We live in a working-class country. More people graduate college than ever before, but, among Americans aged 25 and over, the great majority (62 percent) still do not. These non–college graduates define, to demographers, America’s working class. The exit polls are still a little rough around the edges—they’ll need further weighting when the popular vote is fully tallied—but in Tuesday’s election, most voters (57 percent) were working class. Only 44 percent of them voted for Kamala Harris, against 54 percent who voted for Donald Trump.
That’s a lot worse than Joe Biden did in 2020. Biden won 47 percent of the working-class vote, against 51 percent who voted for Donald Trump. Over four years, the Democratic deficit among working-class voters more than doubled from four percentage points to 10 percentage points. Look no further for a reason why Donald Trump won.
Democrats don’t win presidential elections when they don’t win the working class. Going back 100 years, Democrats have never won the presidency without a working-class majority, the sole exception being Biden in 2020. I argued strenuously last spring that Biden’s 2020 victory was a fluke—that he benefited from Trump’s singularly chaotic and ineffective response to the Covid pandemic. Democrats, I wrote, could not win in 2024 without a working-class majority. I continued to argue this strenuously after Harris replaced Biden as the nominee, faulting Harris for tacking to Biden’s right on economic issues. Harris did manage to reduce her deficit with working-class voters from 18 percentage points in mid-September to 11 percentage points in mid-October. But her progress stopped there.
Late last month I hoped that voters aged 65 and older—a group that’s much more electorally significant than more-studied younger voters—might ride to Harris’s rescue. This cohort has voted Republican in every presidential election since 2000. But in 2020 Biden lost it by only three percentage points, 48–51. Preliminary exit polls show Harris winning it by a whisker, 50–49. Maybe we’ll see elderly voters become a reliable Democratic constituency again, as they were through the 1990s. But this year, older voters didn’t move decisively enough toward Harris to make up for her losses among the working class.
Please note that Harris’s problem was not white working-class voters. During the past half-century these voters have usually favored Republican presidential candidates, but Harris’s 34 percent share was only two percentage points worse than Biden’s 36 percent in 2020. Harris’s working-class deficit grew because of continuing leakage among non-white working-class voters, where Biden’s 46-point advantage in 2020 shrank to a 30-point advantage in 2024. These were mostly Latino and, to a lesser extent, African American men.
Harris held onto union households, but by only a 10-point margin (54–44) compared to Biden’s 16-point margin (56–40). If Harris hadn’t been so diffident about labor issues in her campaign, she might have done better. Harris was also hurt when three major unions—the Teamsters, the International Association of Firefighters, and the International Longshoremen’s Association—declined to endorse her (I think out of cowardice). Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the AFL-CIO who now runs a voter project called In Union, noted that Harris actually bested Biden with union households in Pennsylvania, where it really mattered. In 2020 Biden lost Pennsylvania’s union households, 49–50, whereas in 2024 Harris won them, 54–45. Unfortunately, that gain was not decisive, because union workers are only about 13 percent of all workers in Pennsylvania.
If Democrats are going to reconnect with working-class voters, reviving organized labor remains the best way to do so. That will prove difficult under an administration that will almost certainly be as hostile to labor as Trump’s first one was. Adding insult to injury, the substantial economic benefits of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and CHIPS and Science Act—well documented by Nicholas Lemann in last week’s New Yorker—will start to be felt in the next four years, allowing Trump to take credit for them. Trump promised to repeal the IRA, but with most of the money flowing to Republican districts, that isn’t likely to happen.
Second-best to reviving labor unions, which I grant you is a tall order, is to support the many organizations, most of them state-based, that are working at the ground level to reconnect working-class people to the Democratic Party and to policies from which working people benefit—policies that Republicans are working to dismantle. Here’s a sampling:
The Southern Economic Advancement Project
You will almost certainly get email pleas in the coming weeks to contribute to the Democratic Party. But the Democrats have all the money they need right now—Harris’s campaign raised a billion dollars. The small nonprofits listed above are underfunded, and they don’t get much publicity because the work they do isn’t terribly exciting. It is, however, vitally important—more so than ever before. If you feel that there’s nothing you can do today with your rage and bitter disappointment at Trump’s victory, you’re wrong. You can help a great deal—right now, today. Think of it as an investment in a future that doesn’t resemble this dismal moment.
