After Doug Jones’ surprise victory in Alabama’s election, a lot of people started sifting over the results to try to figure out some actionable lesson for the Democrats to learn from the episode. Some pointed to higher support among non-white voters. On the other hand, others claimed that the election proved the viability of a promising new strategy for Democrats: winning over affluent white suburbanites who would usually vote Republican.
I’m sure that a lot of readers will recognize that this is neither a new, nor promising. People keep coming back to that idea time and again since Trump entered onto the scene. But hope springs eternal for this strategy, so once again it is necessary to go over why exactly this is a terrible strategy to rely on.
The argument for the “poach socially liberal affluent Republican suburbanites” strategy, stated or otherwise, is based on two two assumptions:
- Whether because of economic anxiety or racial resentment, Trumpism won strong working class support, particularly among white working class voters, and winning them back is now a practical and ethical no go
- Democrats can make up the ground they lost among the working class by winning over affluent white and usually Republican suburban voters who, the thinking goes, are turned off by Trump’s politics of racial/cultural resentment and crass incompetence.
I don’t care for this line of thinking for many reasons. Partly because it presumes (wrongly) that the working class is inherently reactionary. Partly because the notion that the Democratic Party shouldn’t have working class politics at its core is abhorrent to me.
But more than that, those presumptions are just wrong. Trump didn’t win over that many working class voters, Clinton lost them. In fact, she lost so many of them that it would have been pretty much impossible for her to compensate for them with affluent suburbanites. In order for the strategy to work, the Democrats would not only need to repeat Obama’s 2008 levels of support among high income voters, which were already extremely high, they’d need to beat those levels by a wide margin, not only in terms of vote share but also turnout. It would be glosses irresponsible to base an electoral strategy on that expectation.
To demonstrate this, all you have to do is look at how people actually voted in 2016 compared to 2012. Better yet, to offset the natural growth in the electorate, we can compare the results to a baseline scenario where we take the total number of potential voters and project what the results would have been had turnout and voting patterns remained unchanged from 2012. That way we can figure out roughly how many working class voters Trump won over, how many working class voters Clinton lost, and how many affluent voters she would have needed to compensate for that loss.
The answer to all of these questions are, in succession: not many, a ton, and way more than would be realistic.
No, Trump Didn’t Win Over That Many Working Class Voters
The way the media talks about Trump’s appeal to white working class voters, it’s easy to believe that Trump has some sort of natural affinity with blue collar middle America, and an enthusiastic column of working class voters marched to the polls to support him. So it’s a little surprising when you actually look into the numbers and find out he didn’t actually do any better than sociopath vulture capitalist fancy prancy horsey having Mitt Romney. In fact, he may have even done worse than Romney.
Strictly defined by income, Trump actually got fewer working class votes than Romney probably would had. On the one hand, Trump did get 500,000 more votes than Romney among low income voters (i.e. income >$30,000), but a lot of that was likely just the natural increase in the size of the electorate. Compared to the 2016 baseline scenario he only gained about 100,000 lower income votes on Romney. Among lower middle class voters in the income range of $30,000-$50,000 he actually got almost 500,000 fewer votes than Romney, and he would have gotten 1 million fewer votes than the baseline scenario.
He didn’t really do that much better if you want to describe “working class” in terms of educational attainment. Trump got nearly 2 million fewer votes from high school graduates, 3 million fewer votes than the baseline scenario. He did, however, increase his total among people with some college education by about 5 million votes, or about 3.5 million votes on the baseline scenario. Taken together this suggests Trump netted maybe 3 million votes among people with less than a college degree, and likely only gained about 500,000 over Romney if you to take the growth of the electorate into account. That’s not irrelevant, but in and of itself it wasn’t nearly enough for Trump to win.
All this is to say, Trump never really had all that much appeal to working class voters. Mostly he just maintained the support Republicans had among the group previously, or got their working class voters (i.e. rural voters) to turn out.
And for all the cultural backlash Trump was supposedly benefiting from, he actually got a smaller share of the white vote than Romney had four years ago, 58% vs. 59%. High turnout and the natural increase in the electorate’s size meant that he got about 3.5 million more white votes than Romney, and that comes out to 1.5 million votes over the baseline scenario. Disaffected men weren’t flocking to Trump either, he only matched Romney’s performance at 52% and gained only about 500,000 male voters over the baseline scenario. Again, that’s not irrelevant, but it’s not enough to win the election.
The point of all this is that Trump wasn’t swept in on a way of enthusiasm engendered by either economic anxiety or cultural backlash because he wasn’t swept in on a wave of enthusiasm period. Whatever his appeal to his core voters, when it came to the electorate at large he was still a historically unpopular candidate. That’s why all the attempts to recreate Trumpism fall flat; it was never a winner to begin with.
It could, however, still be lost to.
Clinton’s Lost the Working Class, And It Blew A Gigantic Hole In Her Election Strategy
People who dismiss the importance of the working class vote in the 2016 election like to point out that Clinton won the working class vote in absolute terms. But the thing is, in and of itself that’s irrelevant. Elections are won or lost on the margins. A candidate’s relative performance isn’t about whether or not they win an outright majority in a particular demographic group, it’s whether or not they manage to expand their margin with that group, and then work it into an effective overall electoral strategy.
And Hillary Clinton failed spectacularly when it came to the working class. She still won the working class vote in absolute terms, but whereas Obama won the working class by over 11 million votes, Hillary barely won it by 5 million. And as we’ve already established, this isn’t because Trump won over tons of working class support, it’s almost entirely due to Hillary Clinton losing the working class vote.
