The White Working Class Is Quiet Quitting Trump |
The White Working Class Is Quiet Quitting Trump
Alas, that doesn’t necessarily mean Democrats are winning them back.
Bill Clinton was the last Democratic presidential candidate to win the white working class (conventionally defined as “white non-college voters,” i.e., white voters who lack a college degree). In 1992, Clinton won 55 percent of this cohort, and in 1996 he won 53 percent. No Democratic presidential candidate has won the white working class since, even though it was once a core Democratic constituency. A lot of people say the reason is that Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Act into law and normalized trade relations with China, thereby beggaring American factory workers.
One of these people appears to be Robert Reich, who by his own admission didn’t achieve all that much for working people as Clinton’s Labor secretary from 1993 to 1997. “The Democratic party … abandoned the working class,” Reich told the journalist Kara Swisher last summer. “To some extent I allowed it to happen. I didn’t fight as hard as I should’ve fought. Deregulating finance and allowing global trade to dominate the way it did and taking our eyes off monopolization and not really encouraging unionization as much as we should have. I mean, all of these ways contributed to disempowering millions of people in this country and ultimately helped lead to Donald Trump.”
To say the Democrats lost the white working class after 1996 is not to say the Democrats lost the entire working class. A lot of people conflate these two groups, but the working class, which was overwhelmingly white when its political influence stood at its peak in the mid-20th century, is a lot less white now. And although the working class stopped voting reliably Democratic after the 1960s, no Democrat in the last century ever got himself elected president without winning the working-class vote—with one exception.
The exception was Joe Biden in 2020. It’s a great irony, since Biden was the most pro-labor........