US Election: Who Exactly Is Trump’s ‘Base’? Why white working-class voters could be key

The path to re-election for US President Donald Trump requires maximizing the support of his often-mentioned “base” – white voters without college degrees – in the key states on the battlefield where he won in 2016.

This is because support for Trump among other voters has fallen. According to the Pew Research Center, he still has a 60-34 percent advantage over Democratic challenger Joe Biden among whites without a college degree, but Biden has a substantial advantage among college-educated white voters as well as black voters, Hispanic and Asian. .

As a result, Trump has a very narrow path to victory that will require high turnout from so-called “working class whites” in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin and Michigan. According to current polls, this path is increasingly unlikely.

But that does not mean that it is impossible. According to Dave Wasserman, election analyst for the Cook Political Report, Trump’s base is key.

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In Pennsylvania, for example, he estimates there are about 2.4 million white voters with no college education who did not vote in 2016, but could do so this year. As Wasserman notes, “The potential for Trump to increase the intensity of participation among non-college whites is quite high.”

Who are the voters of the ‘white working class’?

Whites without a college degree in America are often referred to as the “white working class.” In truth, this tag is used quite flexibly.

The “working class” has long been considered as factory, trades, and construction workers “laborers.”

But according to American political scientists, the working class today is defined by both education and income levels: those who do not have a college degree and report annual household income below the median, as reported by the Bureau of the Census (in 2016, for example, the median annual household income was nearly $ 60,000).

Under this definition, small business owners and various “white collar” (those in service jobs) and “pink collar” (jobs traditionally held by women, such as caregiver roles) workers are also considered part of the American working class. .

Working-class voters have long held the key

Working-class voters have long played a huge role in American elections, even though they have been a minority among wage earners since the 1920s.

Working-class voters, particularly those who belonged to unions, were once strong supporters of candidates from the political left. These days, however, the left feels largely neglected by these voters, while the right increasingly relies on them to win the election.

As working-class voters have shifted to the right, the labels used to describe them have changed. In the 1970s, they were called “helmets”. In the 1980s, they were known as “Reagan Democrats” and, in the early 2000s, “NASCAR fathers.”

In the UK, they have been known as “working-class conservatives”, and in Australia, “Howard fighters”.

The story of working-class whites leaving left-wing parties is a catchy journalistic copy. In each election cycle, there are numerous articles and television voicemails depicting machinists or miners who have moved to the right, feeling disillusioned with their parents’ parties.

Books like The Heritage, Hillbilly Elegy, Strangers in their own land Y What’s wrong with Kansas? I have also tried to capture the essence of this changing working class and why these voters have drifted to the right and, at times, voted against their own economic interests.

Working-class voters are more complex than we think

The only problem with this narrative is that it is too orderly. In reality, the voting behavior of the white working class is more complex.

Take, for example, Trump supporters in the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton. As the data below shows, Trump did not get his highest share of the vote among America’s poorest whites, but among those in the “middle class” (that blanket label used to describe everyone between the rich and the well-off. live below the poverty line).

More than 10 percent of white voters with incomes below $ 30,000 actually voted for a candidate other than Trump or Clinton.

So while Trump won a large number of white working-class votes compared to Clinton, experts say it is not clear that he motivated more of these voters to the polls.

Other factors may also have come into play in 2016 that were unrelated to either income or education.

As this graph shows, voters with no college education divided their voting preferences equally between Democrats and Republicans in 1996.

Then an accelerated shift to the right began, resulting in a remarkable 39 percent margin of support for Trump over Clinton in 2016. For many academics, this “diploma split” was the most important explanation of why Trump won.

But many commentators have also pointed to racism and xenophobia to help explain Trump’s rise among these white working-class voters.

According to Identity crisis, a widely praised book on the 2016 election, Trump successfully “racialized the economy” by promoting among white Americans the belief that undeserving groups are moving forward while his group is lagging behind.

Biden shows empathy for working-class voters, but few new ideas

Have Democrats tried to attract these white working-class voters in the last election?

In the last elections, former President Barack Obama, Clinton and Biden have focused much of their economic rhetoric on industrial and construction employment, although these sectors only account for 20 percent of all jobs (the rest is in the service sector).

Most politicians lack the language to explain the reality that most jobs are service jobs. Because of this, it’s no wonder they also lack good ideas for tackling wage inequality and poor working conditions within the service sector.

Policies that address economic inequality are the best way to guard against the attraction of the white working class by populist figures like Trump. Biden hasn’t offered these voters much more than Clinton, with the possible exception of more empathy.

But Biden may not need to win over white working-class voters to defeat Trump. With minority turnout expected to be high and fewer white women and older voters expected to support Trump, the president’s hopes of winning on a smaller and smaller base seem increasingly remote.

Brendon O’Connor is Associate Professor of American Politics at the University of Sydney Center for American Studies.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.