Working-class voters are swinging right. But can Dutton win the battle for the battlers?

J.D. Vance – a powerful symbol of white working-class America – has been nominated as the vice president of Donald Trump’s campaign. At the same time, Coalition leader Peter Dutton edged ahead of Anthony Albanese as preferred prime minister in the Resolve opinion poll. These events are part of a trend that has swept liberal democracies around the world, in which working-class voters are turning increasingly to conservative parties.

Australia’s political system, with compulsory, preferential voting, ensures that a local Trump or Marine Le Pen are unlikely to enter the Lodge. But if Australian working-class voters are increasingly leaning right, what could happen?

Campaigning for workers’ votes: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his nomination for vice president, Senator J.D. Vance.Credit: AP

The Australian National University has been conducting the most comprehensive study of voters’ attitudes, the Australian Election Study, since 1987. The latest one showed that 38 per cent of the working class voted Labor in 2022, down from 60 per cent in 1987. (Class was self-described.) Some of those votes have gone to the Greens. But the Coalition sees this as a disaffected constituency which is now up for grabs. Cue more visuals of Peter Dutton, in reality a millionaire property owner, in hi-vis and a hard hat.

As Australian society becomes more polarised, it is harder to discuss the issue of class. With academics, journalists and politicians becoming increasingly university educated and middle-class, judgment and criticism are edging out objective analysis. A judgmental, left-elite perspective might ask: Why do working-class people vote against their own interests? Don’t they know what’s good for them?

This is unhelpful, especially as Labor – if it doesn’t want to find itself in permanent minority government – needs to find a way to win back those votes. And with an election due by next May, time is running out. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles is popular and effective, but the Geelong Grammar, Melbourne University educated former lawyer is not going to connect with a group of laid-off coal miners in the way J.D. Vance can.

Even the notoriously class-conscious English have caught on, with the news this month that 92 per cent of new Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s cabinet was educated at comprehensive (state) schools. This is in stark contrast to the cabinets of Conservative leaders Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, in which just one in five ministers was educated in the state system.

Class is a vexed topic in Australia. We like to think we have an egalitarian society. US researchers tend to define class in terms of education – people with four-year college degrees are middle-class. Here, it is more about having an income above $68,000, the median annual wage. And yet education does sway Australian voting patterns. In fact, the more education you have, the more likely you are to vote for the progressive parties, Labor and the Greens.

Of course, less education doesn’t necessarily mean lower incomes. I have two degrees, but the plumber who came to fix my hot water system earns way more money than I do and is clearly much more useful. My core skills, largely consisting of knowing the difference between “lay” and “lie” (and telling you about it), are rapidly becoming obsolete.

American researchers have been mapping this change for some time. Journalist and author Batya Ungar-Sargon spent a year living and working in working-class communities to write her new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. In it, she says the “rules about left and right and who represents the working class are up for grabs. 2016 was a seismic political realignment where working-class voters abandoned the Democrats and voted for Trump.” When Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 and well-paid, unionised manufacturing jobs went to China and Mexico, American working-class votes started this rightward trend.

The same shift has been happening here. Ever since both sides of politics started to embrace neoliberalism, cutting tariffs and closing down manufacturing industries (remember when we made cars?), working-class voters have started to feel politically homeless. According to the Poll Bludger’s William Bowe, class no longer defines voter choice in the way it used to. The parties were once structured around a 20th century social class divide, he says, but no longer.

While centre-left parties have lost working-class votes, they’ve been saved by professional and middle-class women who are increasingly voting progressively, according to Macquarie University’s chair of sociology, Shaun Wilson. “But this has forced the Coalition to find new constituencies,” Wilson says.

Hence, the focus by John Howard on his “battlers” and Scott Morrison on “ScoMo’s tradies”. Howard was also the one who identified that the conservative parties could chase the Catholic vote, Wilson says.

One of the best books on the topic is US sociologist Joan Williams’ White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness. She wrote it after the 2016 election to highlight the class comprehension gap “that is allowing the US (and Europe) to drift towards authoritarian nationalism”.

The hidden injuries of class have led to such polarised politics that democracy is threatened, Williams says. If our decision-makers don’t try to understand the concerns of the working class, they’ll keep making the same mistakes, with potentially serious consequences – as many countries in Western Europe are finding out.

In the past, J.D. Vance has expressed similar concerns. In 2017, following publication of his best-selling Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, he told Vogue: “Whether I’m speaking to conservative or liberal audiences, I don’t find that people are close-minded about the things I say. I’m still optimistic that we can bridge a divide between these various bubbles. But I do think that it requires a little bit of effort.”

Australia has its own divide. Its closest political story to Vance’s ascension is perhaps that of our prime minister, Anthony Albanese, raised in social housing by his single mother. But nor did Peter Dutton come from a wealthy background, as such. He and his builder father made their own money in property development. So, which leader will appeal most to Australia’s working-class voters? And which is best equipped to bridge Australia’s class divide? While we are aiming for gender and racial diversity in our elected representatives, let’s throw in another factor – class. It would be good for the country.

Margot Saville is The Sydney Morning Herald’s deputy letters editor and the author of The Teal Revolution.

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