Introduction
WILL MARSHALL, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER OF PPI
President-elect Donald Trump believes Americans have given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate to govern.” Like so much of what he says, this claim blurs the line between hyperbole and fantasy. His Nov. 5 victory was solid, but no landslide.
Trump won just under half the popular vote, only 1.6% more than Vice President Kamala Harris received. With a public disapproval rating of 50%, he is the least popular presidential winner in modern times.
It’s certainly possible to look at Trump’s return to power as reflecting the new norm in U.S. elections of small and unstable majorities. Since Barack Obama’s departure, U.S. voters have tossed out the incumbents in one “change” election after another.
But such an interpretation might tempt Democrats, who were shut out of power in Congress as well as the White House, to do little but wait for their chance two and four years hence. That would be a colossal mistake.
Instead, Democrats must face a hard truth: their coalition is inexorably shrinking as non-college voters continue to defect. It’s time for honest answers to three vexing questions:
How did they lose again to the deeply flawed Trump? Does their loss signal a U.S. political realignment? And why are Democrats — and indeed center-left parties across Europe — alienating the working-class voters they once championed?
The sweep of Trump’s victory — both demographically and geographically — came as a shock. He shaved his losing margins in Democratic regions and made large gains among Democratic-leaning voter groups — young voters, Blacks, and especially Latinos.
Despite spending a half-billion dollars more than Trump, Harris won not one of the seven battleground states. In the brief time allotted her (107 days), she ran a competent campaign but could not avoid being sucked into the undertow of President Biden’s unpopularity.
Tactics aside, however, the defeat highlighted Democrats’ strategic political failure under Biden-Harris to stop hemorrhaging working-class voters.
Biden talked incessantly about fighting for working people, but his policies did not align with their interests.
Instead, he and his advisors fell victim to the fallacy of “deliverism” — the notion that passing big, multitrillion-dollar bills in Washington would impress working families and show them the “system” at last was working for them.
Instead, they got blindsided by inflation. Forty percent of these voters identified the high cost of living as their top concern. Economists differ as to its causes, but working-class voters link inflation to high government spending.
Immigration ranked second for these voters. Here again, they blamed the Biden administration for liberalizing asylum policy and presiding over a surge of over 7 million illegal migrants over the past four years. In fact, on almost all the key issues except for abortion, non-college voters expressed far higher levels of trust in Republicans than Democrats. They also were more likely to say Democrats had moved too far to the left than Republicans had to the right.
The aftershocks of Trump’s victory and U.S. voters’ rightward shift are felt across the Atlantic. Like his populist-right counterparts in Europe, Trump is riding a working-class revolt against governing elites. First confined to white Americans without college degrees, it’s now spreading to the non-white working class.
In fact, social class, now defined chiefly by education level, is replacing race and ethnicity as America’s deepest political fault line.
Since the high-water mark of Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats have experienced a 30-point drop in non-white working-class support. That’s shattered a cherished progressive myth that “voters of color” think and vote alike along reliably Democratic lines. Harris improved on Biden’s 2020 performance with only one group — white college graduates. Yet that only underscored the strange inversion of America’s partisan loyalties: Democrats have become the party of the highly educated and professionals, while Republicans represent a multiethnic working class.
For the first time in memory, Harris won Americans making more than $100,000, while Trump won those making less than $50,000.The blue-collar exodus from the Democratic Party has been decades in the making. It won’t be fixed by minor tweaks. Democrats need to make dramatic course correction to head off a U.S. political realignment around a new populist right majority.
Voters without college degrees constitute roughly two-thirds of the U.S. electorate. Mathematically, there’s no way to build durable governing majorities with college-educated voters alone.
Morally, if Democrats hope to resume their historical role as the “party of the people,” they’ll need to reflect the mainstream values of middle-class America rather than the rarefied “luxury beliefs” of upper-class elites.
According to a post-election analysis by More in Common, Americans overwhelmingly believe that Democrats care more about advancing progressive social causes than the economic interests of average working families.
Asked to describe the party’s highest priorities, they picked “LGBT/transgender policy” second, after abortion. Actually, Democrats, like all other voter groups, picked the cost of living first, followed by health care and abortion. Transgender issues were 13th on their priority list.
Why are public perceptions so skewed? A big reason is that U.S. political discourse is mainly driven by progressive activists and right-wing populists. This leads members of both parties to assume the other party holds more extreme views that it actually does.
The outsized influence of progressive activists associates Democrats with a raft of unpopular positions on race/gender, immigration, crime and education. Trump exploited that to devastating effect against Harris.
The most lethal attack ad of the presidential campaign was a clip from a 2019 interview in which Harris explains her support for publicly-funded sex change surgery for prisoners, including detained immigrants. The kicker: “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.”
After watching the ad, 2.7% of voters shifted to Trump. That’s a stunning result. And even if most Democrats hold more moderate views on culturally fraught issues, they pay the opportunity costs that come with the progressive left’s fixation on race, gender, police brutality, fossil abolitionism and other “social justice” issues. The amount of time Democrats spend talking about such issues diverts their focus from the kitchen table struggles of working-class families.
It is the kitchen table struggles of working-class families that now need to become the fixation for Democrats. PPI has been working with Deborah Mattinson, most recently director of strategy to U.K. Labour leader and now Prime Minister Keir Starmer, to understand how those crucial voters experienced the U.S. election. In this report, PPI presents insight and analysis of the election, and draws on our learning from the center-left around the world to set out the way ahead for Democrats.
Only by re-connecting with the working-class Americans we have lost, and providing them with a credible alternative for change, can we hope to win the next Presidential election. That work has to start now.
