The debate over the Democratic Party’s losses in the 2024 election has arrived. There will be recriminations and finger-pointing. There will be blame-laying and ideologically-driven “analyses.” There will be an endless parade of pundits, consultants, elected officials, and various family and neighborhood blowhards who will insist that, if Vice-President Harris, Senate Democrats, and House Democrats would have followed their advice, everything would have been different.
Well, we’re not interested in any of that. The 2024 election was serious business and its consequences for working people, worker power, and unions are potentially dire. So, we will contribute to a meaningful discourse and debate about what happened in 2024 and focus tightly on working people and unions. In addition to this post, we are proud to host President Jimmy Williams, Jr., President of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, for an upcoming blogcast discussion of this topic built around his important Labor Notes viewpoint article.
The Fundamentals
Let’s start by saying what needs to be said: winning the 2024 presidential election always was going to be very hard for Vice-President Harris. Six facts created a deeply hostile electoral environment for her (most data below are drawn from 2024 exit polls except where noted):
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VP Harris was closely connected to an unpopular president. According to both exit polls and pre-election polls, President Joe Biden was viewed favorably by roughly 40% of voters. The fate of Vice-Presidents is tied to their Presidents. Some benefit (e.g., George H.W. Bush) and some don’t (e.g., Al Gore).
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Voters were very unhappy about the economy. Sixty-seven (67%) of voters told exit pollsters that the economy was poor or not so good. They wanted a different economic direction. Remembering how the economy boomed before the COVID-19 pandemic, many voters convinced themselves that President Trump could bring needed change.
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Voters were unhappy about the state of the country. Seventy-two (72%) of voters were either angry or dissatisfied with the country’s direction. Why would they choose to keep leaders who would continue leading us in that direction?
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Voters suffered because of inflation. Seventy-five (75%) of voters said their families had experienced hardship because of inflation. About one-third of that group suffered severe hardship. Right or wrong (I would say wrong), voters connected the incumbent Harris-Biden Administration to inflation, even if they did not blame them for it.
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Trump is a well-known person while Harris is not. The old saying teaches that you should choose the devil you know over the devil you don’t because, at least, you know what you’re getting. President Trump has been a virtual guest in Americans’ living rooms since 2004 when his reality TV show The Apprentice debuted. Understanding that their show’s success depended on it, the makers of The Apprentice spent a mountain of money selling Donald Trump as a brilliant businessman and economic soothsayer. That image is ingrained despite his epic failures during the pandemic recession of his first term. See #2 above. Meanwhile, Vice-President Harris has near 100% name recognition and voters know little about her. She could not fix that problem during a short 100-day spell as the Democratic presidential nominee. Voters did not have a chance to get comfortable with her or get to know her.
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Trump looks like our past leaders while Harris does not. You don’t have to level accusations of racism or sexism to acknowledge that Americans have known only male presidents and all those presidents have been white except for one. Putting aside his behaviors, President Trump resembles the people we have always chosen to be our leaders. Vice-President Harris does not. That’s not to say that is how our country should be governed or how voters should make our election choices. That’s also not to suggest that racism and sexism played no role in the 2024 election. They did, and likely played a huge role. Nonetheless, changing longstanding attitudes and stereotypes is challenging under the best of circumstances. These were not the best of circumstances.
So, the mountain that Vice-President Harris and her campaign had to climb to win was very high. Even with these disadvantages, the Vice-President lost the election by only a few percentage points of the popular vote (among votes counted as of this writing), although she did lose all seven of the swing states that put the Electoral College majority firmly in President Trump’s column. The close vote requires that we keep this debate in perspective: all is not lost for Democrats and their labor allies. Voters did not deliver a Reagan-in-1984 (or Nixon-in-1972) repudiation when they re-elected President Trump. This was a reasonably narrow loss, but still a very important one. Failing to learn from and act on the lessons could make the future look much worse. Much worse.
The Most Important Lesson: Much of the Working Class Has Abandoned Democrats
In 2024, union members and their families stuck with the Democratic presidential nominee. According to exit polls, Vice-President Harris won 54% of union household votes while, four years earlier, President Biden won 56% of union household votes. So, despite some high-profile decisions by a few unions not to endorse Vice-President Harris, union members and their families sustained their support for the Democratic candidate.
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That’s noteworthy because union households' voters were the exceptions among a majority of working-class voters supporting President Trump in 2024. That's like because almost all of our country's unions endorsed Vice-President Harris and campaigned aggressively among their members to support her. Yet, there is another possibility. Voters in 2024 were more likely to be white than union members in 2023. About 29% of union members were Black or Latino in 2023 compared with 23% of voters in 2024. Both Black (overwhelmingly) and Latino (slightly) voters supported Vice-President Harris at a higher rate than white voters. So, it is possible that union voters’ support for Harris was a product of that racial voting gap.
Let's look more closely at “working class” voters by looking through two lenses: education and income.
Education: Workers without college degrees earn less and are more likely to be unemployed, on average, than workers with college degrees. These so called "non-college" workers gave 57% of their votes to President Trump in 2024. White voters without college degrees voted for President Trump at a 66% rate, which was essentially the same percentage of the vote this group gave to President Trump in 2020. Harris received 64% of the votes of non-white voters without college degrees, which seems impressive, but a steep decline of 16% below President Biden’s support in 2020 and an eye-popping 26% below Secretary Hillary Clinton’s results in 2016. Simply, non-white voters without college degrees abandoned the Democratic nominee in huge numbers in 2024. White voters without college degrees simply stayed away. By contrast, Vice-President Harris received 55% of college graduates’ votes and 65% of votes from white college graduates --- the latter represented a 4% increase from President Biden’s vote from the same group in 2020.
