No, Trump is not the choice of American workers—but neither is Harris

Lance Selfa, a Chicago-based socialist, is covering the US presidential elections for Red Flag. Lance is the author of The Democrats: A Critical History, and editor of US Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality.

--------------------

On Labor Day weekend in the United States, traditionally considered the beginning of the most important stretch of national political campaigns, there is much talk about workers and labour. This year was no exception, the talk coming from two directions.

From the Democratic Party-aligned side of the political system come the promises of policies to help working people “not just to survive, but to get ahead”. Although Vice President Kamala Harris and most Democratic politicians say they are campaigning for the “middle class”, their trade union surrogates aren’t so constrained. After calling out former President Trump as “a scab”, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain called Harris “a fighter for the working class” in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in August.

From the conservative side of the political system comes a different claim: the Republican Party is now the “party of the working class”. That’s due to opinion polls and election-day exit polls that show Trump and the Republicans winning almost two-thirds of voters who do not hold a bachelor’s degree. This is the media-standard definition of “working class” in the US.

From a socialist point of view, it’s more accurate to say that neither major party—both capitalist parties—are “working class” parties by any stretch of the imagination. That’s true even though most people who vote for both are, by virtue of their occupations, non-supervisory workers. But in neither party are the interests of working-class people upheld, even though more trade unions (with a few notable exceptions) support the Democrats and work to get out the vote for them.

But let’s start where the bulk of media, and much liberal commentary, start: that is, with the Republican claims that Trump’s support rests on a foundation of a “left behind” working class that views the Democrats as representatives of a “woke” coastal elite that disdains them.

The first point to make about this claim is that it isn’t talking about the working class in general. The US working class is multiracial and disproportionately made up of people of colour. It includes both men and women, people with different gender identities, of different religions (and increasingly no religion) and different age groups.

When we narrow the focus to the “white working class” that is often invoked as most receptive to Trump, we immediately run into more definitional problems. For pundits and scholars alike, the most common definition of the “white working class” is whites without a university degree. By this definition, “working-class whites” comprise about 44 percent of the 18-and-over US population.

There are many problems with equating educational level with class, however. Most obviously, it doesn’t get at what a Marxist would consider the baseline for determining someone’s class: their job and its relationship to capital. Moreover, as Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels wrote in a critique of Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the non-college-educated population in the US mirrors the general population’s income distribution. So a substantial number of wealthy people is included in the non-degreed population.

There are other problems related to the two points above. Most importantly, excluding people with university degrees means ignoring most healthcare workers and schoolteachers. Yet these workers have been at the forefront of trade union collective action in recent years. Second, as with the rest of the population, wealthier non-university-educated “workers” are likely to be small business owners and lower-level supervisors—so not part of the working class at all.

Political pundits frequently pigeonhole all white working-class people—and increasingly, Latinos and African American non-university-educated men—into the stereotypical picture of the conservative “base”: misogynist, gun-toting, Fox News-watching patriots and petrolheads. But beyond this caricature, there is a much more varied reality.

Even among white voters, education isn’t an ironclad dividing line, especially when income (an insufficient but somewhat more direct proxy for class) is considered. Lower-income voters of all races are still more likely to vote for Democrats despite the party’s well-documented preference to rely on middle-class suburbanites.

This focus on less-educated, lower-income parts of Trump’s base also obscures the fact that Trumpism finds arguably its strongest appeal among middle- and upper-class people. It’s not just the Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires who have made news with their endorsements of Trump: it’s clear that a middle-class “gentry” provides some of his most fervent supporters. The occupational profile of the more than 1,000 arrestees from the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol revealed a high percentage of law enforcement, professionals and small business owners among them.

If the equation “Trump supporters = workers” obscures more than it explains, does that mean that the Democrats are the working-class champions? In a word, no. Despite support from most union leaders, the Democratic Party is still a neoliberal corporate party whose politics are closer to post-Second World War Christian democracy than to social democracy.

Harris’ economic agenda, a vague call for building an “opportunity economy”, so far includes a grab bag of (no doubt poll-tested) policies: down-payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, tax credits for families with children and a $50,000 tax deduction for start-up small businesses.

It’s telling that the most generous of these is aimed at small business owners. During her 10 September debate with Trump, Harris hardly even mentioned health care beyond the boilerplate promise to protect the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). And while the defence of abortion rights is certainly a working-class issue, so is supporting the rights of immigrants, who are a crucial part of the US working class. But both Biden and Harris have essentially conceded the issue of immigration (along with crime) to the Trumpist right. All of this does not add up to a robust working-class agenda.

The Democrats hope the fear of Trump and Project 2025 will be enough to keep their supporters in line. But Trump maintains a polling lead among people who worry mainly about the economy and inflation—which hits lower-income people the hardest. Both issues work against the incumbent vice president.

Trump may have cornered the market on middle-class and working-class racists. But Harris has proposed only the weakest tea for the millions who are not ideologically committed and looking for economic relief. No wonder the “party of non-voters” continues to be overwhelmingly working class and that, despite Trump’s anti-working class agenda, the election remains too close to call.