Trump’s strength with non-college-educated voters is sinking progressives.
Donald Trump may be a billionaire, but he’s managed to get millions of working-class Americans to vote for him. Unless Democrats can bring more of these voters back to their side, they risk losing national politics to the Right for the foreseeable future.
As the first table shows, working-class voters (those without a four-year college degree) made up the majority of 2020 voters in each of the five key swing states, with working-class whites alone making up an outright majority in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Next, the table reports the change in vote share between 2016 and 2020 for the working class as a whole and among working-class whites only. Joe Biden lost working-class support in three of the five states — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and made up ground among working-class voters in Arizona and Georgia.
Finally, the last two rows compare the changes in working-class support for Democratic presidential candidates between 2016 and 2020 to Biden’s 2020 margins of victory in each state. In other words, were the changes large enough to explain Biden’s wins in those states? The numbers in red mark where changes in voting patterns were sufficient to account for the difference between winning and losing, as was the case in Arizona and Georgia. In these two states, Biden’s improvement relative to Clinton among working-class voters amounted to 2.3 and 8.5 times his margin of victory. Biden’s gains among working-class voters in Arizona and Georgia, states with comparatively large nonwhite working-class populations, were not driven by working-class voters of color alone. Indeed, changes among working-class white voters were 3.6 and 2.5 times as large as…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Jared Abbott
