Joe Biden won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and the Democrats saw an increased share of votes from white working-class voters in 2020. What did he do to win this crucial support in the heartland? Three things. He went there frequently, which Hillary Clinton did not. Biden talked about jobs, with the message that “we can revitalize our industrial base at the heart of the American middle class.” Most importantly, Biden treated working-class whites with respect.
After 2016, Democrats worried whether they could appeal to enough white working-class Trump voters to win in 2020 without alienating and disrespecting a key Democratic constituency: voters of color.
They just did. Biden won because he won back Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The percentage of white working class men voting Democratic increased from 23% in 2016 to 28% in 2020, while among white working class women, support for Democrats increased from 34% to 36%. These voters played a key role in delivering victories for Biden in the Rust Belt states where Clinton lost the presidency in 2016.
But white working-class voters were not the whole story by any means. Biden also won the election this year because he flipped Arizona and probably Georgia, which had not voted Democratic in a presidential election since the 1990s, and by holding on to Nevada. Large Latinx turnout played an outsized role in both Arizona and Nevada. Black voters played a central role in Georgia, thanks to the voter-turnout efforts led by Stacey Abrams. Not to mention that Congressman Jim Clyburn and Black voters saved Biden’s candidacy when it was faltering, by delivering a win in the South Carolina primary.
Biden’s winning coalition was a race-class coalition. This election shows that Democrats can simultaneously appeal to voters of color and to enough (though hardly all) working class whites. The election also severely undermines the “demography is destiny” thesis – that people of color will rote-vote Democratic. Trump won 45% of the Latinx vote in Florida, fueled by Cuban and Venezuelan Americans whom he courted for years through relentless messaging that Democrats would bring socialism. More shockingly, Democrats also lost Texas in part because Latinos in South Texas swung to Trump, cancelling out Democrats’ gains in urban areas. Mexican Americans within spitting distance of Trump’s wall swung strongly for him. How does this make sense?
There are plenty of reasons. Many Latinos have a strong religious orientation, traditionalist views of gender and family, and a strong commitment to small business. All politics is about identity, for sure — George W. Bush’s as much as Kamala Harris’s — but demography is not identity. After all, we aren’t confused that all white people don’t vote the same way.
What did Biden do to win crucial support in the heartland? Three things. He went there frequently, which Hillary Clinton did not. Biden talked about jobs, with the message that “we can revitalize our industrial base at the heart of the American middle class.” Most importantly, Biden treated working-class whites with respect, which had been sorely lacking when Clinton decried Trump supporters as “deplorables” and Barack Obama condescendingly described Midwestern working-class voters as bitter people clinging to guns and religion. Biden instead pointed out that Trump was a fake while signaling his own respect for working class folks: “I’ve dealt with guys like Donald Trump my whole life, who would look down on us because we didn’t have a lot of money or your parents didn’t go to college. Guys who think they’re better than you. Guys who inherit everything they’ve ever gotten in their life and squander it.”
In all the election coverage, there’s surprisingly little discussion about that ocean of red voters in rural middle-America. These left-behind Americans are being treated as irrelevant, which is precisely what caused them to see red in the first place. It’s time to reread Katherine J. Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment, which depicts Wisconsin’s veer to the right with the 2010 election of Scott Walker as governor. The class resentments Cramer found in Wisconsin reflected not culture wars about abortion and gay marriage but a sense of having been belittled and left behind. There are huge swaths of the rural U.S. with no hospitals and no grocery stores that have left many Americans with limited access to essential health care and fresh food. Cramer describes a “rural consciousness”: the sense that “the government must be mishandling my hard-earned dollars, because my taxes keep going up and clearly they are not coming back to benefit people like me. So why would I want an expansion of government?” She found opposition to Obamacare even by people in obvious need of medical care. Obamacare was too expensive to fit their families’ budgets; with all the focus on covering the poor, these folks in the fragile and former middle class felt left out again.
If there is any silver lining to the Electoral College (a stretch, I admit), it is that it makes it essential for Democrats to signal to the heartland — not just the Rust Belt but also rural America — that government will work for them. This is all the more pressing because rural votes are also overweighted in the Senate, which may well retain a Republican majority despite the flood of blue-state campaign contributions to senatorial campaigns. Until Democrats find a way to appeal to rural voters, Biden’s ability to deliver, for anyone, may well be hamstrung by Mitch McConnell.
With their coalition of people of color, the white working class, and college-educated liberals, Democrats won a close election in the midst of worldwide death and the worst unemployment since the Great Depression. They need to reach out to rural voters, too, if they are to end the Gilded-age-level inequality, and help Americans of all races gain access to stable middle-class lives. For centuries, rural people in China were of shorter stature than city folk because elites kept the wealth in the cities. If we do the same, it will fuel support for future Trumps. Americans do not accept stunting as their due — nor should they.