There have been endless laments for the white working-class voters the Democratic Party lost over the past few decades, particularly during the 10 years of the Trump era. But detailed 2024 election analysis also makes it clear that upper-income white voters have become a much more powerful force in the party than they ever were before. These upscale white voters are driving the transformation of the Democratic Party away from its role as the representative of working-class America and closer to its nascent incarnation as the party of the well-to-do.
A detailed analysis of data compiled by the Cooperative Election Study shows that in 2024, 46.8 percent of white Kamala Harris voters had annual household incomes over $80,000, while 53.2 earned less than that. In fact, according to data analysis by Caroline Soler, a research analyst for the Cooperative Election Study, the single largest bloc of white Democratic voters in 2024 — 27.5 percent — had incomes of $120,000 or more.
Along similar lines, Tom Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University, provided The Times with figures from the American National Election Studies for 2020, the most recent year for which data is available. The ANES numbers show that white voters in the 68th to 100th income percentiles — the top third — cast 49.05 percent of their ballots for Biden and 50.95 for Trump. White voters in the top 5 percent of the income distribution voted 52.9 percent for Biden and 47.1 percent for Trump.
These figures stand in sharp contrast to election results as recent as those of 2008. Among white voters in the top third of the income distribution that year, John McCain, the Republican nominee, beat Barack Obama 67.1 percent to 32.9 percent.
Frances Lee, a political scientist at Princeton, responded by email to my inquiries about this phenomenon: “An objective look at both party’s coalitions in the mass electorate would have to acknowledge that neither Republicans nor Democrats are the ‘party of the working class.’”
Instead, Lee argued,
Both parties are vulnerable to charges of elitism. Republicans really do push for tax cuts that benefit the wealthy. Democrats, meanwhile, take stances on social issues that appeal to socioeconomic elites.
The underlying truth, Lee continued, “is that the major parties in the U.S. today are not primarily organized around a social class cleavage.”
This evolution of the two parties has been slow but steady over the past three decades, first emerging in the early 1990s as education polarization drove those with college degrees to the left while working-class voters without degrees moved right.
Sam Zacher, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern California, has detailed both the shift and its policy consequences in a series of papers, including his 2023 article, “Polarization of the Rich: The Increasingly Democratic Allegiance of Affluent Americans and the Politics of Redistribution.”
“Beginning in the 1990s,” Zacher writes,
the Democratic Party started winning increasing shares of rich, upper-middle income, high-income occupation and stock-owning voters. This appears true across voters of all races and ethnicities, is concentrated among (but not exclusive to) college-educated voters, and is only true among voters living in larger metropolitan areas. In the 2010s, Democratic candidates’ electoral appeal among affluent voters reached above-majority levels.
Zacher has developed his own system to measure affluence. It includes income but, he added, “I also rely on occupation and stock ownership.” As sources of information, he wrote, “I analyze data from the American National Election Studies, the Cooperative Election Study and the General Social Survey.”
Using what Zacher calls “this original, holistic assessment” reveals “that in today’s politics, Democrats and Republicans roughly split support among rich, upper-middle income, high-income occupation and stock-owning voters.”
Equally significant, Zacher writes, “While the voters in more advantaged economic classes who have increased their support for the Democratic Party are, on average, more educated and reside in larger metropolitan areas, this polarization of the affluent is spread across all races and ethnicities and is not only relegated to college-educated voters.”
The changing demographics of the Democratic Party, Zacher notes, “may make it more difficult to execute an economically redistributive agenda — in an era of rising inequality — since it would have to redistribute away from voters in its own coalition.”
“How affluent, exactly, are these new Democratic voters?” Zacher asks:
C.E.S. uniquely began collecting data on family income categories up to $500,000 and above in 2011, which appear to be the highest income subcategories to exist in any over-time political survey data. $500,000 and higher (by family income) is roughly the top 1 percent of society; $200,000 and higher is roughly the top 10 percent (in 2020).
The $200,000+ category clearly preferred the Democrat in 2012, 2016, and 2020 — and even the $500,000+ category reported voting for the Democratic candidate more often than the Republican in 2012 and 2016.
Analysis of election data, Zacher writes, “yields evidence that the Democratic voting coalition of the 2010s has taken the form of a ‘U-shape’ by income, a departure from the past,” adding that “it is increasingly the case that the income groups that most prefer Democratic candidates are the lowest and highest income categories.”
Part of the shift Zacher describes results from the rapidly changing education levels of the very affluent:
In 2008, just 27.8 percent of the most-affluent voter group (at least $150,000 family income) had postgraduate degrees, while 41.4 percent of the group had less than a college degree — but by 2020, 35.8 percent of this affluent group had postgraduate degrees (an 8.0 percentage point increase), and just 31.1 percent had less than a college degree (a 10.3 percentage point decrease).
Many political analysts and Democratic strategists find the changing demographics of the party worrisome.
I asked Mike Lux, one of the founders of Democratic Partners, a consulting firm serving progressive clients, if the rising affluence and education levels of white Democrats weakens the party’s claim to be the representative of the working class.
