The White Working Class Is Not Enough

I n the final months of the 2016 election, Senator Chuck Schumer infamously took a sanguine line on his party’s declining fortunes with white working-class voters. Speaking at a Washington Post forum in July of that year, the New York Democrat proclaimed: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” Four months later, of course, that prediction proved to be hubristic: Democratic inroads with Republican-leaning suburbanites failed to materialize to the degree that Schumer had hoped, and a surge of white working-class turnout for Trump — in which “a stunning one-third” of “the nearly 700 counties” that voted for Obama twice “flipped to support Trump,” the Washington Post reported — delivered Republicans the White House and both chambers of Congress.

Schumer was roundly — and understandably — mocked for his error. The Senate Democratic leader was “helping Republicans consolidate and grow their congressional majorities — by further alienating once-reliably Democratic blue-collar voters who abandoned the party in the last election,” conservative writer Marc Thiessen argued in a 2017 column for the Post. “That means there are millions of Obama voters out there who were sick of Democrats such as Schumer dismissing their concerns and decided they wanted to give Trump a chance.”

But in the following years, Democratic inroads in the suburbs did materialize — albeit later than Schumer had initially expected. In 2018, Democrats knocked off Republican incumbents in suburbs across the country, including major swings to the left in areas that had long served as GOP strongholds. White working-class voters “turned out at unusually high levels for a midterm,” Eric Levitz reported, “but so did college-educated whites and minority voters.” Without Trump’s singular figure on the ballot, the white working-class vote was less red than it had been two years earlier, and the voter bloc also represented a shrinking share of the electorate: In 2020, a 2019 Center for American Progress study projected, there would be 2.3 percent fewer whites without a college degree in the U.S. than there were in 2016, whereas the number of whites with a diploma would grow by 0.2 percent. (The study also projected 1.3 percent more Latinos, 0.6 percent more Asians, and 0.2 percent more African Americans.)

In 2020, white working-class voters showed up for Trump again — but not by large enough margins to overtake the new Democratic advantage in the suburbs. Trump repeated his whopping 2016 advantage of 34 points in predominantly white nonmetropolitan areas — an advantage that was much larger than the Republican showing in 2018 — but “large suburban areas in 2020 registered a net Democratic advantage for the first time since Barack Obama’s victory in 2008,” the Brookings Institution’s William Frey wrote. “This is significant because more voters reside there than in the other three categories. In terms of aggregate votes in these large suburban counties, there was a shift from a 1.2 million vote advantage for Trump in 2016 to (at last count) a 613,000 vote advantage for Biden—a nearly 2 million vote flip.”

By virtue of their traditional propensity for low turnout, white noncollege voters ostensibly represented an untapped electoral gold mine for the GOP — but only if the party could actually get them to the polls. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, FiveThirtyEight’s Dave Wasserman noted that approximately 47 million non-college-educated whites — including 2.6 million in Pennsylvania, 2.2 million in Ohio, and 900,000 in Wisconsin — were not registered to vote. “In 2012, President Obama won re-election by almost 5 million votes, but about 47 million eligible white voters without a college degree — including 24 million men — didn’t bother to vote,” Wasserman wrote. “In 2016, these nonvoters are part of the demographic that is most strongly in favor of Donald Trump.” If Republicans could find “the missing white vote,” they would have a formidable coalition.

But getting those voters to show up has proved more difficult than Republicans hoped. In 2020, the surge of rural white support in crucial swing states that had carried Trump across the finish line in 2016 was diminished: In Wisconsin, for example, “the missing white vote stayed missing,” Ryan Girdusky wrote in a 2020 postmortem for the American Conservative. In the 23 Obama–Trump counties in the Badger State, “the number of registered voters declined by nearly 8,000 voters from January 2017 to November 2020 even though the population increased in these areas. So Trump’s campaign had to work harder with a smaller group of people. Most of the non-college-educated white Wisconsinites that didn’t vote in 2016 remained untapped in 2020.”

The Trump campaign committed a significant amount of time and resources to courting new voter blocs such as Latinos and African Americans. While those demographics did move toward Republicans in certain parts of the country, they remained decisively blue in 2020. Meanwhile, Trump’s largest decline in support came from white voters — and particularly white men. If the campaign had redirected some of its minority-outreach resources toward “registering and turning out between five and ten percent of those non-college-educated white voters they missed in 2016, they wouldn’t have to worry about suburbanites defecting to Biden,” Girdusky argued.

But until Republicans can find a way to turn out politically disaffected whites, they do need to worry about hemorrhaging support with suburbanites. The white working-class realignment toward the GOP was supposed to expand into nonwhite working-class demographics, making Republicans the party of the “multiracial working class.” But again, while Republicans have made inroads with certain nonwhite voters — particularly Hispanics — those gains have not occurred as quickly as the party has lost ground with its traditional voter base in the suburbs. One of the major stories of the 2022 midterms was that the Trump-skeptical suburbanites whom Democrats courted in 2018 and 2020 stayed blue, torpedoing the GOP’s hopes of a red wave across the country.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The GOP should be able to hold onto its white working-class base — and expand its inroads with Hispanics — while regaining its footing in the suburbs. In Florida, for example, Republicans did just that, dominating Democrats with Hispanics, both college- and non-college-educated whites, and in rural, suburban, and even urban areas. But they can’t expect to coast to victory on the backs of white working-class voters alone. Otherwise, Chuck Schumer’s prediction may prove to have been more prescient than it initially seemed.