Family income: Voters’ incomes tell an even starker story. Vice-President Harris won the election 51%-46% among voters whose 2023 family income was $100,000 or greater. Certainly, some people with this income may work in blue collar jobs, but this extensive list from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that most jobs paying at this level or above are white-collar jobs that require a college degree. Most noteworthy, Harris lost the election among voters whose families earned less than $100,000 in 2023, although voters with incomes of $30,000 or less gave her a small margin of victory: 50%-46%. The median household income in the United States in 2023 was $80,610. Working class and middle class voters earning around that median --- between $30,000 and $99,999 --- gave majority support to President Trump.
Why Don’t Working and Middle Class Voters Overwhelmingly Support Democrats?
The Biden-Harris economic agenda --- building the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, as he often said --- was largely focused on helping workers without college degrees to secure good union jobs. The massive public investments included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act, as well as the huge income support and other payments included in the American Rescue Plan, were designed to strengthen the American economy and create millions of quality jobs for workers who do not have a college degree. President Biden also proudly donned the mantle as the most pro-union President in American history. He talked often about unions as a way for workers without degrees to secure middle-class lives. Given all these efforts, it must be a bitter irony for President Biden and Vice-President Harris that working class voters did not respond to their economic policies by supporting their continuation.
Why didn’t they? This is where the debate will be joined and fought most fiercely. The battle will be most intense here because the answer that prevails will determine the path forward. It could determine whether Democrats change their message, change their agenda, and perhaps even change their candidates.
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I will briefly posit four reasons why working class voters did not support the Democratic nominee for President in 2024. It is worth reiterating that the fundamentals discussed above are critically important starting places for any explanation of this election’s outcome. Yet, there is more to say about why working class voters made the choice they made in 2024:
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Inflation trumped all: Inflation hits hardest for families that are living paycheck to paycheck. Paying an extra $50 a week for a cart of groceries when your rent is rising and gas prices are climbing can devastate these families’ already-too-tight budgets. Higher income voters feel inflation less because they have an added financial cushion. Certainly, inflation has slowed and real wages have risen, but prices remain high. Presidents (and their Vice-Presidents) have little power to control inflation, but Democrats did not successfully persuade working-class voters that corporate profit-mongering was a principal cause of inflation despite powerful evidence. Working-class voters wanted change and Vice-President Harris did not represent enough of it.
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Democrats do not have a counter to inflammatory, yet effective, right-wing immigration arguments: President Trump’s campaign narrative has been centered around racist and xenophobic immigration messages since he announced his first candidacy in 2015. Tying immigration to job insecurity, wage suppression, cultural issues, and especially increased crime plainly resonated with some working-class voters. It also pitted workers and community members against one another. Solidarity is difficult or impossible in the heat of immigration hysteria. To be blunt, Democrats do not have an effective counter-argument, broadly acceptable alternative policies, or a way to cool an unnecessarily heated discussion. Vice-President Harris’s message that she always has been tough on immigration and always will be essentially gave voters a choice: an all-out militarized immigration crackdown vs. half-hearted border security without the concentration camps. Trump won the debate over immigration by making it one of voters’ top priorities in this election.
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Vice-President Harris did not campaign aggressively on the Biden-Harris economic agenda or talk about unions and worker power: Of course, voters want to know what politicians will do for them in the future. Election victories usually are not handed out as rewards for past behavior. Nonetheless, the Biden-Harris Administration’s economic accomplishments could have been proof points that both Vice-President Harris cares about improving the lives of working-class voters, delivering policies to achieve that goal, and ensuring those policies work for working people. Yet, the infrastructure, climate change, and semiconductor manufacturing investments that are rebuilding the middle class were not prominent in her campaign’s messaging. Equally important, Vice-President Harris talked little about unions and worker power. Her only mention of unions in her Democratic National Convention speech listed them as stakeholders to be brought together with “small-business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs, to grow our economy and to lower the cost of everyday needs like health care and housing and groceries.” This section of the speech sounded more like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama than the aggressively pro-union Joe Biden. Unions have a 70% favorability rating in 2024. You would expect all progressive politicians to hug them as tightly as possible in hopes those gaudy approval ratings might rub off and onto them.
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Unions are trusted third-party voices on politics for their members and their families, but there aren’t enough union members in America: White working-class voters began to abandon the Democratic Party in the 1980s for many reasons. It is not a coincidence, however, that working class voters’ declining support for Democrats and the virtual extinction of pro-labor Republicans occurred over four decades during which union membership was cut in half as a percentage of the American wage and salary workforce. Unions communicate with their members about the issues that bring them together, like jobs, wages, benefits, safety and health, and power in the workplace and community. Unions educate members about elected officials and candidates who support their best interests on these issues and those who do not. Many who are outside labor circles do not understand that most members watch their unions fight for them every day; so, unions’ answers to political questions are trusted and trustworthy, even when members disagree or vote differently. Yet, 90% of American workers are not union members. In the 2024 exit polls, 81% of voters reported they do not have a union member in their household. No trusted third-party that is entirely focused on their interests is communicating with these union-less voters about elections, issues, and candidates.
Conclusion
The 2024 election demands a reckoning for Democrats and the labor movement, but without panic, oversimplification, and self-serving rationalizations. The progressive movement cannot afford to ignore the working class's shift toward Republicans that was fueled by discontent over inflation, immigration, and a lasting sense that Democrats’ do not always have their best interests at heart. The Biden-Harris agenda was a starting place, but the agenda must be ongoing and effectively messaged to workers. Unions are necessarily central both to the agenda and the messaging. That’s where this debate should focus.
*Cover phot credit: AP pic
