The revolt of the Rust Belt Democrats have squandered the white working class

Vance and I share more than a backyard. His biography is mine. I’ve lost my best friend, dad, aunt, uncle, and two first cousins to deaths of despair. My sister will probably be next. Broken homes, poverty, and addiction are, like Vance’s, my family’s narrative themes. I flunked high school. But like Vance, I had a grandparent who helped me survive the post-industrial apocalypse. Somehow, I bumbled into college. Eventually, I earned a PhD.

Today, as a professor, I study American liberalism. And here in the academy, white working-class despair is seen as something best ignored. This comes with a political cost, but don’t take my word for it. As Lisa Pruitt, a professor of law who studies the rural working-class, told me: “Race, ethnicity, and sexuality: It is a competition. Everyone gets a gold medal unless you are white. We need to acknowledge white pain and white vulnerability, or you can’t build a broad coalition.”

But what if Pruitt’s warning is already outdated? Today, the Democrats’ “working-class” problem has metastasised beyond whites. In 2020, Joe Biden won the Hispanic, 55-41, and black, 92-8, working-class by wide margins. Yet Republicans have made real inroads with these voters. The Democrat’s lead with the non-white working class has collapsed to nine points. Two-thirds of all voters are working-class. The math is clear. If the polls of the non-white working class hold, Trump wins in a landslide.

The Democrats’ working-class problem goes beyond math — it cuts to the core of the party’s identity. Gregg Cantrell, a professor at Texas Christian University, has literally written a book on liberalism’s working-class roots. “Farmers and labourers were among the first Americans to realise that the new large-scale corporate capitalist economy needed a counterbalance to protect the little guy from being crushed,” he told me. The idea that the government can protect the small against the big guy is the foundation of modern liberalism.”

But now the “little guy”, of all races, is shifting to Trump. The Republicans are poised to become a multi-racial working-class party. Democrats, meanwhile, are, in the words of Vance, a coalition of “well-to-do white Americans and minorities from across the political spectrum”.

Can Harris woo the non-white working class back to the Democrats? That’s the meta-question of the entire election. And simply replacing the top of the ticket is a cosmetic fix to a systemic problem.

To understand why, start at the top. A majority of House Democrats graduated from a top-100 college. Just one measly Democratic member of Congress has cited ever working a blue-collar or service job. Since 2004, a quarter of all Democratic presidential campaign staffers attended the same 15 elite universities. What this means is that Democrats, the self-styled “Party of the People”, don’t have folks with working-class backgrounds on their staff, in their offices, and now on their voter rolls. But the problem runs deeper than the class disparity of political elites.

Dr Cory Haala, a specialist in the political history of the Rust Belt Midwest, thinks the Democrats’ working-class woes stem from the party’s “singular focus on winning the presidency”. With the White House always in mind, he explained, the Democrats aimed policy at upscale suburban voters in key swing states. As a result, what started with Rust Belt working-class whites morphed into a problem with the non-white working-class.

And this political romantic comedy now has a twist, with Republicans wooing the very Rust Belt and non-white working-class base whom the Democrats had so long taken for granted. Eva Posner, a Democratic campaign manager, thinks her party’s working-class problems start with pocketbook concerns. “We are in desperate times. Housing costs have been going up consistently. There is not a city in America where you can afford an apartment on a minimum wage job.”

Posner agrees with Haala on the damage wrought by White House-centric politics. An obsession with the White House means Democrats ignore political offices that address basic problems. As she told me: “We don’t prioritise city councils or mayor races that have the jurisdiction. We prioritise the goddamn DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee]. Congress is doing shit. Why are we pouring millions of dollars into races that don’t do governance? The things that solve people’s problems are at the local level.”

For Posner, politics is not advanced calculus: “This isn’t goddamn hard. Voters see that we are quick to help corporations but not regular people. They think, ‘you aren’t doing anything for me.’ Well, no shit. Fund local campaigns, talk to human beings, find the problems and solve them. It is basic.”

Because Democrats no longer offer tangible solutions to working-class voters, they left the door open to symbolic appeals. From Kid Rock to Hulk Hogan, Trump and Vance offer a down-scale gloss on a plutocratic agenda. But Trump, at least, offers the gloss. And in choosing Vance, he nominated a person with working-class roots to the Vice-Presidency.

The decision may be hollow and, as recent weeks have indicated, not without blunder. Vance’s recent “cat lady” rhetoric, for instance, is as stupid as it is sexist. But the Democrats are wholly oblivious to our struggles. And in times of oblivion, scapegoats and ruses often have the final say.

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Jeff Bloodworth is a writer and professor of American political history at Gannon University

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