Throw the Groups Under the Bus!

The road back to the working class.

Democrats have lost two of the last three presidential elections to Donald J. Trump. Donald Trump! And they now face a governing trifecta of House, Senate, and presidential control by their (semi-fascist?) opponents.

Clearly, something has gone dreadfully wrong. A clue can be found in the shocking decline of nonwhite working-class (non-college) support for Democrats in this election. Harris carried nonwhite working-class voters by a mere 32 points, a 16-point decline from Biden’s 48-point margin in 2020. (Obama carried them by 67 points in 2012!) This latest decline swept across both black and Latino working-class voters.

What on earth is going on? Whatever happened to Democrats’ identity as the party of the working class? After all, it has been Democrats’ seemingly unchallenged hold over the nonwhite working class that has made that identity even semi-plausible, as white working-class voters have slipped farther and farther away from the party. But now that’s gone too.

Trump dominated the working-class vote in 2024. And look what’s happened to the Democrats’ image over time:

---

---

As another indicator, look at this one:

---

---

Yup, the party of the working class no longer. So why might working-class voters, especially nonwhite working-class voters, be finding it ever more difficult to see the party as their tribune? A key reason is the overriding sense that Democrats’ priorities have changed over time and that the welfare of the working class is no longer front and center in their calculations. This chart illustrates the shift:

---

---

Democrats of course argue that while their cultural views may have shifted left over time and some of these views may be unpopular (actually, most are), they are nevertheless just as focused on the welfare of the working class as they’ve ever been. This ignores the basic reality of opportunity costs. The time, energy and resources spent on the Democrats’ cultural left agenda is time, energy, and resources taken away from promoting the economic welfare of the working class. Working-class voters are well aware of this tradeoff, even if progressive activists and “the Groups” are not. As a result, working-class voters tend to connect their economic criticisms of the Democrats to the party’s apparent preoccupation with cultural issues pushed by their liberal college-educated supporters—issues working class voters either don’t care about or are actively hostile to. This connection is clearly dragging the Democrats down with these voters.

The salience of this connection is demonstrated by post-election data from the Blueprint strategy group. The third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”. And among swing voters, this concern about focus was the most powerful reason.

---

---

And look at what swing voters who chose Trump thought were extremely or very accurate criticisms of the Democratic Party:

---

---

A recent article by Jennifer Medina in the New York Times illustrates how these views are expressed by nonwhite working-class voters:

“Democrats flipped,” said Daniel Trujillo, who owns a barbershop in East Las Vegas and watched many of his customers shift from supporting Barack Obama to favoring Mr. Trump. “They went from being for the working class to, if you’re not college-educated and have money, you’re not worthy.” He said he had watched with delight as his customers increasingly warmed toward Mr. Trump.

“The right turned blue-collar and went full border-control, strong-economy and law-and-order,” Mr. Trujillo added. “Who doesn’t want that?”

Who indeed? Later in the article, Medina notes:

Even as they held onto their faith in the American dream, many nonwhite working-class voters said they had come to see the Democratic Party as condescending, overly focused on issues irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. They bristled over social issues like the concerns of transgender children or the party’s focus on abortion rights. They felt scolded by liberals on Covid precautions—and crushed by the pandemic’s economic fallout.

Some sounded every bit as aggrieved as the white working-class voters who first fueled Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, voicing similar complaints about migrants being given easier access to housing and food than homeless veterans living on the streets.

These views and their antagonistic relationship to Democratic orthodoxy are further illustrated in an excellent article by Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “The End of Denial: How Trump’s rising popularity in New York (and everywhere else) exposed the Democratic Party’s break with reality,” that focused on the red shift this year in the Queens borough of New York City. He observes:

Through the resistance years and into the COVID era, liberal institutions from universities to media organizations to nonprofits cathartically swung left, which bred further denial about what voters cared about and were experiencing. A partial catalogue of progressive denialism, listed in no particular order: that alienating left-wing positions or rhetoric were confined to college campuses; that the externalities of pandemic shutdowns, such as grade-school learning loss, were overblown; that the rapid adoption of new gender orthodoxies, especially in settings involving children, was not a popular concern; that the “defund the police” movement would be embraced by communities of color; that inflation was overstated; that the pandemic crime wave was exaggerated; that concerns over urban disorder represented a moral panic; that Latinos would welcome loosened border restrictions.

Van Zuylen-Woods’ reporting indicates how absurd this denialism is when matched against the lives—the “lived experience”, as it were—of ordinary residents of Corona, Queens:

Carlos Bermejo owns an Italian Latin restaurant called La Pequeña Taste of Italy. Bermejo, who emigrated from Ecuador, says the street vendors undercut his sales and the streetwalkers deter customers and attract crime. “In the summer, in the window, maybe like ten ladies,” he said. Inflation was another concern: Facing rising costs of his own, he says he had to hike the price of his standard aluminum-container takeout from $10 to $12. When I asked whom he voted for, he looked at me like I was kidding: “Donald Trump. You gotta do that. Everybody knows that.”

