as it is by out-of-touch media personalities and liberal activists, rightly or wrongly, was increasingly defined by causes, candidates, and rhetoric that alienated working-class voters. We counseled, instead, that the Harris campaign should focus its entire national campaign on a credible economic message and a palpable populism. We all worried that failing to speak to the anger and frustration of workers—in small-towns, rural areas, and deindustrialized cities alike—would lead to Democratic disaster.

Unfortunately, these warnings came true on Election Day. The Democratic Party lost the working class, and with it any chance of forging a durable majority coalition for the foreseeable future. What’s worse, thanks to Harris’s negative coattails, candidates who best appeal to working-class voters—from Ohio’s Sherrod Brown to Pennsylvania Congressman Matt Cartwright (PA-8)—were dragged down by the top of the ticket. The few Democrats who have had success in Trump leaning areas are now even fewer.

Led by Kamala Harris, who dominated the college-educated vote by 14 points, the Democratic Party is now even more alienated from the voters it needs to build governing majorities. There should be a sense of outrage on the left and center-left. A Republican Party now stuffed with tech and finance billionaires, led by Donald Trump, whose slumlord father was literally the subject of a Woody Guthrie ballad, is soundly winning the working-class.

Yet, we fear that few lessons will be learned, as they were largely not learned after Trump’s victory in 2016. Nonetheless, based on our work at CWCP, here are a few lessons that should be learned.

Find and run working-class candidates. If the Democratic Party wants to get serious about winning back workers, it ought to enlist the labor movement to help recruit talented, blue-collar candidates, something like what the New Jersey’s AFL-CIO candidate training program has been doing successfully for decades. There is clear evidence that candidates from a working-class background are viewed more favorably by working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines. Because such candidates come from the same communities and workplaces as the voters they aim to represent, they are best positioned to speak credibly to their interests and aspirations. Yet, as work by the CWCP has shown, only a tiny fraction of congressional candidates have a working-class background.

A potent example of the power of working-class candidates is Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic turned steamfitter who ran an unlikely independent campaign against a mega-rich mainline Republican in deep-red Nebraska. Though he was ultimately unable to overcome the headwinds that so strongly favored conservatives across the country, Osborn outperformed Harris by a larger margin than any Democratic Senate candidate competing in a competitive state with the exception of three-term incumbent Jon Tester of Montana—whose own bona fides as a life-time farmer certainly gave him a similar leg up (although not enough this time around). Running as an independent, and not as a Democrat, surely helped Osborn, providing him real distance from the party’s worst baggage. But it’s not wrong to see his surprising strength as stemming from his working-class biography as a strike leader, a Navy man, and a real heir to the prairie populism of old. Candidates like this are not a silver bullet, but because of their personal closeness to the workers they seek to represent, they have a much easier time persuading their neighbors than would a typical “Brahmin left” liberal.

Remember—populism works. The House candidates who outperformed Harris the most in competitive districts—such as Gabe Vasquez (NM-2), Marcy Kaptur (OH-9), Matt Cartwright (PA-8), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-3)—employed some of the strongest economic populist language in the field, calling out economic elites and putting the working class in the center of their appeals. Vasquez, for instance, outperformed Harris by an average of 5 percentage points across the counties of New Mexico’s 2nd district. Here is a typical message from his campaign:

New Mexico’s workers and small businesses are the backbone of our economy...For too long the nation’s largest corporations haven’t paid their fair share, while CEOs and wealthy investors inflate their salaries and dividends. They do this while refusing to increase pay or benefits for workers. We can’t afford to allow this to continue.

These candidates’ success is consistent with our analysis of campaign messaging among all 2022 Democratic candidates, which found that candidates who employed a high level of economic populist messaging performed substantially better than other candidates, particularly in districts with a high density of working-class voters. The Democratic Party is at its strongest when its candidates champion the common man against big business and the billionaire class. And they have a real opportunity to credibly attack the GOP as the party for the rich (even if the GOP is currently trending as a party of the people). The Republicans are increasingly funded by billionaires like Tim Mellon, Richard Uihlein, Miriam Adelson, and Elon Musk who topped the list of spending this cycle. In fact, they won the lion's share of billionaire campaign cash this cycle (72 percent of campaign donations from billionaire families went to Republicans). Beyond funding, the GOP is increasingly governed by a roster of megarich office-holders, like hedge-fund manager Dave McCormick (net worth $165M), coal-baron Jim Justice (net worth $450M), auto-dealer magnate Bernie Moreno (net worth $100M)—and of course, Donald Trump himself. Democrats need to make clear that a government led by conservatives is a government of, by, and for the rich.

