The Fact That Democrats and Republicans Speaks Volumes About Our Political Moment
On September 27th, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library will host the second debate of the 2024 Republican presidential primary season. Rather than taking part in this spectacle, former president Donald Trump plans to give a primetime campaign speech in Detroit to a purported audience of current and former members of the United Auto Workers union, alongside other manufacturing workers who did not join the union.
UAW members are currently engaged in an historic strike against all of the Big Three automakers. The union is demanding more pay and better job protections for manufacturing workers as companies are poised to transition to electric vehicles even as offshoring and (inshoring to non-union states) remains a perennial threat.
The Biden Administration initially declared an intent to “stay out” of the conflict between auto workers and their employers. However, following Trump’s move to court manufacturing workers, the president has reversed course and now plans to join a picket line the day before Trump’s event, to shore up his labor bona fides.
The fact that labor is a contested constituency at all is a sign of the times.
Although Americans broadly support the UAW strike, union membership in the U.S. is now at a record low. Unions are perceived as increasingly divorced from the rank-and-file workers, and more focused on pushing niche agendas of the college-educated folks that administer them rather than protecting jobs or improving pay and working conditions for members. There has been discontent and even lawsuits about the use of union dues to support controversial political organizations (like Planned Parenthood and Black Lives Matter) or Democratic Party candidates. According to research by political scientist Oren Cass, the top reason non-union working class Americans mistrust unions is that they are perceived as being too political – and too focused on progressive cultural politics in particular.
Working class Americans tend to strongly support left economic policies but they aren’t down with contemporary progressive cultural politics.
In 2016, Trump effectively positioned himself around the values and priorities of blue collar workers. He was culturally moderate but symbolically conservative (i.e. he celebrated tradition, religion, patriotism, rootedness, etc.). He advocated for an “America first” foreign policy, complete with trade and immigration protectionism. He vowed to safeguard entitlements and restore domestic manufacturing. He pledged to make massive investments in infrastructure. He was completely unconcerned about deficit spending.
As president, however, Trump largely pursued a conventional Republican economic agenda: tax cuts, deregulation and repealing Obamacare. The infrastructure plans he proposed largely failed to materialize. Despite Trump’s campaign promises not to protect Medicare and Social Security, as President he began expressing openness to cutting entitlements as well. Despite portraying himself as a dealmaker who got things done and would ‘drain the swamp,’ the Trump administration was plagued by chronic corruption, scandal, incompetence and internal turmoil.
This gap between campaign promises and White House realities did not go unnoticed. The GOP saw noteworthy declines in union support from 2016 to 2020 which probably helped flip key states Rust Belt states back to the Democrats, once again changing the outcome of the election. And after losing in 2020, Trump further alienated many prospective GOP voters by engaging in election denial, sandbagging his party in the 2022 midterms.
In short, Trump has a lot of liabilities with working class voters going into the 2024 election. But for all that, the Democrats aren’t exactly in a strong position either.
College educated white professionals have come to represent the party’s primary economic base and increasingly set Democrat’s agenda and messaging. For them, left economic priorities come in a distant second to symbolic struggles.
As white professionals have risen in influence within the Democratic Party, non-White, working-class and religious-minority voters who have been increasingly alienated therefrom. Labor, a historically hardcore Democrat voting bloc, has now become a cross-pressured constituency. Indeed, the Democrats have struggled to build a stable coalition at all.
Trump seems to have little to offer workers beyond culture war grievances, implausible policy proposals and a record of failures and broken promises. Most of the right-wing “populist” alternatives to Trump are just offering little more than combatting “wokeness” in a more technocratic fashion while pushing standard Republican economic policies that redistribute income towards the millionaires and billionaires.
The “mainstream” GOP candidates are even worse. As governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley proudly declared, “I continue to be a union-buster, because every time you see me on national TV busting unions, another CEO calls.” And as a 2024 Republican nominee for president she has continued her aggressive anti-union crusade, even in the midst of the ongoing strikes, joined by fellow trad-Republican Tim Scott.
Nonetheless, Democrats continue to see attrition with working class Americans across the board – not just the “white working class” that the press likes to harp on. This weakness with working class constituents isn’t due to some defect in voters, it’s a glaring rebuke of what the Democratic Party has become.
Working class voters had been growing alienated from the Democratic Party since Bill Clinton’s first term. In 2016, these elections were sufficient to change the outcome of the race, flipping key Rust Belt states into the Republican column, and denying Hillary Clinton an electoral college victory. And then shifting back towards the Democrats in 2020, allowing Biden to win. Although unions are far less influential than they were in their heyday, their cross-pressured vote is likely to play in important role in shaping the 2024 outcome as well – particularly in swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Yet, neither party can truly be described as promoting a labor or worker centered agenda. Instead, one party is captured by white liberal urban professionals and the other by non-corporate business interests. Working class voters are therefore forced to choose between a party that ignores their economic interests while its core constituency lectures and villainizes them for their purported cultural deficiencies and seeks to regulate their speech and behaviors through aggressive administrative action versus a party that’s still more hostile to their economic interests but is at least willing to take the folks mocking, deriding and micromanaging them down a few pegs.
If this is the choice that working class voters have to make, it probably won’t work out well for the Democratic Party or America writ large.
At present, most American workers think the economy is in bad shape. They trust Donald Trump more than Joe Biden on economic issues. Something has to give.
In light of these realities, Biden dropping in for a picket line photo op on Tuesday is a good symbolic move. But photo ops alone aren’t going to save the party in 2024. After all, the next day Trump will be be putting on a good populist show as well. And he’ll be able to claim, with some justification, that the only reason Biden took a strong stand in the strike at all is because Trump had already positioned himself as being on the side of the striking workers (against both their employers and their purportedly corrupt and incompetent union leaders) and had already scheduled high-profile events in Michigan and Detroit to underscore his purported commitments to working class Americans.
It’s not a good look for the Democratic candidate to be playing catch up to the GOP frontrunner on labor disputes. But such is the world we live in these days.