Several blocks away, the manager of a grocery store complained of a spike in thefts—he didn’t want me to use his name to avoid risking further incidents—as well as of street vendors pouring their grease directly into the sewer, which he said attracted rats that wound up in his store basement. He says he voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump this time around. Carmen Enriquez, a substitute teacher from Ecuador who lives nearby in what is technically Elmhurst, says she’s a registered Democrat who voted Republican this year for the first time. She complained that migrants had received free shelter and benefits while existing residents struggled. She directed her ire at not only the Biden administration but also Ocasio-Cortez, who appeared at a local rally last year to support migrant vendors, and State Senator Jessica Ramos, who co-sponsored a bill several years ago to decriminalize sex work...

One of the most interesting people I spoke with was 57-year-old Mauricio Zamora, who lives just off vendor-packed Corona Plaza on 103rd Street. Zamora runs a Facebook page and an active WhatsApp group for an organization he founded called Neighbors of the American Triangle, named after a minuscule nearby park he started maintaining during the pandemic when it became a magnet for drinkers…

He says that thanks to the chaos on Roosevelt, he has been getting fined for random garbage in front of his home, which he owns. He feels some of his local representatives, meanwhile, have prioritized tolerance over law and order. Using our translator now, he claimed they showed up only for “LGBT mobilization or when the lady prostitutes do a rally.”

In short, Democrats have lost the plot in the view of more and more nonwhite, especially nonwhite working-class, voters. How can they find it again? The obvious answer would be to sever the party’s connection to unpopular and unworkable social policies and re-establish a focus on the material welfare of working-class voters.

The simplest way to do this, in turn, would be to forcefully denounce said policies and unambiguously break from the forces in the party that are pushing these policies—“the Groups” and their allies that insist being a Democrat is inseparable from being a progressive as they define it. But this is hard because it entails conflict and conflict with the Groups is something Democrats have been determined to avoid.

This is foolish, not least because the theory upon which this deference was based—that the Groups actually represented groups of voters—was incorrect. As Ezra Klein, generally a loyal liberal Democrat, has been compelled to admit:

[I]t’s very important to look at the power of this nonprofit complex in the Democratic Party. Because part of what that power has been based on…is a sense that the way to understand what …collections of voters want…is by listening to what the groups purporting to represent them want…

“[I]n the case of nonwhite voters, it proved really, really deceptive. So the groups that were, in a sense, representing Hispanic voters within the Democratic coalition — they were part of what was leading Democrats, many of them in 2020, to say they were going to decriminalize border crossing, unauthorized border crossing. But that wasn’t what Hispanic voters wanted.

It was many of the groups representing Black Americans that pushed the Democratic Party toward “Defund the Police” rhetoric…But that was never popular, and certainly is not now popular, among Black Americans.

And so there’s been this dynamic where you have these groups that are claiming to speak for very, very wide swaths of the electorate and persuading Democrats of things that those parts of the electorate simply don’t believe. In the room where the Democrats are sort of making these decisions, you have staffers from these groups, and they’re often maybe the only Black person in the room or maybe the only Hispanic person in the room, so they’re granted a degree of deference.

But it has proved to be a misleading form of politics. Because these aren’t mass-membership groups. And this is a place where I think the Democratic theory, political theory, has just actually and truly failed. The Democratic Party moved into a position of thinking it was doing more than it ever had before to win over the allegiance of this multicultural electorate.

And it has lost huge amounts of support among that very same multicultural electorate. Because the people it was listening to as its guide to how to win them over were nonrepresentative.

In short, it was a catastrophic error which should now be rectified. And that will inevitably entail conflict. Adam Jentleson put the issue squarely in a recent New York Times op-ed:

Democrats cannot [achieve electoral dominance] as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power…Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate…

[W]hen Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test…

The same year, a coalition of groups including the Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party demanded that all Democrats running for president embrace decriminalizing border crossings. When candidates were asked at a debate if they would do so, every candidate on the stage that night raised a hand (except Michael Bennet). Groups like Justice Democrats pushed Democrats to defund the police and abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Positions taken a few years ago are fair game in campaigns, and by feeding into Republican attacks these efforts helped Mr. Trump and left the people and causes they claim to fight for under threat.

In other words, if anyone was being thrown under the bus, it was the very voter groups the Groups purported to represent! It’s high time for Democrats to turn the tables and throw the Groups under the bus. It’s the road back to the working class if the Democrats care to take it. Otherwise, they’ll be stuck being America’s educated, affluent party relying on their redoubts in blue metropolitan areas for political support. That would be a sad fate indeed for America’s historic party of the working class.