About 60 percent of all registered voters are working-class, defined as adults without a college degree. Many knowledgeable observers seem to think that Donald Trump owns their votes. For instance, Patrick Ruffini, a well-respected Republican pollster, argues that the Trump-led GOP represents a “multiracial populist coalition” and is now America’s “working-class party.”

That’s not an outlandish claim. After all, Trump won a majority of the white working-class vote in 2016 and again in 2020. Joe Biden couldn’t break Trump’s ostensible grip on blue-collar whites, and nobody, not even pro-Democratic liberal luminaries, believes that Kamala Harris has a prayer of doing so. For instance, Harold Meyerson, editor of the American Prospect, cautions that “there’s not much in Harris’s history to suggest she’s the cure for the Democrats’ growing weakness among working-class voters — most particularly, the white working-class voters who’ve been trending Republican for a very long time.”

But Harris’s VP pick, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, hails from a hardscrabble, rural, white working-class town in Nebraska. Walz first entered the national spotlight through an MSNBC interview in which he referred to Trump and his midwestern vice-presidential pick, Ohio senator J. D. Vance, as “these weird people on the other side.” But Vance has a life story that seems made to magnetize MAGA-minded white working-class voters to his side: dirt-poor grandparents who migrated to Ohio from Kentucky’s Appalachia region; a working-class family wracked by “alcoholism, poverty, and trauma”; and the rest of the Hillbilly Elegy saga, including the happy ending about how “working-class boys like me” can still make it in America. Vance got off to a rocky start just after the Republican National Convention, but, Walz and all, most observers still think he could turn Trump’s ostensible grip on white working-class voters into a vise grip.

But let’s take a closer look at the pertinent data. We’ll see that the Trump-led GOP does not have a lock on white working-class voters; that Vance’s appeal to this demographic has been overrated; that the Republicans are on cracked ice when it comes to claiming credit for pro-worker public policies; and that the battle for the partisan allegiance of demographically diverse Americans without college degrees is really only just getting started. In 2024 and beyond, it’s either party’s to win.

Start by recognizing that America has three working classes, not one: white Evangelicals, other whites, and non-whites. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump won the white Evangelical working-class vote but lost the non-Evangelical white working-class vote. The white Evangelical working-class electorate is a bit smaller than the rest of the white working-class electorate. For example, in 2020, about 16 percent of the total vote-casting electorate consisted of white Evangelicals with no college degree, while about 19 percent of it consisted of non-Evangelical working-class whites.

In 2020, 84 percent of white Evangelicals without college degrees voted for Trump, up from 80 percent in 2016. That same year, Trump received 41 percent of the votes cast by non-Evangelical whites without a college degree, up from 36 percent of that vote in 2016 but still shy of a majority.

This bifurcation of the white working-class vote is nothing new. As Will Marble, a brilliant “educational polarization” expert at the University of Pennsylvania, has observed, American National Election Survey data show that support for Republican presidential candidates between the two white working classes has diverged (white Evangelicals safely Republican, other whites not) in each of the ten presidential elections from 1984 through 2020.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan won reelection in a landslide that included 56 percent of the white working-class vote. But the first post-Reagan Republican presidential candidate to garner a Reagan-sized white working-class majority wasn’t Trump; it was Mitt Romney. In 2012, Romney won 57 percent of the white working-class vote, followed by Trump’s 62 percent in 2016 and 59 percent in 2020.

Such research as now exists does not enable one to referee competing claims about the partisan trajectory of either the Latino or the Asian working-class vote. But, by the end of May 2024, concerns that more black voters, especially working-class black men, would vote Republican in 2024 pushed the Biden campaign into overdrive on outreach to black voters.

But Biden and his team weren’t right to be so rattled. An April 2024 Pew Research Center survey found no steep or stark erosion in non-white working-class support for the Democrats. A May 2024 Pew survey of black voters found that 77 percent supported Biden, with nearly half agreeing that he is “a great or good president.”

Besides, as Sean Trende, a senior election analyst with RealClearPolitics, had correctly observed, the political science of the subject counsels Republicans not to count their improved black vote, working-class or other, before the election. Black “support for Democrats will likely increase through Election Day as kinship networks activate and produce social pressure to conform to Democratic Party voting norms,” he noted.

With Kamala Harris, a black woman, heading the ticket, the Democrats’ share of the black vote should meet or beat the 91 percent that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and the 92 percent that Joe Biden won in 2020. By contrast, Republicans, having kicked staunchly pro-life voters to the curb at their national convention, might expect not defections but at least a dip in turnout among anti-abortion conservatives, including GOP-registered working-class white Evangelicals and white Catholics.

And consider how Vance actually performed among white working-class voters when he ran as Ohio’s Republican senatorial candidate two years ago. His vote share among Ohio’s white working-class voters was actually a point below the national average (66 percent) for all GOP congressional candidates and well below the 72 percent of white working-class votes won by Ohio’s incumbent Republican governor, Mike DeWine, who ran without kissing Trump’s ring, won big, and received a congratulatory call from Biden.

So, to date, Trump hasn’t owned the working-class vote, Vance won’t either (at least not anytime soon), and the GOP hasn’t forged a “multiracial populist coalition.” But looking now to 2026 and beyond, could either party draw stable majority support from all three working-class electorates? I would identify five possible keys to creating a reliable working-class coalition that cuts across religion, race, ethnicity, and region.

Begin with an up-to-date understanding of what kinds of work most working-class people do. More people without college degrees work in food service, health care, and retail than in manufacturing or construction, and many own small businesses (car-repair shops, nail salons, and other, mostly small enterprises).

