How both parties are failing working-class voters
There are more working-class Americans than any other voting bloc, and those blue-collar voters could be the decisive factor in this year’s presidential election. Yet each political party is doing a poor job of addressing the needs and concerns of lower-income Americans.
Political analysts have been spilling a lot of ink trying to figure out how Democrats or Republicans can gain an edge with working-class voters, broadly defined as adults without a college degree who get paid hourly. Yahoo Finance went straight to the source. We ran an online survey from Jan. 23-26 asking people who identify as working class to tell us what they want from the nation’s leaders, drawing answers from 1,269 respondents.
Hardly surprising: 75% said they’re not satisfied with America's leadership. Only 15% said they are satisfied. And it’s not just the current president, Joe Biden, they’re fed up with.
When we asked which political party, Democrat or Republican, they most trusted to look out for their interests, the most common answer was 'Neither,' with 46%. Only 25% cited Republicans, while just 22% cited Democrats. Our respondents skewed Republican by 10 percentage points, so the 3-point edge the Republican Party has looking out for voters is hardly impressive.
As in other political-affiliation surveys, the largest group in our poll was Independents, representing 45% of respondents. Thirty-two percent said they're Republican or lean Republican, while 22% said Democrat or lean Democrat.
What do working-class voters want? Political operatives obsess over this question, but maybe it’s not that complicated. We asked our respondents what the biggest long-term problem in the United States is, and provided 10 multiple-choice answers. The top answer was illegal immigration, which 21% cited. Next was the high cost of healthcare, with 15%. Then came cultural decay, with 14%, and high inflation, with 10%.
We probed this issue in two other ways. After asking what the biggest problems are, we asked what each respondent wants most from the nation’s leaders. More law and order was the leading response, with 19%, while immigration was next, with 18%. When we asked about crime in the prior question, only 3% cited that as the nation's top problem. So it may be safe to assume that "more law and order" has more to do with the migrant crisis than with violence in the streets.
The other big thing people want is better healthcare, which 12% of respondents cited. In general, what people want from the nation's leaders syncs with what they think the biggest problems are.
Finally, we asked respondents to tell us in their own words, without any prompts, what’s the No. 1 thing they want from government. The 1,269 responses echoed many of the earlier answers citing illegal immigration, healthcare, and inflation. But there was one other recurring theme we didn’t include in the multiple-choice menu: Better cooperation between the two political parties and a more competent government.
Sample answers:
“Compromise on things and do their damn jobs!”
“I want politics to be a service and not a career.”
“Bring the country together.”
“Leaders need to work together and spend less time bickering over things that are inconsequential to the average American.”
Now ask yourself which political party seems to understand what ordinary Americans care about, and it’s easy to see why “Neither” is the winning answer. Democrats led by Biden have instituted healthcare improvements, most notably the Affordable Care Act (ACA) President Obama signed when Biden was vice president. The ACA now provides insurance coverage to 21.3 million Americans, the most ever.
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Biden may deserve a bit of credit for the bipartisanship voters want, given that he did sign a 2021 infrastructure law and a 2022 semiconductor bill with some Republican support. Biden sometimes brags about his friends on the “other side of the aisle” and even seems to mean it.
On the other hand, Biden’s Democrats have no coherent plan for dealing with the surge of migrants streaming across the southwest border and dispersing throughout the country, a problem getting so bad that even Democratic mayors of “sanctuary cities” are begging for help. Biden polls worst on his handling of immigration, and it could cost him in November.
Republicans claim to be the party of tough border security, except now that they actually have the leverage to pass meaningful immigration reforms, it turns out they don’t really want to. As Trump keeps reminding Congressional Republicans, immigration is too important as a political issue to actually fix the problem.
When Trump was president, of course, he tried to build a border wall, keep Muslims out, and do many other things to preserve America as he found it. His measures were so harsh, cruel, and extreme that they generated an inevitable backlash. So now it seems as if the only options on immigration are Biden’s chaos or Trump’s savagery.
The Republican stance on healthcare is "Let’s have less of it." Trump still talks about repealing the ACA, even though Republicans tried and failed to do that when Trump was president and they controlled both houses of Congress. Lucky for them, they failed because it’s hard to imagine a dumber political move than taking away voters’ access to a doctor.
The obvious question is why isn’t there a political party that actually does what the majority of voters want? Sigh. As Ruy Teixeira of the American Enterprise Institute points out, Democrats have become a party of the “Brahmin left,” in which college grads and urban elites have replaced the blue-collar workers who were once the Democrats’ core constituency. That’s where all the cultural gobbledygook comes from. But Biden can’t win on those voters alone.
Trump, meanwhile, has turned the Republican Party into a cult of personality, driven by grievance and hate rather than any kind of broad appeal to improve the country. Trump wants to make life better for his loyalists and punish all the rest, with no particular regard for the law or any of the other rules everybody else has to play by. Bring the country together? Insults get higher ratings.
Since each party needs the working-class vote, Biden and Trump and their proxies will try to say all the right things for the next 10 months to pick up a blue-collar edge. Our survey suggests most voters know the con. But it won’t help provide any better choices in November.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.
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