Trump and the Working Man

Is the 2024 election going to be the one where labor begins to recognize that the Democratic party is not its logical home? That question comes to mind with the news that startling numbers of working class Americans are moving into the Trump camp. A CNN analyst, Harry Enten, tweets that the 45th president “has more working class support than any GOP presidential candidate in a generation.” It could deliver him back to the White House.The realignment of the working class behind the 45th president is one of the storylines of this election. Mr. Enten discovers that Trump is “on track for the best performance among union voters in 40 years” and is up 31 points among Americans who have graduated from trade school. The former president is doing 17 points better among nonwhite voters without a college degree than he did in 2020. This is what a shift looks like in real time.In 2020, President Biden lost working class votes by eight points. Ms. Harris is losing among the group by 12 points. President Clinton won the votes of union households by 30 points in 1992, a group that Ms. Harris is carrying by only nine points. In 2012, President Obama carried the votes of the non-white working class by 67 points. Ms. Harris’s polling lead among that group is only a third as large. Those who work with their hands are voting with their feet.Then there is the news from the Teamsters. We like to say that Jimmy Hoffa’s Master Freight Agreement is one of the great documents in American history. For the first time since 1996, that union, which counts more than one million members, will not endorse a candidate for president. The president of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, addressed the Republican National Convention, but Democrats did not invite him to their jamboree. The reason why the Teamsters are not issuing an endorsement is because a survey of their members “showed no majority support for Vice President Harris.” This is a situation, though, where a tie goes to the Republican, President Trump, who garnered nearly 60 percent of the vote. Even the New Yorker laments that Donald Trump’s blue-collar support raises “questions about the Democratic Party’s identity and priorities.”The trend toward Trump underscores the potency of what we call the “Rome Strategy” after a speech the then-candidate gave in 2016 at Rome, New York. We called that address, which zeroed in on manufacturing losses upstate and the ruins of a hollowed out economy, the “template for his successful primary campaign and then his general election strategy.” It threatened to become a path not taken as Trump’s attention drifted elsewhere. We’d like to think that this issue is asserting itself in the runup now to November 5. Working class voters applaud Trump’s tough stance on Communist China and the border. It belies the claims by the Biden-Harris administration that their policies have helped working class voters. Blue collar voters get the link between, on the one hand, tax cuts and deregulation, and, on the other hand, jobs. Those who work for a living understand the treadmill of inflation.Much ink has been spilled over the renovations for which Trump has been the catalyst within the Republican party. We understand that not every one of them sits well with every GOP loyalist. The flocking to the party by working class voters of all races, though, is a movement to mark. It appears to be only accelerating. A final month of the campaign focused on those voters and their issues could put Trump back to work — as president.

Trump and the Working Man

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