In September, as UAW members went on strike at multiple auto plants across the country, both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump sought to capitalize on the moment. Biden joined the picket line in Belleville, Michigan, near Detroit, signaling his support for labor, while Trump gave a rally at a nonunion auto parts manufacturer, also near Detroit, blasting Biden’s electric vehicle policies and calling on union leaders to endorse him. Each was trying to signal that he was on the side of “the working class.” Importantly, each had a different idea of what “the working class” is and how essential it is to presidential victories.
Saying that ‘the working class’ has abandoned the Democrats is highly misleading.
Democrats and Republicans have shifted their coalitions a lot over the past 50 years, and even during the past 10. Understanding how can be tricky, and saying, as many have, that “the working class” has abandoned the Democrats is highly misleading. Some recent studies argue that working class voters moved away from Democrats because of the party’s economic policies, but this ignores that the portion of the working class that moved away was overwhelmingly white. The changing demographics of the Democratic Party, then, isn’t a story about economics; it’s a story about race.
Fifty years ago, when Democrats were still benefiting from high opinions of the New Deal and low opinions of Republicans lingering from the Great Depression, the party was a hodgepodge of people we wouldn’t normally expect to see voting together. There were, among others, white segregationists in the South, civil rights advocates in the North, liberal Black people, conservative white people, rural farmers and big-city machine bosses. It’s impressive that such an unlikely coalition lasted for as long as it did.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965 put great strain on this coalition, and while white Southerners still…
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