In June, 2016, Scott Sauritch, the president of United Steelworkers Local 2227, a branch based in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, drove for half an hour to a union hall in Pittsburgh, where Hillary Clinton was holding a campaign rally. Sauritch was hoping that Clinton, whom the U.S.W. had just endorsed, would talk about jobs and the steel industry. Instead, she focussed on the character flaws of Donald Trump, calling him “temperamentally unfit and totally unqualified.” As Sauritch listened, he grew frustrated: what did she plan to do for workers? Afterward, he told me, Clinton shook hands with supporters. Sauritch stood there in his union shirt, but Clinton didn’t extend her hand to him. “Hey, Hillary,” he called out, prompting her to turn around. “I’m the union president—we really need your help.”
He remembers her saying, curtly, “Oh, I will help,” then leaving.
That November, Sauritch voted for Clinton. But this fall he’s backing Donald Trump, in part because he believes that Democrats don’t actually care about the working class—a group defined, by pollsters, as people without college degrees. If Sauritch were still running Local 2227, he might have felt pressure to keep his decision private, since the U.S.W., like most unions, is supporting Kamala Harris. But he left his post in 2022 and is now free to speak his mind. Most of the rank-and-file workers Sauritch knows share his view, he told me, regardless of what union leaders say publicly. “I don’t care what you see on TV,” he said. “The grunts in the lunchroom love Trump.”
Not long ago, America’s steel mills and factories were full of loyal Democrats. These union members understood that, in the struggle between labor and capital, Republicans sided with management. One of the workers who shared this outlook was Sauritch’s father, Herman, a retired steelworker and the person who introduced me to Scott. When Herman was young, he told me, employees knew “there wasn’t a Republican in the goddam world that ever tried to help the working guy out.” Herman, an eighty-three-year-old who wears a ring inscribed with the U.S.W. logo on his right hand, still believes this. He raised his children—five sons and a daughter—in a household that he thought would instill the same perspective in them. To his dismay, three of his sons support Trump. “I don’t know where I screwed up,” he said, with a sigh.
The shifting political allegiances of blue-collar voters have made it increasingly difficult for Democrats to compete in, much less carry, parts of the country they once dominated. In 1984, Walter Mondale won ten counties in western Pennsylvania, home to the state’s once thriving steel industry. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost all but one, contributing to her defeat in Pennsylvania and, consequently, in the election. Some of the union members who had long turned out for Democrats had either moved away, after their factories shut down, or become MAGA Republicans. And a new generation of blue-collar voters was emerging, one that was less likely to belong to unions and to vote Democrat.
Pro-Trump signs on display in the front yard of a residence near the town of Charleroi.
The counties where this transformation occurred are heavily populated by working-class whites, who were especially receptive to Trump’s xenophobic nationalism. But some polling suggests that the decline in support for the Democratic Party hasn’t been confined to the white working class. In 2012, Barack Obama carried the nonwhite working class by sixty-seven points—a margin that helped him win the over-all working-class vote. In the latest Times/Siena poll, Harris trailed Trump by eighteen points among working-class respondents, in part because the size of her advantage among nonwhite voters without college degrees—twenty-four points—was roughly a third of Obama’s in 2012. Although Black and Latino voters back Harris over Trump by large margins, the Times/Siena poll showed Harris with substantially less support from both white and nonwhite working-class voters than Joe Biden had in 2020.
The large crowds at Harris’s rallies, along with the donations that have poured into her campaign, have drawn comparisons to Obama’s electrifying race for the White House in 2008. The broad enthusiasm her candidacy has aroused is reflected in the proliferation of Zoom fund-raisers with names like South Asian Women for Harris and White Dudes for Harris. But Harris’s support rests disproportionately with affluent, college-educated voters. It’s possible that courting such Americans—including Republicans in the suburbs who dislike Trump and support abortion rights—will enable her to win. But, even if this strategy succeeds, it will raise questions about the Democratic Party’s identity and priorities. For much of the past century, its leaders have prided themselves on championing less advantaged people. If such Americans continue drifting away from the Democrats, it will be hard to dismiss the perception that the Party speaks mainly for coastal élites and upscale professionals. This is particularly dangerous in Rust Belt states such as Pennsylvania, where this year’s election may well be decided—and where nearly two-thirds of voters don’t have college degrees.
