‘The working class will decide this election’

If the American media are to be believed, Kamala Harris has effectively already won the 2024 election. Compared with the ‘divisive’ Donald Trump and the rest of the ‘weird’ Republicans, she has the ‘vibes’ and the ‘momentum’ that are needed to carry her to the White House. Ruy Teixeira – co-author of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? and politics editor of the ‘Liberal Patriot’ Substack – has long warned the Democrats against such self-satisfied complacency. Harris, he argues, is failing to slow the withering of the traditional Democratic base. Working-class voters, including ethnic-minority Americans, are not on board with the elites’ Kamalamania.

Ruy returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss the Democrats’ struggles and much more. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: You’ve dubbed 2024 the ‘working-class election’. What do you mean by that?

Ruy Teixeira: On a very basic level, the structure of the US electorate is about two-thirds non-college educated – or working class – in terms of eligible voters, and about three-fifths in terms of those likely to turnout. It’s even higher than that in the swing states. In Rust Belt swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the working class is heavily skewed toward white working-class voters. This has become a very serious trouble spot for Democrats, and it’s the main reason why Donald Trump won in 2016.

If you look carefully at the polling data we’ve seen so far, it’s very clear that, in a way, this is a contest between Kamala Harris’s ability to jack up the college-educated vote – and hold down losses among the working class – and Trump’s ability to build on his advantages among the working class. These advantages are quite evident at this point. Trump has a much larger share of the non-white, working-class vote than Republicans are used to getting.

This is why I say that, in the end, it will be a working-class election. It will come down to the preferences of the working class, how many of them are kept down on the farm by the Democrats, and how many of them defect to the Republicans. That’s where the real swing voters are, in my opinion, and I think that’s really what this election is all about. The most recent polling data is very clear: Harris is overperforming Biden among college-educated voters, and underperforming among the working class.

O’Neill: What is Harris’s standing like among voters from ethnic-minority backgrounds?

Teixeira: There is definitely a continuing trend of diminishing support for the Democrats among Hispanics. Most of the evidence suggests that this decline is heavily concentrated among Hispanic working-class voters, which is the majority of Hispanic voters. Between 2016 and 2020, there was basically a 16-point decline in the Democrats’ advantage among Hispanics. Looking at the latest data, as we move into this election cycle, there could be another 10-point decline in the Hispanic advantage for Democrats. Biden’s 23-point lead in 2020 has slumped to 11 or 12 points for Harris. Trump might even get north of 40 per cent of Hispanic voters, which is very unusual.

On a somewhat lower level, but still very interesting, there’s been a lot of evidence that Trump could get a larger proportion of the black vote – maybe even as high as the mid teens. This would be a noticeable shift compared with 2020 and very different from what Republicans won in 2012. In both cases, roughly 90 per cent of black Americans voted for the Democratic candidate.

In a very broad-brush way, we are seeing a decline in racial polarisation – which is actually a good thing, right? We don’t want people voting solely on the basis of their ethnic or racial identity. We’re definitely going to see this in spades in this election. Democrats are going to be surprised – unpleasantly, I think – to see the extent to which non-white voters will not vote for them anymore just because they’re not white. And they will be surprised that the Republicans – despite how deplorable Trump is – are viewed as being interesting to a lot of these voters.

Of course, the Democrats are not going to lose their overall advantage among non-white voters anytime soon. But if your margin among these voters declines by 10 points, that has a big effect on an election, and that’s really what we’ve been looking at in this recent cycle.

O’Neill: What are your thoughts on the Trump campaign and its impact in this election so far?

Teixeira: Well, if you’re talking about a sense of what he would do if he was president, I think it is still pretty vague. In some ways, he’s running similarly to how he did in 2016. I guess back then it was a little fresher. He promises to be tough on trade. He promises to be tough on China. He’s talking about tariffs. He’s talking about bringing back manufacturing. He’s certainly not going to touch social security and Medicare. Some of the old Golden Oldies are still present, but I do think there’s a confused aspect to this campaign. He’s going to have tax cuts, too. That doesn’t really add up, and doesn’t make sense in terms of a policy programme.

Perhaps more important than that, I don’t know what ordinary voters are getting out of Trump’s offer, other than the fact that he seemed to do a pretty good job when he was in office. Realistically, how coherent is his policy programme going to be if he does win? There are people like Oren Cass at the American Compass organisation who have really interesting policy ideas and have relationships with Trump allies like JD Vance, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. But how much influence is that really going to have on on policymaking?

There are people who are mildly optimistic that Trump will get some things done. But the truth of the matter is that he is such a wildcard, and the Republican Party itself is so disunited on economic philosophy, that it’s entirely unclear what he’s going to be able to do if he wins. What we really seem to have is a stasis between the parties, a sort of vexed equilibrium, that is unlikely to change even if Trump does get elected.

Ruy Teixeira was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Watch the full conversation here: