The Left Has a Working-Class Problem

In a recent column published by the New Republic, Michael Tomasky asks, “Why don’t lefty candidates do better among working-class voters?” This shouldn’t be a mystery considering that Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024 was delivered by a multiracial working-class coalition. He accomplished that historic feat by building his campaign platform around the things working-class voters care about. The real mystery is why anyone is still struggling to understand this obvious fact. Tomasky does at least grasp that, even in the recent Democratic primary in Michigan, far left candidate Abdul El-Sayed underperformed so badly among working class voters that it very nearly cost him the nomination.

Part of the problem is that our friends on the left don’t understand how to define “working class.” Being intellectually lazy, they rely on the standard academic definition of the working class — adult workers lacking a four-year college degree. “By that measure,” writes José García of the Ford Foundation, “the working class constitutes over 60 percent of the U.S. labor force — more than 93 million people as of 2023. This group is not only large, but richly diverse: Roughly 53 percent are non-Hispanic white, 13 percent black, and 25 percent Hispanic.” Yet this academic definition of working class has little or no meaning to its actual members. Political scientist Nicholas Jacobs explains in The Conversation that the fabled “diploma divide” isn’t a satisfactory definition:

While a larger proportion of the electorate has obtained a college degree and household incomes have risen, the share of Americans who consider themselves working class has remained remarkably stable: roughly 35 percent of voters for the past 70 years, 38 percent in 2024.… There are conventional ways to define the working class, but they often miss how people understand their own place in society. In the 2024 American National Election Studies, for example, 21 percent of those who identify as working class have a college degree, only 5 percent belong to a private-sector union, and 37 percent own stocks. Conversely, most Americans without a college degree do not identify as working class.

Despite its limitations, the diploma divide is routinely cited by the commentariat as the most reliable predictor of voting behavior in modern democracies. College-educated voters increasingly support the Democratic Party, while non-college voters lean heavily toward the Republican. Most of their disquisitions suggest that Republicans, particularly MAGA voters, are by definition intellectually stunted. In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, the pundits invoked the diploma divide to explain the outcome, frequently citing a Pew Research study, “Voters with a four-year degree — who constitute about 40 percent of all voters — favored Harris by a double-digit margin (16 percentage points).” Nonetheless, Donald Trump won.