For victory in 2024, Democrats must win back the working class

A spate of recent polls showing President Biden either tied with or falling behind Donald Trump has some Democrats in a swivet. How could Biden be trailing a fabulist he’s already beaten, who’s facing 91 felony charges, and whose business empire may be crumbling around him? 

It’s a good question. Today’s polls aren’t predictive of an election that’s more than a year out. But they are indicative of how little headway the president and his party have made since 2020 on their central political challenge: enlarging their party by winning back working class voters.  

Luckily for them, a lifetime of deceit continues to catch up with Trump. A New York Supreme Court justice has ruled that his real estate companies defrauded banks and insurance companies by ludicrously overstating their properties’ value. The judge yanked their licenses to do business in New York and said he’d appoint a receiver to dismantle them.  

If the ruling stands, it would kill Trump’s real estate business and put the lie to his carefully cultivated image as a fabulously successful businessman taking on an incompetent political establishment. That’s been key to his “outsider” appeal to disgruntled blue-collar voters.  

So, it’s not unreasonable for Democrats to believe that, despite his abysmal approval ratings, Biden could yet parlay public anger at the Republicans’ anti-abortion crusade and Trump’s accumulating legal wounds into a second presidential term next November.   

Yet even if he manages to eke out a win, a Biden-Trump rematch would likely leave the parties at rough parity. Until that changes, Democrats’ path to victory will be exceedingly narrow.  

To break this political deadlock, Democrats need to start reaching across the “diploma divide.” They’re doing fine with college graduates; Biden won 61 percent of them in 2020.  

But Trump won white non-college voters by a massive, 25 point margin. The New York Times reports that “In nearly 20 Western and Southern states, Democrats are virtually shut out of statewide offices largely because of their weakness among the white working class.”

Given these realities, many expected the moderate Biden to craft a governing strategy aimed at defusing partisan tribalism and courting blue-collar voters. Instead, the White House spent much of its first year trying to pass a strictly partisan Build Back Better bill tailored to the leftist tastes of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the House Progressive Caucus.   

That managed to make Biden appear both less moderate and more partisan than the national healer he had promised to be during his campaign. Not once but twice, he encouraged House progressives to block a vote on his own bipartisan infrastructure bill as a way of putting pressure on moderate Democrats to support a $5 trillion grab-bag of new spending.    

This confusing turn of events, following the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, took a toll on the president’s standing. At midsummer 2021, his public approval stood at a healthy 50 percent. By the fall, Biden was underwater and by January 2022 his job approval had sunk to around 40 percent, where it has hovered ever since.  

Instead of placating the left, Democrats should have focused from the start on enlarging their coalition. With a vengeful Trump thrashing around like a Cocaine bear, progressives have little choice but to support Biden’s reelection if they want to preserve our constitutional democracy.   

What Democrats really need is more voters. The only way to break today’s partisan stalemate and build a solid center-left majority is to target non-college voters, who are expected to be nearly two-thirds of eligible voters in 2024. Democrats must whittle away at Trump’s huge margin with white voters and stop hemorrhaging support among Black and especially Hispanic non-college voters.  

That starts with an honest assessment of why voters — especially non-college voters — are so down on Democrats’ handling of the economy. Even as the inflation rate has moderated, the public’s top concern remains the high price of food, fuel, housing and other necessities. The administration’s efforts to focus them instead on “Bidenomics” haven’t succeeded.  

Or consider the message sent by another White House initiative: the $400 billion plan to forgive college student loans. An analysis by my organization, the Progressive Policy Institute, shows that while the plan would help some low-income borrowers, its benefits would flow mainly to students from affluent families. 

The push for loan forgiveness also highlights a glaring disparity between Democrats’ solicitude for college students, who are already on track toward higher lifetime earnings, and their comparatively modest investments in the majority of young Americans who don’t have college degrees.  

Educational polarization also manifests itself in cultural politics. As the liberal political demographer Ruy Teixeira has documented, the progressive left has saddled Democrats with “genuinely unpopular positions” on crime, immigration, race, gender and schooling.  

Those positions are even unpopular among Democrats — specifically nonwhite working class voters who mostly identify as moderate-to-conservative. Their voices rarely carry in Washington, where very liberal white, college-educated professionals presume to speak for them.   

But it’s not too late for Democrats to start reorienting their cultural and economic policies around what working families actually want rather than what progressive elites think they should want. Their ability to keep Trump or a Trump clone out of the White House just may depend on it. 

Will Marshall is founder and CEO of the Progressive Policy Institute.