Of course, the fact that Democrats raised even more money than Trump this election cycle—fueled by high-dollar contributions from Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—presents a huge obstacle for the party to present itself as a populist counterbalance.                          

Progressive economic policies are not the enemy. Republicans and establishment Democrats will surely argue that Harris lost because she was too far left on economic policy. (Harris’s positions on cultural issues are another story and were certainly a liability with working-class voters.) After all, didn’t Biden’s large-scale spending packages lead to the inflationary spiral that caused Harris’s defeat? Americans, they will say, just want low taxes and free markets.

But this theory is not borne out empirically, as surveys consistently find that many progressive economic policies are popular, especially those built around the promise of high-wage jobs and high-quality public services offered to all.

For instance, across 12 surveys we identified (including three conducted by the CWCP) that asked American voters their opinion of a federal jobs guarantee, we found an average of 59 percent support for a jobs guarantee, including, according to a recent CWCP survey, among Pennsylvania voters in October of 2024. The same pre-election Pennsylvania poll similarly found that 58 percent of respondents were in favor of a policy that would “Expand Medicare to cover all US citizens.” This is consistent with our analyses of data from the Cooperation Election Study (CES) which shows that majorities of Americans have consistently supported expanding access to Medicare since 2009, particularly working-class Americans, of whom between 70 and 80 percent of Americans supported Medicare expansion in 2022.

These findings are far from outliers. A recent YouGov survey found that 65 percent of Americans support establishing a law to strengthen workers’ right to bargain collectively, 56 percent support a substantial hike in corporate tax rates, and 66 percent support an increase in the federal minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour. This latter figure is consistent with the massive Nationscape survey of the 2020 electorate, which consistently found that over 60 percent of the electorate supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, as well as our analysis of CES data which found overwhelming public support for raising the minimum wage, especially among working-class Americans.

We are not arguing that Harris would have won simply by embracing these specific progressive economic ideas. But nor was her economic program a distinct liability. Americans remain rightly skeptical of government programs that involve a lot of spending and yield few observable benefits for their families and communities. Moreover, Democrats have to learn that good economic programs mean very little without a good marketing program tied to them (it's why FDR made sure “Social Security” was written on every paycheck and why Trump made sure his own signature was on the COVID-19 relief checks). Still transformative economic and universal social policies—from Social Security and Medicare to unemployment insurance—that address American workers’ sense of being left behind economically and socially are a fundamental component of a long-term policy solution to Trumpism and class dealignment.

Republican economic proposals, despite some populist rebranding, are fundamentally anti-tax and anti-labor. While the GOP does have plans to juice GDP, like Trump’s massive corporate tax cut and deregulation proposals, the party’s opposition to pre- and redistribution combined with their continuing opposition to strong labor laws, will mean that new economic gains will mostly accrue at the top of the income scale. Workers will see crumbs. Progressives need to say this repeatedly while proposing compelling policies to bring back high-wage blue-collar manufacturing jobs, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, and renew our rotting public services.

The “shadow party” is a serious liability. While it’s not likely that the Democrats’ pro-union and pro-infrastructure policies cost them votes, it is likely that a focus on unpopular progressive appeals hurt them. The problem is that Harris, like most Democrats, didn’t really focus any of her own campaign appeals on the kind of “woke” rhetoric that many voters attach to the Democrats. In fact, we found that in the 2022 midterms very few Democrats talked about divisive cultural issues at all. So, what gives? The Democratic Party ecosystem is filled with media figures, foundation directors, NGO administrators, and an array of high-profile actors, activists, and advocates. And this group, the Democratic “shadow party,” has enormous power over the Democratic Party’s image. Consider that while Harris herself was reluctant to make the election about her race or gender, those in the shadow party immediately organized high-profile cringeworthy events like “White Women for Kamala,” “White Dudes for Harris,” and “Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders for Harris” that insisted on putting identity issues front-and-center.

And what about those Republican attack ads that claimed Harris wanted to give inmates free sex-change surgery? What sounded like a Fox News fever dream was based on a real quote that Harris gave in response to a 2019 questionnaire from the ultra-liberal American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Or consider the decision by some Harris backers, like Progress Action Fund, to spend millions on pro-pornography ads, seemingly unaware that young men’s dependence on OnlyFans is a sign of a much larger loneliness crisis for which Democrats promised to do nothing at all.

