The Left Has a Working-Class Problem

 In a recent column published by the New Republic, Michael Tomasky asks, “Why don’t lefty candidates do better among working-class voters?” This shouldn’t be a mystery considering that Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024 was delivered by a multiracial working-class coalition. He accomplished that historic feat by building his campaign platform around the things working-class voters care about. The real mystery is why anyone is still struggling to understand this obvious fact. Tomasky does at least grasp that, even in the recent Democratic primary in Michigan, far left candidate Abdul El-Sayed underperformed so badly among working class voters that it very nearly cost him the nomination. 

‘Why don’t leftie candidates do better among working-class voters?’ These people are often corrupt and their putative policies are frequently downright dumb.

Part of the problem is that our friends on the left don’t understand how to define “working class.” Being intellectually lazy, they rely on the standard academic definition of the working class — adult workers lacking a four-year college degree. “By that measure,” writes José García of the Ford Foundation, “the working class constitutes over 60 percent of the U.S. labor force — more than 93 million people as of 2023. This group is not only large, but richly diverse: Roughly 53 percent are non-Hispanic white, 13 percent black, and 25 percent Hispanic.” Yet this academic definition of working class has little or no meaning to its actual members.  Political scientist Nicholas Jacobs explains in The Conversation that the fabled “diploma divide” isn’t a satisfactory definition:

While a larger proportion of the electorate has obtained a college degree and household incomes have risen, the share of Americans who consider themselves working class has remained remarkably stable: roughly 35 percent of voters for the past 70 years, 38 percent in 2024.… There are conventional ways to define the working class, but they often miss how people understand their own place in society. In the 2024 American National Election Studies, for example, 21 percent of those who identify as working class have a college degree, only 5 percent belong to a private-sector union, and 37 percent own stocks. Conversely, most Americans without a college degree do not identify as working class. 

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Despite its limitations, the diploma divide is routinely cited by the commentariat as the most reliable predictor of voting behavior in modern democracies. College-educated voters increasingly support the Democratic Party, while non-college voters lean heavily toward the Republican. Most of their disquisitions suggest that Republicans, particularly MAGA voters, are by definition intellectually stunted. In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, the pundits invoked the diploma divide to explain the outcome, frequently citing a Pew Research study, “Voters with a four-year degree — who constitute about 40 percent of all voters — favored Harris by a double-digit margin (16 percentage points).” Nonetheless, Donald Trump won.

The problem here is that not all college degrees — or colleges — are created equal. People with four year college degrees, including most journalists, flatter themselves that they are part of a vaguely defined “elite.” But that term describes individuals or groups with power, influence, and wealth. Yet, in 2026, “higher education” doesn’t confer any of these things. Indeed many universities hand out degrees that are little more than participation trophies. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, literature Professor Tyler Jagt told of an assignment for his rhetoric and writing class that asked students to read a 20-page paper. Not one student finished the paper.” As Jay Rogers, a private equity and hedge fund manager writes in The Hill:

A degree does not, on its own, confer common sense or merit. Strada Institute and Burning Glass found humanities and cultural studies majors carry an underemployment rate of 55 percent one year after graduation. That is more than twice the rate for engineering or health grads, implying that some degrees are more worthy than others. A large loan balance and a diploma do not make a person wiser or more employable than the guy who skipped campus and went straight to work as a plumber. Hard work and the ability to deliver real value to somebody else remain the actual measure of a person.

Even in the New York Times, David Brooks made the case that the 2024 election outcome was the result of Democrats turning their backs on working-class Americans: “That great sucking sound you heard was the redistribution of respect. People who climbed the academic ladder were feted with accolades, while those who didn’t were rendered invisible.… Society worked as a vast segregation system, elevating the academically gifted above everybody else. Before long, the diploma divide became the most important chasm in American life.” But the holders of the diplomas were not and are not gifted. While writing this, I glanced at my postgraduate degree hanging on the wall (an MBA from a good school) yet I’ll vote Republican in November. 

This isn’t meant to suggest that the diploma divide isn’t a factor in elections. It is. But the frustration of marginalized Americans with self-styled elites is a real thing. We should take care not to conflate education with good judgment. Real world data dispels the myth that a college “education” somehow renders us “elite.” All of which brings us back to Michael Tomasky’s original question: ‘Why don’t leftie candidates do better among working-class voters?’ These people are often corrupt and their putative policies are frequently downright dumb.

https://spectator.org/the-left-has-a-working-class-problem/