Next, recognize that, as the journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon has explained, although the “working class is not a monolith,” there is “a lot less diversity on questions of politics and policy” than is generally supposed. For instance, most working-class people would “never consider getting an abortion” but are “appalled at the idea of an abortion ban”; don’t want to expand “the welfare state” but do support “a government-backed catastrophic health-care plan”; favor secure borders but oppose immigration bans; and hold many other positions that “neither political party represents.”

Third, remember that, except when the issue is war or peace, most working-class people care little about foreign affairs, pay scant attention to international news, and favor protectionist measures.

Fourth, realize that working-class opinion is moderate but dynamic. For instance, the median working-class voter is ideologically center-right, but working-class views are trending to the left on many social and cultural issues, including abortion, LGBTQ rights, and taxation.

That’s “trending left” but not “on the left” and far from “far left.” For instance, as political economist Les Leopold has rightly noted, liberal white working-class voters remain much less liberal than their “white managerial/professional class” bosses.

Fifth and finally, most working-class folks hold nuanced views on most issues, but for all three working classes all the time, “it’s the economy, stupid!”

At the very core of what a majority of each working class wants are secure and decent jobs — as in jobs that pay well enough that the worker does not have to live paycheck to paycheck, that include meaningful health-insurance benefits and retirement plans, and that won’t vanish in the next ill economic wind. In conjunction with that, they want government at all levels to help them and their children lead peaceful and productive lives, if not uniformly prosperous ones.

Both parties have their fingerprints all over decades-old neoliberal economic policies that favored de-unionization and fueled free-trade globalization. But the times, they are a-changin’.

Today, most Americans see the decline in unionization as bad for America, 70 percent of working-class Americans approve of unions, and an estimated 60 million nonunionized workers would like to have the opportunity to join a union. Organized labor is now more trusted by Americans than are large technology companies and big business.

And compared with Americans who have college degrees, working-class Americans are more likely to feel that they have suffered personally from free-trade globalization and more likely to favor strengthening American manufacturing over combating climate change.

From born-again rural white truck drivers to inner-city black barbers and suburban white Catholic plumbers, working-class people blame both parties (as do I) for the neoliberal policies behind stagnant wages, CEOs’ making hundreds of times more than the average worker, fractured families, wrecked communities, and deaths of despair.

But if I had to bet on which party is most likely to become a hospitable home for majorities of all three working classes, I would bet on the post-Biden Democrats. Ruffini would probably bet the other way, but, as he himself has duly observed, the “old-school Democratic Party” had “oriented itself around delivering benefits for working-class families,” and Biden enacted many policies that “hew toward economic populism.”

I would go further: Biden has been the most pro-union, pro-workers’-rights president in decades. Months ago, he issued a plan targeting working-class economic concerns and protecting the U.S. steel and shipbuilding industries by tripling tariffs on Chinese imports. There is plenty in that plan to please a policy wonk, but it is written in a way that could easily be translated into party-platform bullet points and campaign-ad rhetoric.

But that’s not the whole story. Small businesses, especially ones located in less affluent urban communities, are far more likely than medium-sized or large businesses to be owned by working-class people or to employ working-class people. Following a not-bad start during his first year or so in office, Biden did little for small businesses, self-employed blue-collar laborers, and gig-economy independent contractors without college degrees. By late 2023, more than four times as many small-business owners (56 percent) strongly disapproved of Biden’s presidency as strongly approved of it (13 percent).

Until the GOP national convention, neither Trump and his campaign nor Republicans in Congress seemed to be as focused on winning the working-class vote as one might have expected. But the GOP platform featured “twenty promises,” among them anti-free-trade protectionist measures, no cuts whatsoever to the two biggest entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare), and “large tax cuts for workers, and no tax on tips!”

Still, with Election Day around the corner and the working-class vote still very much in play, Trump and Vance have yet to make any concerted effort to directly and passionately address core working-class economic concerns. Tax cuts and no taxes on tips are a nice start. But Harris has parroted Trump’s no-taxes-on-tips pledge, promised large tax cuts for working people, and won endorsements from several unions, including the AFL-CIO, which represents about 12.5 million workers, and the United Auto Workers, which represents nearly 400,000.

So how about banning noncompete clauses that stop workers from taking a job in their same line of work if they quit? How about expanding eligibility for overtime pay from its $35,656 cap? How about pressuring pension funds to invest only in firms that have fair labor practices and to divest now from ones that treat workers like dirt?

Well, Biden and Harris already did all those things, and Democrats in Congress are now drafting new laws to protect workers who could be displaced or replaced by artificial intelligence (something that worries about 70 percent of voters).

Okay then, but how about a bill to provide workers up to twelve weeks a year, with partial pay, to care for a newborn baby, nurse a sick relative, or recover from a serious injury or medical malady? Or how about measures rigorously regulating the productivity requirements that companies such as Amazon impose on warehouse workers and drivers?

Great, but Walz, who was a union member during his time as a public-school teacher and football coach, has already championed and enacted each of those policies and others.

In short, the race for the three working-class votes is on. If the GOP is to win it in November or beyond, then Trump, Vance, and other Republican leaders need to dispense with the outmoded anti-union rhetoric and develop a deeper pro-worker policy agenda — and fast.

But maybe Team Trump believes that nobody will take Harris, Walz, and the Democrats’ economic populism seriously. Or maybe they reckon that the working class’s predominantly anti-woke cultural politics will win Trump and Vance a big enough vote in all three blue-collar blocs to win them the election. Or maybe they think that Walz’s appeal to working-class voters will wilt while Vance’s widens.

But if that’s what they think, they should think again.