This year’s presidential election hinged on a few hundred thousand voters across a handful of key swing states, and no one can claim to have known the outcome in advance. Yet the tectonic shift of working-class voters away from Democrats was all too predictable. In fact, the Harris campaign seemed deliberately designed to accelerate trends in working-class dealignment.
The vice president’s bid was premised on the risky bet that catering to moderate, college-educated voters would win more support than it would lose in working-class defections. That gamble backfired massively. Instead of expanding the Democratic coalition to bring in a larger share of the working-class vote in critical swing states where working-class voters make up a large majority of the electorate, Kamala Harris saw her only gains among college-educated white voters, and for the first time, Democrats received a higher share of votes from high- compared to low-income Americans.
Battle lines have already been drawn between factions of the Democratic coalition to explain Harris’s loss. On the one hand, some have admonished Democrats for failing to connect with the real economic anxieties and sense of cultural alienation from the Democratic Party felt by many working-class voters. This was forcefully expressed by Bernie Sanders, who railed that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
Similar critiques were proffered by Thomas Frank, Senator Chris Murphy, and even New York Times columnist David Brooks, who conceded that
I’m a moderate who really did not like the policies that Bernie Sanders proposes. And yet . . . it could be that in order to win…
Auteur: Milan Loewer
