Political scientist Alan Abramowitz says in his new paper about the white working class in America, “it’s not the economy, stupid.” I think we knew this but it’s good to see some empirical study into the phenomenon. Pace Karl Marx, “class” is not just an economic designation.
Key points:
— While the state of the economy was likely an important factor in the 2024 presidential election and other recent contests, discontent over economic conditions doesn’t really explain the movement of white working class voters to the Republican Party in the longer-term.
— Rather, ideological realignment was probably a larger driver of white working class voters, once the base of the Democratic Party decades ago, into the Republican column.
Racial and cultural issues better explain GOP dominance with white working class
[…]
The dramatic shift in the partisan alignment of white working class voters over the past several decades, and especially the overwhelming support of this voting bloc for Donald Trump, has led to considerable speculation about the reasons for the rise of white working class Republicanism. Much of this speculation has focused on changes in the U.S. economy that have had a detrimental impact on the economic security and standard of living of this group. Since the 1970s, according to this theory, the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. as a result of automation and competition from low-wage countries like China and Mexico has devastated many working class communities and led to growing disillusionment with the Democratic Party, whose leaders were seen as complicit in these changes. Donald Trump, with his focus on the grievances of those who felt left behind by changes in American society, was especially effective in appealing to these disillusioned white working class voters.
In this article, I examine the rise of white working class Republicanism in American politics. Contrary to much of the conventional wisdom, I argue that economic discontent has very little to do with this phenomenon. Instead, I argue that the growing attraction of white working class voters to the Republican Party is a result of the ideological realignment of the political parties over the past 50 years. The growing divide between the Democratic and Republican parties over economic, racial, and cultural issues has led to an ideological realignment within the electorate. Groups with relatively conservative policy preferences, including white voters without college degrees, have shifted their allegiances to the Republican Party while groups with relatively liberal policy preferences, including white college graduates, have shifted their allegiances to the Democratic Party. These findings have important implications for the future of electoral competition and for party strategies.
I know you know this. We’ve traveled down the “economic anxiety” road for years now trying to explain Trump’s appeal. It’s really about hostility and grievance toward “the other” and Trump is a master at stoking that hatred.
But that’s not to say the economy isn’t relevant. Trump’s salesmanship and good fortune gave him a strong economy from Obama that was in the final phase of a recovery from the hell that he’d inherited from George W. Bush. He was constrained from doing all the cockamamie plans he had in his mind by people around him but also the Republicans in congress who were not yet united in their worship of the Golden God Trump. In the first two years they spent all their capital on tax cuts and banning Obamacare and came very close to achieving both. He lost the House in the midterms and hadn’t yet figured out that he was untouchable and could literally do anything he chose by executive fiat and no one would stop him. And then there was COVID.
This time he won on the basis of a “vibe recession” basically a bad hangover from the pandemic in which people just didn’t feel good about anything. He promised to fix everything on day one, particularly the cost of living and it is highly probable that his margin of victory consisted of people who were voting on the basis of their pocketbooks and just wanted to throw the bums out. What he’s doing now is going to send shock waves through the entire country and even some MAGAs are going to be shaken up by it. So the economy does matter and it is often a sort of stand-in for general discontent.
But what Abramowitz says is clearly the reason for the permanent migration of much of the white working class to the Republican Party. It’s a very big group and it’s what makes it hard to get beyond the polarization that makes our politics so fraught and our elections so close. I keep hoping that over time, as people grow up with diversity in our culture being just a normal fact of life that this will smooth out. But the backlash to this transition from a traditional white dominant American culture to a modern multi-cultural one is fierce and it looks like we’re going to go back and forth between “woke” and “broke” for a while.