The numbers are striking. Clinton lost 4 million votes among low income votes off 2012, 5 million votes off what she would have gotten had she maintained Obama’s level of support. She lost another 2 million votes among lower middle class voters, 3 million less than what she would have gotten had she maintained Obama’s levels of support from 2012. Overall, Clinton lost about 6 million working class votes from 2012, and fell about 8 million votes short of where she probably should have been. That, more than anything else, blew a hole in her electoral strategy.
If you define the working class by educational attainment, the picture looks largely the same. Hillary Clinton lost 5 million votes from people with a high school diploma or less, 6 million votes less than if she’d maintained Obama’s levels of support. She gained about 500,000 votes among people with some college, but she fell 500,000 votes short of the scenario where she retained Obama’s levels of support. As a whole, the voters with less than a college degree went from voting for Obama by a margin of 2.3 million votes, to voting against Hillary by a margin of 5.3 million votes. You can’t entirely attribute this to Hillary losing support in the demographic, as I mentioned Trump did gain among voters with some college, but you can mostly explain it that way. Trump gained about 1 million votes on the baseline scenario, but Clinton lost 6.5 million votes from non-college graduates she otherwise should have gotten.
Either way, you come to the conclusion that Clinton was falling about 7 to 8 million working class votes compared to what she should have gotten had she managed to maintain Obama’s 2012 levels of support. And if anything, this probably understates how many working class voters Clinton simply lost by either not voting or voting third party, since the composition of the working class vote changed pretty significantly from 2012 (i.e. it was more rural this time).
And we should stress here that this wasn’t just the white working class men who Clinton lost. She lost 1 million African American voters who supported Obama in 2012, and 2 million off the baseline scenario. She also probably got 700,000 fewer Hispanic votes than she should have.
And No, You Can’t Expect Affluent Suburbanites To Fill That Hole
Here’s the problem with the theory that the Democrats can make up their losses in the working class with affluent, highly educated voters turned off by Trump: Democrats tried that in 2016. They were even pretty successful in winning over affluent voters, about as successful, I’d argue, as they reasonably could have hoped. But it didn’t even come close to filling the massive hole left by the collapse of working class support.
Looking at the numbers, Hillary probably picked up 5 million votes over the 2016 baseline scenario, partly because she won a higher percent of affluent voters, and mainly it was due to significantly higher turnout among the group. Not all of this turnout translated into support for Clinton, but overall she did net a fair amount of support. Whereas Obama lost this group by more than 3.5 million votes in 2012, Hillary only lost it by 500,000. In fact, Hillary’s margin in this group was only 200,000 less than what it had been for Obama in 2008, when he won in a landslide.
Similarly, Hillary did about as well as Obama has in 2008 among people with a college degree or higher. She won 58% of people with advanced degrees, exactly the same share as voted for Obama in 2008. She also won college graduates by 49%, the same share Obama won them. More than that, turnout among highly educated voters was also unusually high. Typically highly educated voters tend to vote at a rate about 50% higher than their share of the population, but in 2016 that was more like 66%. Factoring in Trump’s poor performance among highly educated voters, and their increasing share of the electorate, and Hillary actually did better than Obama in the highly educated demographic.
All this is to say that the strategy of focusing on affluent highly educated voters worked about as well in 2016 as that strategy is realistically going to work. She netted about 3 million votes with this But in the end it didn’t matter because it wasn’t even close to offsetting the 7 to 8 million collapse in her working class share. For every one upper income vote she picked up, she lost nearly two working class vote. To make matter worse, the upper class votes Hillary picked up were partially cancelled out by the roughly 2 million votes Trump picked up in the among higher income voters. Like him or not the upper class is still the Republicans’ core constituency, and as it turned out a lot of those upper class voters were just as caught up in Trump’s cultural backlash as anyone.
When you get into it, in order for Clinton to compensate for all the working class voters she’d lost, Clinton would have had to have won outright majorities of all voters making over $100,000 a year. Not even Obama had managed to do that in 2008, and he had done spectacularly well with affluent voters.
But that’s the strategy a lot of people are banking on. They expect Democrats to not only repeat Obama’s 2008 levels of support among affluent voters, which were already highly exceptional, but drastically improve on them. Not only that, but they expect to maintain that elevated level of support in election after election. It’d be grossly irresponsible to count on that happening. It’s also obviously vulnerable to the possibility that all those affluent voters would just snap back to Republicans the moment some conservative politician with a veneer of competence comes by, like they essentially did in 2012. And God forbid the Republicans ever actually gain working class support, then the whole strategy pretty much goes out the window.
Conclusion
The Obama coalition was a three legged stool, based on achieving high levels of support among the working class, non-white voters, and relatively well off social liberals. In 2016, the working class leg fell off, and the whole thing fell over. If you want to win elections, and I mean really win them at a rate to overcome historic levels of gerrymandering and Republican entrenchment you need to put that leg back. You can’t just try to make the other legs bigger. Maybe that will work for a time, as voters in generally are repulsed by Trump and the Republicans. Maybe a lot of those voters will even be working class people tired of getting kicked in the face by Republicans. But you shouldn’t rely on that. And if you looked at Alabama’s special election, where college educated voters were over represented by a rate of 2-to-1, and thing “that looks like a sustainable long term strategy for political success”, sorry that’s just magical thinking.
Getting those working class voters to turn out for Democrats again shouldn’t be to difficult. They’re not in the thralls of Trump’s white identity, they just didn’t vote. You just need to give them a reason to vote, and that’s going to require a positive program of working class politics. You can’t just rely on making empty platitudes about jobs or think you’re good enough because you have some great policy document you never actually run on or implement when you get in power. You actually do have to do better.
Model Metamodern Generalist 