US presidential election: Contest for workers’ votes may end up a matter of class

If Kamala Harris loses the election to Donald Trump it will fundamentally be because as the embodiment of this new class of Democrat politician, she has failed to win the support of the American working class.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris greets supporters during a Get Out the Vote rally in Raleigh, North Carolina.

French economist Thomas Piketty coined the term Brahmin Left in his 2013 book Capital in the 21st Century, to describe the growing tendency of modern left-wing parties to overflow with bureaucrats, academics and corporate elites who have little in common, culturally or economically, with the working-class people they say they represent.

Brahmins, a tiny single-digit percentage of India’s population, have long been the most prestigious and highest caste in the world’s largest democracy, disproportionately sustaining its intellectual class.

Kamala Harris on the US presidential campaign trail has repeatedly said she is middle class, but maybe she protests too much. It turns out her mother, a highly educated scientist who migrated from India to the US ahead of her early death in 2009, was a Brahmin.

Her estranged father had an upbringing most Americans wouldn’t find normal, either. Donald Harris grew up in a family that owned multiple businesses, including a supermarket, in his native Jamaica and eventually became the first black economics professor at Stanford University, one of the world’s most prestigious.

If Harris loses the election next week to Donald Trump it will fundamentally be because as the embodiment of this new class of Democrat politician – wealthy, highly educated, racially diverse – she has failed to win the support of the American working (non-university-educated) class, which still makes up the bulk of the voting public.

The loss of support has been staggering, laid out by American political scientist Ruy Teixeira in his latest online essay on The Liberal Patriot. In 2020 Trump won working-class voters by a margin of four percentage points, and lost voters with university degrees by a whopping 18 percentage points, in the election against Joe Biden.

The latest New York Times/Siena poll, one of the most reputable, points to Trump winning the working class by 13 points this time but losing the university-educated vote by 21 percentage points. The exodus of intellectuals towards the Democrats, and working men and women towards the Republicans, underscores the idea the two major parties are flipping, as lower-income voters turn to Republicans and higher-income voters opt for Democrats.

These statistics matter hugely because working class or non-university-educated voters make up an even bigger share of the electorate in the seven big swing states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – than they do in the nation on average. Currently, Trump is ahead of Harris in five of the seven states by a slim margin, according to the polling averages compiled by RealClearPolitics.

In light of this it’s not surprising one of the biggest and most diverse unions in the US, the Teamsters, has declined for the first time to endorse the Democratic Party candidate given such strong support for Trump among its 1.3 million-plus membership.

More worrying for Democrats is the large loss of support among non-white, working-class voters, a constituency that traditionally the party had won by overwhelming majorities.

According once again to the Times poll, Harris is ahead by 26 percentage points among this group, but that’s drastically down from the 49 percentage point advantage Biden enjoyed when he was running, and the extraordinary 67 percentage point lead in 2012 when Barack Obama was running.

Trump has dramatically recast political support in the US.

Democrats’ attempts to reinforce their support among black voters, who traditionally have voted Democrat in overwhelming numbers, appear to be backfiring, especially among black men.

Last month Harris introduced an “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men” to stop the haemorrhaging, which included legalisation of marijuana as one of the core aims of a Harris administration.

Last month former president Obama suggested latent sexism among black men could explain the jump in support for Trump to as high as 20 per cent according to some polls (around double the support from previous elections). “Y’all know some of those brothers,” Obama said, a comment that may well have appeared condescending.

Democrats’ leading issue, without doubt, has been the alleged assault on women’s rights, specifically in relation to new curbs on abortion in at least 14 states, in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade in mid-2022. Harris has successfully blamed the crackdown on Trump for his conservative Supreme Court justice choices when president.

But men in general have been gravitating to Trump more than women to Harris.

“In the Times data, Harris is carrying women by 12 points, actually slightly less than Biden’s 13-point advantage in 2020,” Teixeira writes. “But Trump is carrying men by 14 points”, eight points better than his six-point advantage in 2020.

Democrats’ hyper-focus on trans and LGBTQ rights and abortion may well have alienated lower-income, culturally conservative, Catholic voters.

Of course, none of this is to say that Trump will certainly win next week: Democrats remain ahead among groups that have a higher propensity to vote: the university-educated and suburban voters.

But it’s clear the patchwork of constituencies on which Democrats traditionally relied to win US presidential elections has been falling apart. To be sure, they still have the bulk of the mainstream media, which no fair-minded person could deny favours a Harris victory, but that may not be enough this time.

Interestingly, the over-65s, baby boomers, the group that consumes by far the most mainstream news in the US, supports Harris in net terms by a small margin, the opposite of what might be expected in an Australian election, say, where older voters tend to vote for the Coalition.

The truth is, economic circumstances for working-class people have deteriorated so much during the Biden-Harris administration, following a near 20 per cent increase in consumer prices and even greater increases in housing costs and interest rates, that appeals for votes based on virtue signalling and emotion haven’t had their usual cut-through.

Even if the outrage over a joke by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York this week, about Puerto Rico being a “pile of garbage”, convinces a few Hispanic Americans to cast their ballot for Harris, the overall trend among that large, fast-growing and traditionally Democrat-supporting group has been towards Trump.

Democrats’ support for an aggressive foreign policy hasn’t helped them either. Fighting foreign wars in the name of freedom has become notably less popular among lower-income Americans, who tend to do the fighting and dying, given the poor record of US interventions across the past 25 years. If Harris loses next week the party will face a great reckoning.

Trump, a billionaire, is of course far richer than Harris and would appear to most to be upper class. But from a cultural standpoint he’s not necessarily as elite. Trump’s father, unlike Harris’s, never went to university, performed menial jobs as a young man, despite later becoming very successful in business. Similarly, his mother was a Scottish immigrant to the US of little note who became a housewife.

There’s no question his background has enabled the Republican leader to resonate with Americans more easily than “middle-class” Harris.