US Democrats seen losing more ground with blue-collar workers

WASHINGTON: The findings are undeniable and are already troubling Democrats as they analyse their defeat: the party is falling further behind with the working-class voters it has claimed for decades to represent, experts say.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” leftwing Senator Bernie Sanders said in a scorching rebuke a day after the triumph of populist conservative Republican Donald Trump.

He added that the hemorrhage of the “white working class,” which stunned observers during Trump’s first victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, extended in 2024 to “Latino and Black American workers”.

Exit poll data compiled by the Edison Research Center revealed the president-elect won over 56 percent of people without college degrees, compared to 42 percent for Trump’s election rival Kamala Harris.

That marked a six-point increase for the billionaire compared to 2020.

In this large sociological survey, 57 percent of American voters declared themselves “without a college degree,” compared to 59 percent in 2020.

Experts noted that Trump, a New York billionaire businessman, had succeeded in convincing a significant portion of the white working class -- along with growing minorities of Hispanic, Black, and Arab voters -- that he better understood their concerns.

After four years in power, during which consumer prices surged due to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Harris was also seen as responsible for the inflation that has eroded living standards.

“Kamala Harris failed to connect” with “struggling white and Hispanic women” in a deeply unequal America, said Sylvie Laurent, a professor at Sciences Po university in Paris.

“They manage the family budget, shop, and prepare meals. Food prices have risen by more than 30 percent since 2020,” she said.

“In a country where some people have low salaries, and where healthcare and housing are more difficult to afford than they were 10 years ago, this is unbearable.”

Like others in the Democratic Party, which spans the political spectrum from center-right to left, congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez called for self-reflection, while aiming some barbs at the party’s leaders in Washington.

After media projected her narrow re-election to the US House of Representatives from a conservative rural county in western Washington State, she criticised her fellow Democrats for showing “condescension” toward the working classes.

“A lot of elected officials get calloused to the ways that they’re disrespecting people,” Gluesenkamp Perez said in an interview Friday with The New York Times.

Recounting how she had recently discussed the impact of drug addiction among new parents, she suggested Democrats needed a tougher policy on border security to stop narcotics entering the United States.

“What is empathetic - to tell them that’s their problem, or to take border security seriously?” the young congresswoman told the newspaper.

In the swing state of Michigan, part of the industrial north which flipped back to Trump, labor union leaders had endorsed Harris, but their influence over younger voters appears to be waning.

Many young blue-collar workers encountered by AFP during the campaign found Trump’s message of tariffs and tax cuts appealing -- and were actively courted by the Republican.

Isaiah Goddard, an employee at Ford, said he would vote for Trump, ignoring the guidance of the United Auto Workers union, which also represents the aerospace and agriculture sectors.

David McCall, from the United Steelworkers, lamented after the vote that “one of the great tragedies of this grueling election season has been the way in which key figures sought to divide working Americans against each other”.

While Trump put immigration, inflation and security at the heart of his campaign, many voters saw Harris as having other priorities -- even as she repeatedly stressed her goal to lower costs for low-income and working-class Americans.

The pro-Democratic public opinion research center Blueprint pointed out in a study posted on X that the third-most cited reason voters in swing states had turned away from Harris was because “she focused more on cultural and social issues, like transgender rights, rather than helping the working class”.