Workers for Trump?

On the U.S.’s Labor Day weekend, traditionally considered the end of the summer and the beginning of the most important stretch of U.S. national political campaigns, a lot of talk about workers and labor fills the air. 2024 was no exception, with such talk coming from two directions.

From the Democratic Party-aligned side of the U.S. political system come the promises of policies to help working people “not just to survive, but to get ahead.” Although Vice President Kamala Harris and most Democratic politicians say they are campaigning for the “middle class,” their labor union surrogates aren’t so constrained. After calling out former president Trump as “a scab,” UAW President Shawn Fain called Harris “a fighter for the working class” in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in August.

From the GOP/conservative side of the U.S. political system comes a different claim: the Republican Party is now the “party of the working class.” How so? That’s due to opinion polls and election day exit polls that show Trump and the Republicans winning almost two-thirds of voters who do not hold a bachelor’s degree. This is media-standard definition of “working class” in the U.S.

From a socialist point of view, it’s more accurate to say that neither major party—both capitalist parties—are “working class” parties by any stretch of the imagination.That’s true even though most people who vote for both are, by virtue of their occupations, non-supervisory workers. But in neither party are the interests of working-class people upheld, even though more labor unions (with a few notable exceptions) support the Democrats and work to get out the vote for them.

But let’s start where the bulk of media, and much liberal commentary, start: that is, with the Republican claims that Trump’s support rests on a foundation of a “left-behind” working class that sees the Democrats as representatives of a “woke” coastal elite that disdains them.

The first point to make is that we certainly aren’t talking about the U.S. working class in general. The U.S. working class is multiracial and disproportionately made up of people of color. It includes both men and women, people with different gender identities, of different religions (and increasingly no religion). It is made up of different age groups.

So, let’s start by narrowing the focus to white members of that working class. But we immediately run into more definitional problems. For pundits and scholars alike, the most common definition of the “white working class” is whites who didn’t obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher. While education level is certainly related to the types of jobs people do, it’s far easier to capture education level than occupation on surveys. By this definition, “working class whites” make up about 44 percent of the 18-and-over U.S. population.

There are many problems with equating educational level with class. Most obviously, it doesn’t get at what a Marxist would consider the baseline for determining someone’s class: their job and its relationship to capital. Moreover, as Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels wrote in a critique of Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? the non-college educated population in the U.S. mirrors the income distribution of the population.

But there are other more obvious problems related to the two points above. The most significant is that excluding people with bachelor’s or higher degrees excludes workers like most nurses and other health care workers and most K-12 educators. Workers in the education and health sectors have been among the most active in taking collective action in recent years. Secondly, if the non-college educated workforce mirrors the income distribution of the population, above-median incomes are quite likely to be associated with small business owners and lower-level supervisors.

The non-college-degreed part of the population also overlaps more heavily with older people, who tend to be more culturally traditional. To a Beltway pundit, though, all white working-class people—and increasingly, Latinos and African American non-college men—are easily pigeonholed into the conservative “base,” with all the NASCAR-following, misogynist, gun-toting, Fox News-watching stereotypes that image implies. But when you look beyond the caricature, you find a much more varied reality.

Even among white voters, education isn’t an ironclad dividing line, especially when income (an insufficient, but somewhat more direct, proxy for class) is considered. Lower income voters of all races are still more likely to vote for Democrats, despite the party’s well-documented preference to rely on middle-class suburbanites.

Because of this, political operatives have always recognized that working-class opinion is divided. In fact, the AFL-CIO’s canvassing arm identifies three groups of workers: reactionaries/conservatives who might be considered part of the Trump base, liberals (often active union members) who are Democratic Party supporters, and the rest whose politics are somewhere in between. Almost three of five voters for Democrats in the 2020 presidential election did not have bachelor’s degrees.

This focus on less-educated, lower-income parts of Trump’s base also obscures the fact that Trumpism finds a strong appeal among conservative middle- and upper-class sectors in the U.S. It’s not just the Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires who have made news with their endorsements of Trump, but it’s clear that a middle-class “gentry” provides some of his most fervent supporters. The occupational profile of the more than 1,000 arrests following the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol showed a high percentage of law enforcement, professionals, and small business owners among them.

If it’s true that the equation of Trump supporters = workers obscures more than it explains, does that mean that the Democrats are the working-class champions? In a word, no. Despite support from most union leaders, including UAW President Shawn Fain’s uncritical endorsement of VP Harris at the Democratic convention last month, the Democratic Party is still a neoliberal corporate party whose politics are closer to post-Second World War Christian Democracy than to social democracy.
Harris’s economic agenda, a vague call for building an “opportunity economy,” so far includes a grab bag of (no doubt poll-tested) policies: down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, tax credits for families with children, and a $50,000 tax deduction for start-up small businesses. It’s telling that the most generous of these is aimed at small business owners. During her September 10 debate with Trump, Harris hardly even mentioned health care beyond the boilerplate promise to protect the Affordable Care Act. And while defense of abortion rights is certainly a working-class issue, so is supporting the rights of immigrants, who are a crucial part of the U.S. working class. But both Biden and Harris have essentially conceded the issue of immigration (along with crime) to the Trumpist right. All of this does not add up to a robust working-class agenda.

As always, the Democrats hope that the fear of Trump and Project 2025 will be enough to hold their supporters in line. But the fact that Trump continues to lead among people who say that the economy is their main concern, and that concerns about inflation—which hits lower income people the hardest—is still top of mind, both work against the incumbent vice president.

Trump may have cornered the market on middle-class and working-class racists. But for the millions who are not ideologically committed and who are looking for some signal from the political establishment that it will address the real issues of their lives, Harris has proposed only the weakest tea. No wonder the “party of non-voters” continues to be overwhelmingly working-class, and that, despite Trump’s anti-working class agenda, the election remains too close to call.