Tag: white working class
american worker

Why Those White Working Class Votes Still Matter

Joe Biden has reason to be proud; in the last 107 years, only three American presidential nominees have managed to defeat an elected, incumbent president who was seeking a second term. Let history show that the winning trio were all politically gifted leaders who became successful presidents: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

That is fairly awesome company for Regular Joe to be joining. But Democrats already impatiently waiting for "Hail to the Chief" to be played for one of their own would be wise to confront a sobering reality from the Nov. 3 returns: White, working-class men who represent 1 out of 3 presidential voters and who formed the electoral backbone of the winning coalitions that elected FDR, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy preferred Republican Donald Trump, now of Mar-a-Lago, Florida, over Joe Biden, a son of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Read NowShow less
New Study Reveals Crucial Element Of Trump’s Base

New Study Reveals Crucial Element Of Trump’s Base

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Much has been written about President Donald Trump’s appeal among downscale white voters who live in the American Rust Belt. One of the most famous lines of Trump’s 2016 campaign was “I love the poorly educated,” and he continues to enjoy strong support among white males without a college degree.

But New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall stresses that there is one group that the media often overlook when analyzing Trump’s base of support: whites who have a higher income but lack a college degree.

The phrase “downscale whites” has often been used in connection with Trump’s base. But Edsall, analyzing a recent report from political scientists Herbert Kitschelt and Philipp Rehm, stresses that it is quite possible for whites who never went to college to have a higher income — not wealthy, but comfortably middle class.

And those who fit that description are an important part of Trump’s base.

“Perhaps most significant, Kitschelt and Rehm found that the common assumption that the contemporary Republican Party has become crucially dependent on the white working class — defined as whites without college degrees — is overly simplistic,” Edsall explains. “Instead, Kitschelt and Rehm find that the surge of whites into the Republican Party has been led by whites with relatively high incomes.”

And those higher-income whites, Edsall stresses, don’t necessarily have college degrees.

“High-income whites without college degrees were swing voters 60 years ago, pursued by both parties,” Edsall notes. “Now, they are rock-ribbed Republicans.”

In an e-mail, Kitschelt told Edsall, “Unlike much of the current debate, the ‘white working class’ — concentrated in the low-education/low-income sector of the white population — is not the category that has most ardently realigned toward Republicans. It’s higher income/low-education whites who are currently still doing well, but fear that in the Knowledge Society, their life chances are shrinking as high education becomes increasingly the ticket to economic and social success.”

Nonetheless, Edsall notes, low-income whites without college degrees are still an important part of Trump’s base.

“In the 1950s and ‘60s,” Edsall recalls, “low-income whites without degrees formed the base of the Democratic Party. Now, this group leans Republican.”

Meanwhile, Edsall reports, another demographic has become increasingly important to the Democratic Party: whites who are college-educated but low-income. That demographic was almost unheard of 60 or 70 years ago, when a college degree practically guaranteed a decent income.

“Two generations ago, there were almost no low-income whites with college degrees, a group that made up 1.5 percent of white voters in 1952,” Edsall observes. “These voters were a swing bloc without firm commitment to either party. By 2016, this constituency had grown to form 14.3 percent of all voters. They have, in turn, become the most loyal white Democratic constituency.”

Looking ahead to 2020, Edsall asserts that the next presidential race “may well prove to be a base-vs.-base election.” But he quickly adds that “the outcome may lie in the hands of the substantial proportion of the electorate that is undecided: 7 percent, according to Pew.”

Data Show Most Trump Voters Were Middle Income, Not ‘Working Class’

Data Show Most Trump Voters Were Middle Income, Not ‘Working Class’

In the months since Donald Trump’s stunning presidential victory, media outlets have obsessed over his voters—who they are and what their motivations might have been. Many have credited his win to “working-class whites,” a segment of society that has been laid low by opioid addiction and income inequality, in part because it made a compelling narrative.

The data tell a different story. According to an analysis by the Washington Post, Trump’s voting bloc was primarily comprised of middle- and upper-income Americans. An NBC poll of Trump voters from March 2016 showed that only one-third of his supporters had incomes lower than $50,000, while the other two-thirds made more than $50,000.

A similar trend arose in the general election as well. According to the American National Election Study, 35 percent of people who said they voted for Trump had household incomes under $50,000. The other two-thirds of Trump voters “came from the better-off half of the economy.”

According to a new report, despite what Ivanka Trump says, her father's administration isn't doing much for families of people who voted for him. A report from the Center for American Progress says that in swing counties won by Trump in the 2016 election, a family of four with two young children would only take in an additional $5.55 a year under Trump's tax plan if they spend an average of $6,037 per year on child care. The reason for this is that Trump's child care proposal is nothing more than a tax credit based on an assumption that families can afford to pay the full cost out of pocket.

Another component of the “working-class whites” narrative was the lack of a college education among most Trump voters, as 69 percent of his supporters in the general election did not have a college degree. But polling data from NBC also showed that about 70 percent of Republicans had not graduated from a college or university, so that number was not an aberration.

It is also the case that the lack of a college degree is not intrinsically tied to a person’s income—less education does not necessarily equate to being a member of the poor or working class. Only 25 percent of Trump voters were white people without college degrees making below the $50,000 median income. In fact, nearly 60 percent of white Trump voters without college degrees were making over $50,000, placing them in the “top-half of income distribution.” Data also show that one in five Trump voters actually made over $100,000 in household income, again exposing gaping holes in the narrative that the white working-class is mostly responsible for Trump’s win.

Celisa Calacal is a junior writing fellow for AlterNet. She is a senior journalism major and legal studies minor at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York. Previously she worked at ThinkProgress and served as an editor for Ithaca College’s student newspaper. Follow her at @celisa_mia.

IMAGE: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appears at a campaign rally in Miami, Florida, September 16, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar