After Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, most sensible Democrats realized they had a problem. The party attracted significant support from the white working class. More than 60 percent of Americans over the age of 25 do not have a four-year college degree. It is very difficult to win national elections without them.
So in 2020, Democrats made a smart move. For the first time in 36 years, he nominated a presidential candidate without an Ivy League degree. Joe Biden won the White House and immediately promoted ambitious policies to help the working class.
The economic results have been impressive. During Biden’s term, the U.S. economy will create 10.8 million manufacturing and non-supervisory jobs, including about 800,000 jobs in manufacturing and 774,000 in construction. Wages are rising faster for those at the lower end of the wage bracket than for those at the higher end.
A study by economist Robert Pollin and others estimates that 61% of the jobs created by Biden’s infrastructure law would not require a college degree. The same is true for 58 percent of the jobs created by the Inflation Control Act and 44 percent of the jobs created by the CHIPS Act.
A Brookings Institution study found that starting in 2021, the new law will direct nearly $82 billion in strategic sector investments to job-strapped counties across the country. Biden’s policies have sparked private investment, creating jobs, manufacturing and productivity booms in many previously marginalized regions, benefiting hard-hit workers. By hollowing out industry.
But what was the political impact? Did these big spending programs increase working-class support for Democrats? Is the Democratic Party reclaiming its role as the party of the working class?
So far, unfortunately, the answer is a resounding “no.” Biden’s economic policies have done little to help Democrats politically. Indeed, the party continues to lose support among the working class. A recent NBC poll found that voters say they trust Donald Trump more than Biden to steer the economy, a 22-point difference, the largest in the NBC poll’s history dating back to 1992. , the biggest advantage any candidate has on this issue.
Part of the loss of support is occurring among some of the party’s historically most loyal supporters. A recent Gallup poll measured how many Americans support the Democratic and Republican parties. In at least three years, the Democratic Party’s lead among black Americans has shrunk by 19 points. Among Hispanics, the Democratic lead narrowed by 15 points.
The Gallup poll also shows that the educational attainment gap continues to widen. People with graduate degrees are increasingly turning to the Democratic Party. People without college degrees are increasingly Republican.
Franklin Roosevelt built a New Deal majority by using government to support workers. Biden tried to do the same. His policies worked economically, but not politically. what happened?
Indeed, over the past few decades, across Western democracies, we have experienced a seismic political realignment in which more educated voters have moved to the left and less educated voters have moved to the right. I’m in the middle of it. This realignment is not so much an economic issue as it is a cultural and identity issue.
College-educated voters tend to flock to large cities and live very different lives than non-college-educated voters. College-educated voters are also more socially liberal than non-college-educated voters, more likely to focus on cultural issues such as abortion and LGBTQ rights.
Matthew Goodwin, a political scientist who writes about the degree gap in Britain, calls his recent book “Values, Voices and Virtues.” He argues that educated and uneducated people have different values. The former is cosmopolitan and progressive, while the latter is traditionalist in terms of faith, family, and flag. He went on to say that because of their dominance in universities, the media, the arts, nonprofits, and bureaucracies, educated voices drown out less educated voices. Less educated voters feel unheard and unnoticed. Goodwin found that across the Western world, “workers and non-university students are consistently the most likely to support statements such as ‘The government doesn’t care what people like me think.'” writing.
Finally, less educated voters feel morally judged as socially backward. In his analysis of more than 65,000 people in 36 countries, Dutch scholar Jochem van Noort found that those outside the new elite were not only united by economic insecurity, but also by “feelings of misperception, viz. , they feel that they do not play a meaningful role in society and that they have a stigmatized identity.
British author David Goodhart gets right to the point. “For the past 20 years, it has often felt like a giant social vacuum has sucked the status out of manual labor, even the skilled trades, and redistributed it to the moderate and higher cognitive and social professions. There are rich metropolitan centers and university towns. ”
For the sake of the country, Biden was clearly right to focus his policies on those left behind. I was one of those who hoped that working-class voters would interpret these policies as a sign of respect and recognition. But class divides are also about morality, status, and identity, and the wounds have not healed. The key question is: What else can Democrats try to slow redistricting?
There are reasons for the pessimism. In a study for the Manhattan Institute, political scientist Zach Goldberg convincingly argues that the educated class will continue to remake the Democratic Party in its own image. Goldberg shows that educated Democrats are more politically engaged than less educated Democrats. They are more likely to donate to candidates. They control the means of communication.
Goldberg observes a new contradiction. “While the Democratic Party will become a majority-minority party relatively soon, it remains disproportionately steered by liberal, college-educated whites.”
If there is any hope for the Democratic Party, it is found in people like Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who is working hard to reduce the social distance between the Democratic Party and the working class. As analyst Louis Teixeira pointed out in his book, Liberal Patriot Substack, Fetterman opposes progressive orthodoxy on immigration, fossil fuels, and Israel. He shows his strength by opposing the elites of his party. Similarly, Democrat Tom Suozzi won back his Long Island House seat on issues such as border control and fighting crime.
Joe Biden has done an admirable job of bringing together a diverse Democratic coalition. But winning the votes of the working class will likely require a degree of independence from the educated elites who lead the working class.