Lux replied by email:
Of course it does. The foundational idea that Democrats are the party of working people (and its corollary that Republicans are the party of business and the wealthy) has grown much more tenuous than it once was. Democrats are lost without that core idea.
Lux argued that conversations with working-class voters show they “want a candidate and a political party that will fight hard for you. Right now, they don’t think that is the Democrats.”
Does that make the party legitimately vulnerable to the charge of elitism?
Lux:
Both parties have some elements of elitism. The Republicans have a hard case to make when Trump’s cabinet is full of billionaires and they let big business write their own rules, and when they are cutting taxes for billionaires and paying for it by cutting Medicaid and V.A. benefits and food for hungry children.
But, yes, the Democratic Party has some elements of elitism. To survive, we need to re-emphasize our working-class identity and that we are fighting for regular folks. We need to not talk down to folks, and not spend so much time hanging out with celebrities.
Is the demographic shift among white Democrats a factor in the loss of Black and Hispanic voters?
Lux:
Yes, there is a class element to the erosion in support among Black and Hispanic voters. That erosion is mostly coming from working-class folks in those communities. Just like with white folks, working- class voters want candidates to focus on economic issues, and they want people who will fight for them and their communities, to be their proxy.
Working class voters’ perception, fed brilliantly by the Republican and right-wing media infrastructure, was that Democrats cared more about other issues and other people than they did about the essential economic needs of regular working families.
Ariel Malka, a professor of psychology and political science at Yeshiva University, tackled the same issues as Lux from a different vantage point, writing by email that Democrats need to “counter forces promoting an image as the party of left-wing cultural elites.”
That strategic approach, Malka cautioned, “comes with challenges”:
First, Republicans relentlessly define the Democratic Party in terms of woke excesses despite the fact that many Democratic officeholders reject these excesses, so it is not clear how much messaging and policy shifts would be rewarded with a more culturally moderate partisan reputation.
Second, cultivating a socially moderate reputation is challenging when influential progressives insist on aggressively left-wing social messaging, often without giving serious consideration to the notion that this might be electorally disadvantageous.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle, Malka wrote, is that developments in this country reflect “larger trends in the Western world” that
have consolidated highly educated and culturally liberal citizens within left-leaning parties over the last several decades, making it hard for them to maintain their reputations as working-class parties.
This — along with rising inequality and job displacement from global trade and technological advance — has yielded feelings of cultural and economic resentment that have redirected many working class voters from left-leaning parties to right-wing populism.
In short, the Republicans are in a solid position to use hot-button cultural issues as a wedge, and the nature of the Democratic Party as a somewhat disjointed coalition of diverse interests and viewpoints makes it vulnerable to this.
For Yphtach Lelkes, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, the Democrats’ working class image has been gone for decades. Lelkes wrote by email:
It is true that Democrats are increasingly perceived to be the party of the elite. That is certainly true to the extent that the only counties that swung left were the most educated counties in America.
The Democratic Party is clearly not a working-class party, particularly as its policy shifted from predistribution (which is most preferred by the less educated) to redistribution.
Despite these changes in the image of the party, Lelkes continued,
Democratic policy is more closely geared toward the working class than Republican policy. The majority of Black and Hispanic voters still vote for the Democratic Party. The Big Beautiful Bill will be the most regressive law passed in decades, and tariffs are a tax on the working class.
In contemporary elections, Lelkes argued, “perceptions are king, and the Republican Party has done a fantastic job in painting Democrats as out of touch, elite and extreme.”
Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and one of founders of the Analyst Institute Board, made the case in an email that “Neither party is genuinely ‘of’ the working class in terms of consistently addressing their core daily concerns or consistently siding with them over corporate interests — despite isolated gestures like Biden’s presence on the U.A.W. picket line.”
This fact may contribute to the sustained rejection of incumbents in recent years, Podhorzer argued:
The Democratic Party is as dependent on the failures of Trump and the Republican Party, as Trump and the Republican Party are dependent on the failures of the Democratic Party.
In nine of the last 10, and 11 of the last 13 elections, the party in power has lost, a pattern with no historical precedent. At the presidential level, three consecutive party switches have happened only once, more than a century ago. That neither party offers what voters want is further evidenced by the fact that the 1.3 point average margin is the lowest for three consecutive elections in well over a century.
If, as Podhorzer argued, working-class interests are secondary in both parties, it may be because the divide over values has become central to partisan differences.
Julie Wronski, a political scientist at the University of Mississippi, described this phenomenon in an email responding to my queries, citing
the stark divides in moral values and psychological orientations between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats tend to focus more on the moral values of care and fairness, while Republicans tend hold stronger needs for order, security and certainty.
These innate needs for order, certainty and security are linked to a view that the world is a hostile place, where acceptance of outsiders is a risky decision that could harm a group’s cohesion and identity (where a group can be based on national identity, racial identity, or gender identity).
Yet, on average, Democrats don’t necessarily see the world in these terms, and as you mention, they tend to place higher values on other groups like racial minorities who have been traditionally marginalized and harmed. They don’t see these levels of acceptance as a threat to national, racial or gender identity — they are more fluid in how they view the world and the boundaries of the groups they belong to.
Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, reinforced Wronski’s argument, writing in an email that the gap between perception and image on one hand and substance and reality on the other is driven by the salience of cultural issues at the expense of economic policies:
The changes in the Democratic and Republican electorates over the past 25 years are a direct result of the move from political conflict structured around social welfare and the size of government after the New Deal to conflict being dominated more by cultural issues and concerns.
To the extent that partisan conflict is structured by issues like gay/transgender rights, abortion, immigration, race, and gender equality, the social liberalism of educated Democratic voters and activists makes it difficult for the party to develop appeals to more socially conservative and religious voters.
Feldman posed a rhetorical question: “Can you look at Democratic and Republican economic policies this century and believe that the Republican Party is winning less educated voters because it is enacting policies that benefit them?”
The problem for Democrats, Feldman argued, is that “many less well-educated voters are willing to set aside their economic self-interest for the socially conservative positions that dominate the Republican Party.”
The entire debate over partisanship and the working class is, according to Herbert Kitschelt, a political scientist at Duke, fundamentally off kilter.
“The gist of my reasoning,” Kitschelt wrote in an email, “is to challenge the entire ‘working class’ nostalgia that has beset parts of the Democratic Party and public intellectuals.”
Kitschelt acknowledged that
blue-collar workers are now, in their majority, voting Republican, old mining regions and old industrial towns, once upon a time strongholds of the Democrats, are now often hegemonically Republican and the alienation of blue-collar workers from the Democratic Party is not only one of economic abandonment, but also cultural abandonment of traditional religious piety, gender relations and sense of social conformism in the local community.
But, Kitschelt contended, “The well-meaning strategy-inducing conclusion that is directly or indirectly suggested by these empirical findings — namely that Democrats have to ‘win back’ the blue-collar working class — is false for many reasons and will in fact drive Democrats into the political wilderness.”
Why?
Because “the American industrial manufacturing working class has dramatically shrunk as a share of employment (and population) from about 25-30 percent of the labor force in the 1960s to barely 10 percent now.”
Kitschelt added that
Many of the “working-class” voters who now support Trumpist populism never voted in the past. Trump could mobilize an electorate that in the past never felt represented by any party, particularly many of those whites with strong xenophobic and racist opinions who never felt represented either by the Democrats or the older upper-middle class moderate Republicans.
Finally, the broad label “working class” masks key differences among non-college voters, preventing Democrats from adopting strategies designed to target those voters who might be most receptive to their message.
Kitschelt:
Many citizens who do not have four-year college degrees are not blue-collar “working class” in the sense that Democratic pollsters or ethnographers like to imagine, and the profile of defection from the Democratic Party has to be differentiated a great deal between those particularly receptive to Trumpism and those who are not.
Kitschelt places groups of voters into an “unreachable” category, as far as the Democratic Party is concerned: “higher-income, non-four-year college degree voters — often small businesspeople, in crafts, especially construction and real estate — who particularly experience the sense of downward mobility” and “white Evangelical Christians who are substantially underrepresented among college-educated voters and who are particularly prone to subscribe to xenophobia, nationalism, racism and support of traditional paternalist and heterosexual gender roles.”
There are, however, Kitschelt continued,
many elements of the electorate without four-year college degrees that do not fit any of the templates of Trumpist populism:
They are wage earners in clerical-administrative jobs in banks, insurance companies, municipal administrations, logistics firms, tourism/travel and in sociocultural (semi-)professions in health care, education and a wide spectrum of cultural and social services.
These voters are more favorably disposed to and winnable by moderate Democratic Party strategies, although they have been put off by the more radical cultural-identitarian elements of Democratic progressivism.
The “radical cultural-identitarian” wing of the Democratic Party, Kitschelt argued, is concentrated among “four-year college educated voters who are not high-income earners by any stretch of the imagination.” Instead, they “typically have humanities or social science degrees and work in the sociocultural professions.”
This constituency of
lower-to-middle income highly educated white progressive urban Democrats tends to press the cultural identitarian ethnic and gender agenda of the Democrats the most assertively, alienating formerly Democratic voters from that party, including many minority voters, above all Hispanics and Asians, but increasingly also African Americans, who are concerned about bread-and-butter issues of health, housing, education and public safety.
For the past decade, Kitschelt argued,
the Democratic Party has advanced an assembly of particularistic group demands that have alienated many voters. The party has been captured by specialized “rent-seeking” groups that have tried to carve out specific benefits for their respective unique constituencies.
What, then, is to be done?
Kitschelt had a thought:
The party has to embrace a universalism of political demands that rejects any kind of bias against citizens based on ethnic, religious, gender and other cultural grounds. The party should teach a conception of citizenship that acknowledges, recognizes and tolerates differences, albeit without ranking and prioritizing any particular way of life. This implies abstention from a divisive agenda of defining privileges and special tiers of consideration for specific groups that would precipitate the fragmentation of the party’s electoral coalition.
Kitschelt may well be right in theory, but to achieve his objective would require cunning and indeed genius we have not seen among party leaders in a long time.
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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Tuesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.
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