Yes, it's not fair that the right wing has a well-built propaganda machine that can exploit these cultural flashpoints and tie them to the party, but the problem is inside the house as well. Ultra-progressive organizations have a distinct interest in forcing Democratic politicians to take incredibly unpopular maximalist stances to demonstrate to their donors and members that they have real influence. These organizations, of course, have no accountability to the electorate yet they make it increasingly difficult for Democrats to communicate their relatively popular economic policies.

Denying social problems doesn’t make them go away. Over the nearly ten years since Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut, he has consistently highlighted very real problems in American society. From crime and street violence to drugs and homelessness to diminished wages and the crisis at the border, quality of life issues have gotten worse for people across the country. Between 2020 and 2024, many American cities experienced a major spike in violent crime, drug overdoses reached staggering heights, and price hikes ate into modest wage gains. The victims of these social crises are, of course, overwhelmingly working class. And yet many leading progressives denied or downplayed the pain of inflation, the crime wave, the ongoing mass layoffs and offshoring, disorder at the border, and the addiction crisis in their own backyards. That persistent denial of reality may help explain why Trump’s biggest gains in 2024 were concentrated in large metropolitan urban counties.

In our last poll before the election we found that those voters who indicated that they were either recently “unfairly fired” or those who reported job insecurity heavily favored Trump. Post-election data confirmed this exact pattern. As the economist Jed Kolko observed, counties with a “higher unemployment level in the year leading up to September 2024” were “associated with a bigger swing in the county vote toward Trump in 2024 versus 2020.” Trump may be a liar, misdirect, scapegoat, and dog whistle. But he doesn’t tell workers that their anxieties about contemporary American social problems are unfounded.

Adopt a class theory of politics. Already figures in the Democratic orbit are claiming that Harris lost as a result of sexism or racism. David Axelrod, top advisor to former president Barack Obama, was unequivocal in his post-election analysis: “Let’s be honest about this. Let’s be absolutely blunt about it: There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country.” Prejudice no doubt persists as an ongoing challenge, but its existence just doesn’t hold up as an explanation of last Tuesday’s results. According to AP Votecast, Harris’s support among black voters was 8 points lower than Biden’s (a drop from 91 percent to 83 percent), and she performed remarkably poorly among Latino voters. Indeed, early indications suggest that Trump may have actually improved his vote share among Pennsylvania’s Puerto Ricans. That’s after weeks of media elites and progressives trying to hang Tony Hinchcliffe’s “island of garbage” joke around Trump’s neck like an albatross. And while Kamala won women overall, Trump actually carried working-class women.

These demographic breaks just do not comport with the official progressive narratives about race and sex. They indicate that an entirely different social cleavage has rent the nation. It’s the class divide. Democrats have become the party of high-earning, big city professionals and they just cannot speak to, speak like, or even understand, working-class concerns. To change that they must first recognize it. And to do so they need to retire the theory of politics that says that the party must run people of this or that ethnicity, or must run a woman, or must run a gay man, etc. A class theory of politics would scrap the petty tribalism that dominates so much of liberal analysis and instead focus heavily on the real social divides in American life. It would see that the reason Harris underperformed in nearly every single county relative to Biden cannot be the mysterious work of white supremacy or patriarchy but instead must be, at root, economic.

Keep in mind Democrats still need unions. One of the fateful decisions made by the Clinton-era New Democrats was to pull the party away from the labor movement. Clinton’s disastrous decision to sign NAFTA combined with party insiders' belief that dynamic emerging constituencies would be able to replace blue-collar voters in the Democratic coalition, while a new donor class could displace the unions’ institutional support for Democrats. These decisions, combined with broader economic shifts, helped weaken the influence of labor in American political life. Working-class associational life has shrunk overall but it has also changed, labor unions in small towns have been replaced by NRA gun clubs for example, marking a distinct political drift rightward. The Teamsters' much publicized decision to sit out the election likely helped contribute to Harris’s defeat, but it was itself the result of the clear distance union workers, and even labor officials, now feel from the Democratic Party despite their obvious shared economic interests.

Working-class associational life was vital to the Democrats’ ability to congeal the New Deal coalition. And if any hope of rebuilding that coalition, or one like it, is to emerge it will likely come through the revitalization of the labor movement and the support of that movement by the party.

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Harris’s voters should be outraged, not because Donald Trump won so resoundingly but because the Democrats lost. And further, because she herself dragged down many of the candidates that could have helped to fortify the party for the future.

Democrats need a reckoning, and a lot of soul-searching, if they are going to ever reclaim their mantle as the party of the working class.

Dustin "Dino" Guastella is Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 and a research associate with the Center for Working-Class Politics. Jared Abbott is the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics.