Kamala Harris is doing a lot of things right that recent Democratic campaigns got wrong. She took a chance on Tim Waltz – coach, solider, snow-shoveling-helper – because she hoped to build bridges to the non-college grads who have abandoned Democrats in large numbers.
Nearly 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters were white people without degrees; only 27% of Joe Biden’s were. Non-college white people are the largest voting bloc in the country, so if Democrats lose them overwhelmingly, they need the immense support and turnout among people of color to win. Instead, Democrats have lost ground among non-white voters. Their advantage among Latinos has fallen from 39 points in 2016 to 19 points today; that same New York Times/Siena poll found the vice-president down 12 points among African Americans compared with Biden in 2020.
Much of the erosion is among non-college grads of color. Democrats’ support has fallen particularly sharply among Black voters without college degrees and is eight points lower among non-college-educated Latinos than among college grads. Some Black and Latino working-class voters, particularly men, increasingly are voting like the white working class.
To win back (enough) of these voters, the Harris campaign is using anti-elitist rhetoric that has been shown to appeal to working-class voters. This is a big change. Republicans have owned anti-elitist rhetoric in recent decades, using it to redirect anti-elitist anger away from economic elites towards cultural elites – the “Brahmin Left”, as Thomas Piketty calls us (I’m one of them).
In 2020, only 20% of congressional TV ads by Democratic candidates running in competitive districts used anti-elitist rhetoric, but Walz does so all the time: “Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD [Vance] studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community.” Harris reminds voters that she won $20m for California homeowners ripped off by banks during the Great Recession.
This isn’t just rhetoric. For 30 years, Democrats combined vague praise of the “middle class” with neoliberal policies that embraced free trade, with little attention to its consequences for blue-collar jobs in the US. Biden ended that: Democrats finally recognized that middle-status Americans don’t care about the increases in GDP if they don’t benefit from the resulting economic growth. Gone is the unquestioned faith in unfettered markets we saw from Clinton through Barack Obama; hence Harris’s proposal to lower grocery prices by prohibiting “price gouging” – policy (such as restraints on trade) free-marketers love to hate.
The Harris campaign understands that class conflicts aren’t only about economics. Culture wars work for Republicans because class is expressed through cultural differences, and Democrats un-self-consciously send out signals that non-college grads hear as elitist. Patriotism is a good example. Being American is an important part of the identity of 79% of Americans with high school degrees or less, but only 43% of college-educated progressive activists. Non-elites are proud of being Americans for the same reason elites aren’t: everyone stresses the highest-status categories they belong to. That’s why elites stress class: as members of a globalized elite, they rise above nationhood. That’s also why non-elites cherish being American: it’s one of the few high-status categories they inhabit.
So it’s an olive branch across class divides when Harris talks about “the awesome responsibility that comes with greatest privilege on earth; the privilege and pride of being American” to crowds chanting “USA, USA”. Like Harris’s Waltz pick, her aim is to forge a cultural connection with the white and Black non-college grads in Georgia and the midwest and the white and Latino non-college grads in purple Sunbelt states such as Arizona and Nevada. Only 46% of progressive activists would choose to live in the US if they could live anywhere in the world. But 79% of Latinos would. Latinos don’t inevitably endorse the cultural dispositions of the Brahmin Left, in part because 79% of Latinos aren’t college grads.
The Harris campaign has been careful, too, about issues of style. Many commentators have complained that Harris is light on detailed policies, not recognizing that this, too, is a class outreach strategy. “Too often,” Stacey Abrams warned in 2021, “Democrats [turn] a legitimate message into an unclear or overstuffed manifesto.” Non-college grads hear messages such as Elizabeth Warren’s “I have a plan for that” as aimed at college grads, not at them.
Harris is doing so many things right … and yet the election’s stubbornly tied. Does that mean it’s a fool’s errand for Democrats to attempt to build bridges to non-college voters? It is not a fool’s errand, but it is an uphill battle due to a cultural dynamic that threatens to swamp what a single campaign can do alone.
Trump’s superpower is his ability to channel the hurt and fury of Americans (especially men) mourning the loss of the American dream: Americans are now 40 points less likely to earn more than their parents than they were a generation ago, with declines especially marked in the midwest. Trump doesn’t offer real solutions to their economic woes. What he offers instead is honor.
He does this by drawing the Brahmin Left into openly insulting the intelligence and morals of his voters, whom Trump then defends, telling them: “I am your voice.” Bill Clinton warned against this at the Democratic national convention: “I urge you not to demean [Trump voters], but not to pretend you don’t disagree with them if you do. Treat them with respect – just the way you’d like them to treat you.”
Clinton knows a thing or two about how Democrats can reach non-college grads and his approach is also backed by science. An experiment by Robb Willer found that political arguments framed to appeal to the moral values of those targeted for persuasion were more effective than those that weren’t – and that liberals were 2.4 times more likely than conservatives to fail to use such arguments. Too many are caught in an upper-middle-class bubble.
Within this bubble, “disdain for the less educated is the last acceptable prejudice,” to quote philosopher Michael Sandel. A study out of Europe found that college grads showed more bias against the less educated than against any other group. Blue-state cultural elites supposedly attuned to social inequality openly traffic in stereotypes of less educated people as ignorant, irrational and worthy of contempt. “Trump’s cultists … are beneath contempt and deserve to be demeaned,” Richard Kavesh wrote of New York in the New York Times.
“Yes, there are those supporters who have suffered addiction and hardship, but that this might logically lead them to support a criminal and potential dictator who gives no reason for a rational person to believe he would serve their interests is simply a bridge too far … [They are] just plain ignorant,” wrote Robert Millsap of California. “I assert that we must clearly call these people out for what they are; selfish, racist bigots like the man they support,” wrote David S Schwartz, also of New York. And it’s not just in the media; I hear these sentiments all the time in my social justice warrior circles in San Francisco. Trump’s team knows how to use this stuff against us, folks.
Democrats’ fate depends on their ability to win (enough) non-college-educated voters in swing states. This isn’t how to do it. Trump bonds with non-college grads through rage; Democrats need to win them with respect – but to do that, they need to actually respect them.
Harris can’t do this alone. Her supporters need to stop handing Trump a loaded gun.
