The myth of the ‘working class' voter

As the 2024 presidential race enters its final week, media coverage has increasingly focused on the candidates’ efforts to win over a supposedly crucial swing group: working-class voters.

For example, even though Vice President Harris talks incessantly about her “middle-class” roots, Michigan Democrats fear she isn’t doing enough to appeal to working-class voters. They aren’t alone. “If Harris loses,” pollster Frank Luntz reasons, “it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people.” A viral jeremiad in The New Yorker even warns that if Harris fails to connect with blue-collar workers, the Democrats will risk becoming a mouthpiece for “coastal elites and upscale professionals.”

We think these concerns reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of America’s electorate. Most conversations about the “working class” rely on disparate definitions of this group — the lack of a four-year college degree, union membership, a blue-collar or manufacturing job. Although each of these criteria represents a reasonable demarcation of the working class, the problem with using them interchangeably is that they refer to distinct groups of voters who face different challenges and even have conflicting interests.

The best available data on the structure of the American workforce come from the government’s Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly poll used to calculate the unemployment rate. The CPS is informative because it includes a variety of questions that identify the characteristics of the groups commonly called “working class.” Yet the CPS paints a far different picture of America from the one pundits and election prognosticators describe.

Americans who hold college degrees, for example, are 20 percent more likely to be union members than workers who only have a high school diploma. Surprisingly, unionization is also 40 percent higher in industries outside of manufacturing. One reason is that nearly half of Americans who work in a union job are government employees — think teachers and bureaucratic paper pushers, not construction and factory workers. What’s more, the military now employs more non-college-bound youth than does the manufacturing sector.

Meanwhile, among people employed in occupations the government characterizes as “blue collar,” fewer than 15 percent are unionized. And nearly as many Americans with a high school diploma work in a “white collar” job as the share with a “blue collar” position. In manufacturing, fully 36 percent of employees have a college degree, more than the number of manufacturing workers with only a high school diploma or GED.

Other polling confirms that the economic status and policy preferences of the working class often elide our intuition. According to the 2020 Cooperative Election Survey, the average union member is more likely to own stock and carry student loans than the rest of the population. Support for tariffs on steel imports is also no higher among union members than everyone else.

Consider the case of the United Auto Workers, historically a political juggernaut in Democratic politics. Given the auto industry’s heavy presence in Michigan, it might seem obvious that presidential candidates would compete for UAW support. Yet the union has only about 125,000 members in the state — and that includes not just auto workers but also Michigan government employees and freelance writers. Nationally, almost a third of UAW members work in higher education.

The nearly 50,000 UAW members employed at the University of California alone — mostly graduate students and postdoctoral researchers — are some of the most militant, nearly shutting down the university last year in an illegal strike over efforts by campus leaders to rein in disruptive pro-Palestinian protests. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which presidential candidates seeking the UAW endorsement will don kufiyas instead of work boots and make appearances at university encampments instead of factory picket lines.

There are several ways in which distorted narratives about working-class voters impoverish our understanding of American politics. First, they can oversimplify important trends. One of the biggest stories in recent years is the growing education polarization in the electorate — the so-called “diploma divide.” Another is the steady erosion of the Democrats’ historical advantage among union voters. Although many claim these are both symptoms of the working-class fleeing the Democratic Party, there is no longer a robust relationship between education and union membership. It is, therefore, just as plausible that these two trends are being driven not just by different voters but also by entirely different forces.

Second, the obsession with working-class voters can exaggerate the influence of some interest groups while overlooking efforts by politicians to curry favor with other power players. Much has been made of the Teamsters’ decision not to endorse a candidate in the 2024 election. However, the National Education Association represents twice as many members and it has come out strongly in support of the vice president.

It is perhaps not surprising then that the Democrats’ education platform is a teachers’ union wish list and that Harris has continued the party’s retreat from school choice policies that are popular with lower-income voters of color. Notably, while 80 percent of public-school teachers are white, nearly a third of Teamsters are Black or Hispanic.

Third, praising class-based appeals provides the candidates with populist cover to push otherwise incoherent economic policies in a cynical bid to win support from tiny, geographically concentrated vested interests at the expense of the broader public. Every presidential administration this century has used tariffs in an effort to protect jobs of Pennsylvania steelworkers, or at least claim credit for trying to do so.

But by increasing the cost of steel, a major input in U.S. auto manufacturing, the same policy destroyed jobs in Michigan, another swing state, and hurt the competitiveness of many other American companies that use steel in their manufacturing. It’s not at all obvious that putting the interest of Pennsylvania’s (relatively) small force of 2,000 steel workers ahead of American consumers helps the working-class overall.

The working-class voter seems has attained meme-level status in the 2024 election — the go-to archetype that we’re (falsely) told characterizes the pivotal dividing line in our politics. But we’re again letting a good story get ahead of the more complex reality. Like the mythical undecided voters, soccer moms, NASCAR dads and rainbow “people-of-color” coalition that promised to produce an “emerging majority” in previous elections, the talk about “working-class” voters will likely prove only the latest short-lived political craze.

Michael Hartney is the Bruni Family Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and an associate professor of political science at Boston College. Vladimir Kogan is a professor of political science at the Ohio State University.