Hillary Clinton’s campaign made two fateful decisions that decisively undercut her ability to beat Donald Trump. But these struggles tie back to the 2016 presidential election. In a proximate sense, it’s not hard to see how this might be happening, given America’s economic situation and Democrats’ campaigning choices. Available data and reporting strongly suggest that this further decline is being driven by working-class voters, the overwhelming majority of this demographic. Democrats carried Hispanic voters by 35 points in 2018 and 25 points in 2020. But nonwhite working-class voters-especially Hispanic voters-may be following suit. In part, this results from further deterioration of Democratic support among white working-class voters.

(The American Enterprise Institute’s demographic-group tracker averages poll results and confirms this yawning gap in Democratic support.) In the latest national New York Times/Siena poll, Democrats have a 15-point deficit among working-class voters but a 14-point advantage among college-educated voters. Democrats are losing voters without college degrees while running up the score among college-educated voters. Polling points to a continuation of these trends in 2022. In contrast, Democrats’ advantage among white college-educated voters improved by 16 points from 2012 to 2020, an edge that delivered Joe Biden the White House And between 20 alone, the Democratic advantage among Hispanic voters declined by 16 points, overwhelmingly driven by the defection of working-class voters. But until Democrats are prepared to grapple honestly with the sources of their electoral struggles, that streak is unlikely to end.įrom 2012 to 2020, the Democrats not only saw their support among white working-class voters-those without college degrees-crater, they also saw their advantage among nonwhite working-class voters fall by 18 points. Those mistakes, compounded over subsequent election cycles and amplified by vocal activists, now threaten to deliver another stinging disappointment for the Democratic Party. The roots of the Democrats’ struggles go back at least as far as Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, and, as important, to the way in which many Democrats chose to interpret her defeat. This inattentiveness to working-class concerns is not peculiar to the present election. They are instead focused on the economy, inflation, and crime, and they are skeptical of the Democratic Party’s performance in all three realms.

But these issues have much less appeal to working-class voters. This year, Democrats have chosen to run a campaign focused on three things: abortion rights, gun control, and safeguarding democracy-issues with strong appeal to socially liberal, college-educated voters. Not only has the emerging Democratic majority I once predicted failed to materialize, but many of the nonwhite voters who were supposed to deliver it are instead voting for Republicans. America’s historical party of the working class keeps losing working-class support. As we move into the endgame of the 2022 election, the Democrats face a familiar problem.

White among us character