“I love McDonald’s. I love jobs,” Donald Trump said over the weekend as he visited a Pennsylvania franchise of the iconic fast-food brand to sling fries and pose for the cameras. The former president’s affection for the Golden Arches has generated many viral social-media moments, and the campaign stop highlighted Trump’s cultural and economic outreach to working-class voters.
While Kamala Harris claims to have worked at McDonald’s in her youth, her support among union and working-class voters seems relatively soft. In a break from tradition, the International Association of Fire Fighters recently announced that it would not endorse a candidate for president. The firefighters’ union endorsed Joe Biden last time around and has backed a Democrat in almost every presidential cycle for the past 40 years, the only exception being 2016—a parallel that might provoke dread in some Democrats. The IAFF isn’t the only union sitting on the sidelines this year. After commissioning a poll and learning that its rank and file prefer Trump by a considerable margin, the Teamsters decided to stay out of the presidential race, too.
To some extent, these two organizations are labor-movement outliers; Harris has secured endorsements from many other unions. But polling also suggests that Harris is struggling with blue-collar voters. As part of a secular shift within American politics, working-class voters are migrating from their old base in the Democratic Party to join the Republican coalition.
This blue-collar disenchantment with the Democratic Party has laid bare the gap between unions as a political bloc and the interests of working-class voters themselves. Like Biden, Harris has catered to the demands of union leadership. She has endorsed both the PRO Act, which would expand the power of unions and weaken right-to-work laws, and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would allow public-sector workers to unionize across the country.
But the demands of the union power brokers on 16th Street, N.W., in Washington, D.C., might differ from the rank and file on Main Street. Inflation has ravaged the pocketbooks of many working families. According to federal data, inflation-adjusted median household income has risen over the past year but remains lower than it was in 2019. The border crisis—stoked by the policies of the Biden administration—has strained communities across the country. In climate and energy policy, too, some progressive ideologies are at odds with worker interests. In fact, Harris herself cosponsored a bill that would mandate that all new cars be “zero emission” vehicles by 2040—a policy that would essentially ban the manufacture of conventional automobiles, shred the American manufacturing base, and likely give a considerable strategic advantage to the People’s Republic of China, which has in place a massive infrastructure for producing battery-powered cars.
This economic track record highlights how the priorities and cultural values of progressive elites have become increasingly estranged from those of working-class voters. A 2023 poll from the Progressive Policy Institute found that non-college voters gave Republicans a healthy advantage over Democrats on handling crime and illegal immigration. Only 25 percent of those polled backed Biden’s unilateral use of executive power to liquidate student loans; 56 percent thought that this policy was unfair to Americans who didn’t go to college. The imperious managerialism of “woke” social policies is at odds with the “leave us alone” ethos of many working-class communities.
The GOP has been well-positioned to exploit this fracture in the Democratic coalition. Its more populist approach to economics has removed many potential deal-breakers with working-class voters. For instance, economically vulnerable voters view federal entitlements as a vital safety net, and fears of cuts to these programs made many suspicious of Republicans. In his 2012 reelection campaign, Barack Obama (who did well with working-class voters compared with recent Democratic nominees) bludgeoned Mitt Romney over entitlements. The Republican Party under Trump has instead emphasized keeping much of that safety net intact, and there’s a kind of internal logic to its combination of tight borders, family subsidies, federal entitlements, and cheap energy as a backstop for working Americans.
This economic evolution has allowed Republicans to use cultural issues to peel away additional working-class voters from Democrats. Trump’s combative public rhetoric may alienate some college-educated Americans, but many voters who feel left behind like his style. Beyond taking shifts at the fryolator, Republicans more broadly have tried to reach out to labor. One of the Senate’s leading populist Republicans, Missouri’s Josh Hawley has joined picket lines for striking workers, as has J. D. Vance. In terms of policy signals and political aesthetics, today’s GOP is certainly more attuned to working-class voters.
Some of the Harris campaign’s strategic decisions have reinforced these trends. Biden was successful in 2020 in part because he was so clearly a bridge to the Democratic Party of the past. He had put in decades developing relationships with union leaders, and his affect was that of an avuncular ward-heeler of the old Democratic machine. Even this year, before he dropped out, Teamsters townhalls gave him a narrow edge over Trump. Harris has instead pitched herself as the avatar of the new Democratic Party. The central issues of her campaign so far—abortion and anti-Trumpism—seem more designed to turn out college-educated voters than win back blue-collar Americans.
Harris’s blank-slate candidacy has allowed Trump to claim the spotlight and dominate the populist lane. The vice president’s long experience with California corporate politics has also hampered her ability to connect with working-class organizations. Many labor organizations suspect that Harris is less economically populist than Biden. When the Teamsters reached out to ask whether she would keep Lina Khan as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, the Harris campaign rebuffed them.
A labor realignment has high political stakes. A drop-off from 2016 in blue-collar voter enthusiasm and continued defections from college-educated suburbanites cost Trump reelection in 2020. Harris may hope that redoubling efforts among college-educated voters will pay dividends in the Sunbelt, particularly Georgia and North Carolina. Among all the battleground states, Nevada has the lowest percentage of college-educated voters, so a strong Trump performance with working-class voters could help nudge that state into the Republican column. In the Rust Belt bellwether states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a GOP swing among working-class voters helped put Trump in the White House in 2016. Conversely, suburbanites delivered for Democrats in key races there during the 2022 midterms and also helped tip those states in 2020.
Working-class voters were the pillar of the New Deal coalition that dominated American politics for decades. Now Republicans hope that offering some grand new bargain for workers could help them forge their own governing majority.
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