Bill Clinton was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win the white working class (conventionally defined as “white non-college voters,” i.e., white voters who lack a college degree). In 1992, Clinton won 55 percent of this cohort, and in 1996 he won 53 percent. No Democratic presidential candidate has won the white working class since, even though it was once a core Democratic constituency. A lot of people say the reason is that Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Act into law and normalized trade relations with China, thereby beggaring American factory workers.
One of these people appears to be Robert Reich, who by his own admission didn’t achieve all that much for working people as Clinton’s Labor secretary from 1993 to 1997. “The Democratic party … abandoned the working class,” Reich told the journalist Kara Swisher last summer. “To some extent I allowed it to happen. I didn’t fight as hard as I should’ve fought. Deregulating finance and allowing global trade to dominate the way it did and taking our eyes off monopolization and not really encouraging unionization as much as we should have. I mean, all of these ways contributed to disempowering millions of people in this country and ultimately helped lead to Donald Trump.”
To say the Democrats lost the white working class after 1996 is not to say the Democrats lost the entire working class. A lot of people conflate these two groups, but the working class, which was overwhelmingly white when its political influence stood at its peak in the mid-20th century, is a lot less white now. And although the working class stopped voting reliably Democratic after the 1960s, no Democrat in the last century ever got himself elected president without winning the working-class vote—with one exception.
The exception was Joe Biden in 2020. It’s a great irony, since Biden was the most pro-labor president since Harry Truman and had a strong affinity for working class people. Even so, Biden won the 2020 election while losing the working class–which is to say, the overall multi-ethnic working class—to Trump, 47 to 51. My boss, TNR editor Michael Tomasky, has concluded from this that Democrats can win in 2028 with less than a working-class plurality. In Tomasky’s view, “all a future Democrat needs to do” is match Biden or gain a point or two more. But I think Biden’s 2020 victory without a working-class plurality was a fluke, and that Democrats must keep chasing working-class majorities. Working-class voters were, after all, 57 percent of the electorate in 2024 (when Kamala Harris lost them to Trump, 43-56 percent). To win the most votes you tend to need the biggest constituencies.
Winning back Latinos and Blacks who drifted to Trump in 2024 shouldn’t be that hard. In October Axios reported Blacks (84 percent) and Latinos (70 percent) to be the two groups most dissatisfied with the country’s direction under Trump, and in January the BBC reported that Latino support for Trump had dropped from 49 percent at the start of his presidency to 38 percent. And that was before the Iran war sent oil prices through the roof.
A survey this month by Jared Abbott of the Center for Working Class Politics and Joan C. Williams, emeritus law professor at University of California San Francisco, found that among those who voted for Trump in 2024, 45 percent of Black working class voters and 28 percent of Latino working class voters said they won’t vote Republican in 2028. “Wavering rates are highest,” they wrote in Jacobin, “where race and class intersect: Low-income, noncollege black and Latino voters — the very people whose shift toward Trump was most celebrated by Republicans — are the most likely to leave.” In last year’s Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, nonwhite working class voters drove Democratic victories. The conventional wisdom going into election night was that Mikie Sherrill was struggling to close the deal with New Jersey voters; she ended up winning handily, and Latino voters were a big reason why.
Winning back working-class white voters is of course, a much taller order But Trump is making that easier, too, with every passing day. According to G. Eliott Morris, a former data analytics guy at The Economist and Five Thirty-Eight, low-income white voters favored Trump by 22 points in 2024. Now Trump’s 4 points underwater with them—a 26-point swing. Middle-income white voters have swung 14 points away from Trump; they favored him by 16 points in 2024 but today favor him only by 2 points.
A Marist poll last month told the same story. Fully 49 percent of white working-class respondents said they disapproved of the job Trump’s doing (46 percent approved). Out of the 49 percent who disapproved, 42 percent said they “strongly” disapproved.
It’s not hard to see why this is happening. As the Center for American Progress noted Tuesday, during the 10 months since Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs (subsequently ruled illegal by the Supreme Court) the United States lost 89,000 manufacturing jobs—after gaining 775,000 under President Joe Biden. Granted, Biden’s gain was skewed by the Covid crisis from which the United States was recovering—but that crisis was worsened by Trump’s gross mismanagement of it, a factor on which voters for some reason chose not to dwell on in 2024. Manufacturing investment is in free fall because of Trump’s infantile cancellation of tax credits and grants under Biden’s CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act. And the tariffs themselves amounted to roughly a $1000 tax hike in 2025, according to the nonprofit Tax Foundation. A report issued last week by Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee said they’ll amount to a $2500 tax next year.
Whether Democrats can seize the advantage remains an open question. A September report by the Center for Working Class Politics by Abbott, Les Leopold, and Todd Vachon found that in the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, “the Democratic label carries a clear electoral penalty.” Democratic candidates delivering an economic populist message performed worse (by about 8 percentage points) than independent candidates who deliver the same message. The only group among whom the gap disappeared was union members—but even there, Democrats performed no better than independents. Among the complaints the study noted was that Democrats lacked sufficient courage to stand up to Republicans. Dissatisfaction with “wokeness” registered among “a significant minority,” but economic grievances weighed more heavily. “The dominant narrative is structural,” the report said. “The party doesn’t deliver.” Ouch.
It’s starting to dawn on the working class—and even the white working class— that Trump sold them a bill of goods. “No talking, no faces, no nothing,” a fictional middle American mom played by Ashley Padilla urged her wised-up children in a Saturday Night Live skit widely shared last month on social media. “I may have changed my mind about Trump,” she continued haltingly. “I feel now … like he might be … bad for our country.”
But that doesn’t automatically mean people like the SNL mom will pull the lever for Democrats in the 2026 midterms or in the 2028 presidential election. There’s still a lot of ground to regain. I laid out some suggestions before the 2024 election (here and here). Nobody listened, least of all Kamala Harris. More recently, Tomasky proposed some excellent ideas to win back the working class. The good news is Trump is losing. The bad news is that doesn’t automatically translate into Democratic victories.
