Bernadette Daywalt had yet to decide whom to vote for in the presidential election. But the 69-year-old retiree said her decision would probably come down to economics.
She and her 82-year-old sister have struggled to keep up with rising grocery prices over the past few years, and they now frequent a food pantry in the Philadelphia suburb where they live.
“I think we’re headed downhill right now, with the cost of food, the cost of everything,” Ms. Daywalt said as she checked on her voter registration at an outreach van parked outside the Elmwood Park Zoo on a crisp October afternoon. She voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, and she felt better economically when he was president.
Ms. Daywalt’s perceptions underscore a tough reality facing Democrats, who have been trying to recapture a working-class vote that has been slipping away from them.
Many economists say Vice President Kamala Harris’s economic proposals would do more to help everyday Americans than the agenda put forward by former President Donald J. Trump. One model suggests that her package would boost post-tax income for the poorest Americans by 18 percent by 2026, much more than the 1.4 percent bump Mr. Trump’s ideas would offer.
Yet America’s recent burst of inflation has put a serious dent in the nation’s economic confidence, and it has been especially tough for those on a tight budget. After decades of economic backsliding, many working-class voters are eager to hear that significant changes are coming — and are skeptical of the experts who say Mr. Trump’s promises to remake America might do little to benefit them.
The upshot is that Ms. Harris’s targeted economic proposals, many of which aim at the working class, may not be enough to change political reality. America’s blue-collar voters have been turning increasingly red in recent years, and they seem to be leaning in that direction once again.
“Concrete, specific political promises are often not as powerful in the electorate as emotional appeals that tap into fears and anxieties,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University.
Working-Class Shift
Working-class voters have been moving their support toward Republicans for years, a trend that has been especially true for white voters with less than a college education. Mr. Trump appears to be poised to maintain that foothold on Tuesday.
A national New York Times/Siena College poll of the nation’s likely electorate taken in late October found that 64 percent of white voters without a college degree planned to cast a ballot for Mr. Trump, and just 34 percent for Ms. Harris. And while Ms. Harris retains much higher support among nonwhite voters without a college degree, support from Democrats has been slipping over time even among minority voters.
The reasons for the shift are complex. Some are economic — tied to the erosion of unions and a loss of manufacturing jobs — and others are cultural.
“Even before Trump appeared, white working-class culture began turning more conservative and Republican,” said Paul Clark, a professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies labor and employment relations. He said that being a Trump voter had increasingly become an identity: It often goes right along with owning a truck and a gun in battleground states like Pennsylvania.
Mr. Trump has branded himself as a “blue-collar billionaire” who embraces irreverence and wears trucker hats. He’s famously rich, which political scientists said made him an aspirational model for many voters.
But the shift also comes as Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are offering very different visions of the economic future. And if the analyses are right, it may mean that the working class is poised to vote against its self-interest.
‘Robin Hood in Reverse’
Mr. Trump’s economic proposals amount to a disruptive bid to restore an economy of the past — one in which America was more industrial and more squarely dependent on fossil fuels.
The former president is pledging to lift tariffs even more than he did in his first term. He has promised the “largest deportation operation in American history.” And he says he will lower prices by encouraging domestic oil and gas production to drive fuel costs lower. He argues that cheaper fuel will lower the costs of other products and prod the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, though economists and oil analysts have voiced skepticism about the feasibility of such plans.
At the same time, Mr. Trump has proposed a smorgasbord of tax cuts, including no taxes on tips. Which proposals would actually pass and how much they might help the working class are unclear, because much depends on how they would be structured.
But several analysts pointed out that the tax cuts passed in 2017 provided the largest benefits for the rich — and that Mr. Trump’s other proposals could push up prices, which could hurt the poor and working class. Tariffs are generally passed along to domestic producers and customers, so raising them is likely to lift prices. Sudden deportations could lead to overnight worker shortages in construction or agriculture, further pushing up prices.
“I call it Robin Hood in reverse: It’s this shift in resources away from the poor and working class and up the chain,” said Kimberly Clausing, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who worked at the Treasury Department in the Biden administration.
But Joe LaVorgna, a former chief economist of the White House National Economic Council under Mr. Trump, said it was important to understand the tariffs as part of Mr. Trump’s broader economic package, not as a stand-alone policy.
“The intent is to re-industrialize,” he said.
Building on Biden
Ms. Harris’s economic vision is one of greater continuity.
Her campaign has said that she would resist unfair trading practices, but also that she “believes in upholding and strengthening international economic rules.” She has pledged to continue the Biden administration’s sweeping efforts to ramp up clean energy development. She has talked about cutting costs for families, but has focused on doing so by lowering drug prices and giving incentives to increase home buying. She has proposed a new $6,000 tax credit for families with infants.
Economists do not uniformly embrace Ms. Harris’s proposals: She has suggested a tax break for first-time home buyers that some have fretted might feed into higher home prices. Many see her promise to curb corporate price gouging as more of a political message than a practical plan for lowering prices.
But many analysts have suggested that her ideas could benefit rank-and-file workers.
Wall Street economic analyses of the two packages have regularly suggested that Mr. Trump’s ideas come at a bigger risk of stoking further inflation. More than a dozen Nobel Prize-winning economists have signed an open letter supporting Ms. Harris.
And a Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis has found that Ms. Harris’s policies would be comparatively good for the bottom three-fifths of the income distribution, while Mr. Trump’s would be better for the richest groups. And that is without taking into account the effects of tariffs or deportations.
“There is no question that Harris is much more focused on lower-income, middle-income,” said Kent Smetters, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and head of the Penn Wharton Budget Model. And while Mr. Trump’s proposals do slightly boost lower-income earnings, “nothing is paid for in the case of Trump.”
Both Penn Wharton and the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have estimated that Ms. Harris’s proposals would add to the deficit and national debt by much less than Mr. Trump’s.
Enough to Change Things?
But even if economists are lining up behind Ms. Harris’s ideas, it seems unlikely to change the tide of proletarian politics.
In a sign of how much workers are gravitating toward the Republican Party and a blow to Ms. Harris, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a union with 1.3 million members, did not endorse a presidential candidate this year.
While Democrats have typically been more union-friendly, the Teamsters carried out several polls of its members this year and found that they were moving toward Mr. Trump. Two later surveys showed that roughly 60 percent preferred him and just 30 percent preferred Ms. Harris.
Part of the longer-term problem for Democrats may be that the nation’s bottom half has been falling behind for decades. Wealth inequality has widened substantially, and there are fewer opportunities for economic progress, especially for those without a college degree.
“Working-class people — some working-class people — feel that the Democrats have not offered a meaningful solution to the blah economic situation they’ve seen,” said Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, which aims to push progressives to focus more on workers.
That is what’s keeping Paul Brown, 47, from voting at all. Mr. Brown, who is Black, was headed into a Dollar General in a Philadelphia suburb on Sunday. He has worked in food production in the past, but an injury is preventing him from working right now, and it has been hard to keep up with his bills.
He doesn’t believe that either candidate will bring real changes for people like him, and he hasn’t cast a vote since Barack Obama ran for office. But his friends are split between voting for Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump.
When they’re voting for the former president, it is often because they think his policies benefited them economically — especially pandemic stimulus checks that went out under both Mr. Trump and President Biden, but that only Mr. Trump made a point of signing.
“I’m like: I don’t think that was Trump,” Mr. Brown said. He himself remains unconvinced. “Nothing they’re going to do is going to help us out.”
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