As the 2024 presidential race enters its final week, media coverage has increasingly focused on the candidates’ efforts to win over a supposedly crucial swing group: working-class voters.
For example, even though Vice President Harris talks incessantly about her “middle-class” roots, Michigan Democrats fear she isn’t doing enough to appeal to working-class voters. They aren’t alone. “If Harris loses,” pollster Frank Luntz reasons, “it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people.” A viral jeremiad in The New Yorker even warns that if Harris fails to connect with blue-collar workers, the Democrats will risk becoming a mouthpiece for “coastal elites and upscale professionals.”
We think these concerns reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of America’s electorate. Most conversations about the “working class” rely on disparate definitions of this group — the lack of a four-year college degree, union membership, a blue-collar or manufacturing job. Although each of these criteria represents a reasonable demarcation of the working class, the problem with using them interchangeably is that they refer to distinct groups of voters who face different challenges and even have conflicting interests.
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Michael T. Hartney is a faculty member in the department of political science at Boston College and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Vladimir Kogan is a professor of political science at the Ohio State University.
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