One mistake of Hillary Clinton’s that Harris will surely not repeat is taking the support of working-class voters for granted. According to Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the country’s largest federation of unions, Clinton didn’t visit a single union hall in Michigan or Wisconsin after she became the nominee, in 2016. While she dismissed Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” Trump held rallies across the Rust Belt, promising to bring back jobs and deliver “a victory for the wage-earner.” Trump’s speeches were littered with bigoted remarks about Mexicans and Muslims. But, as a group of sociologists noted in a paper published in The British Journal of Sociology, he also exalted factory workers who had been stripped of their jobs, and of their dignity, by structural forces beyond their control, especially free-trade agreements backed by Democrats. (Of course, Republicans had supported the same agreements.) Trump’s message resonated with voters like Steve, a retired firefighter I spoke with while visiting Berks County, in southeastern Pennsylvania. He was dressed in a T-shirt adorned with the American flag, and told me that he’d voted twice for Bill Clinton. “Grandpop was a Democrat, Dad was a Democrat,” he explained. “They had a pro-union stance, and that was that. I learned it from them.” Then he watched the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Clinton signed, ripple through the Rust Belt, causing nearby factories to slash jobs. “Those places laid off hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people,” he said. I met Steve, who left the Democratic Party, outside a Trump field office, where he’d come to volunteer.
Once Trump was in office, he abandoned his vow to help America’s forgotten workers. Instead, he cut taxes on the wealthy. Trump appointed Peter Robb, a former management attorney, as general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, which issued a series of anti-worker rulings, including one that restricted the ability of union organizers to communicate with employees. By contrast, many scholars regard Biden’s Administration as the most pro-labor since F.D.R.’s. In Biden’s first year, the N.L.R.B. ordered employers to reinstate more workers who had been illegally fired for protected activity, such as participation in a union, than it had during Trump’s entire Presidency, and the agency has defended workers involved in organizing drives at companies like Amazon and Starbucks. In 2023, Biden walked a picket line in Michigan with striking members of the United Auto Workers, a gesture of solidarity no other sitting President has performed. (Harris walked a U.A.W. picket line in Nevada in 2019.) Biden also oversaw a boom in domestic manufacturing and construction, which was spurred by legislation—such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—that required workers’ salaries for government-funded building projects to reflect “prevailing wages,” thus encouraging the hiring of union labor.
Had Biden run again, he undoubtedly would have campaigned on this record, hoping that it would pay dividends with voters in union households, which he won in 2020 by seventeen points—more than double Hillary Clinton’s margin. Since Harris became the Democratic Presidential nominee, she has also tried to emphasize her labor credentials. Among her first campaign stops this summer was a union hall in Wayne, Michigan, one of the three locations where the 2023 U.A.W. strike began. She went there with Tim Walz, whose selection as her running mate drew praise from labor leaders familiar with his record as the governor of Minnesota, which includes signing a law granting workers paid family and medical leave. Seven union leaders spoke on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention, among them the U.A.W.’s president, Shawn Fain, who wore a “TRUMP IS A SCAB” T-shirt and told the crowd, “Kamala Harris is one of us.”
“I guess we didn’t know the Muffin Man after all.” Cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz Link copied
It’s not clear, though, whether most workers share this view. A few weeks after Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, I met Aaron Joseph—an organizer with District Council 57 of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, which has members in thirty-two counties in western and central Pennsylvania—at a coffee shop in Carnegie, a working-class suburb west of Pittsburgh. On social media, Biden’s decision to step aside was greeted with relief and exuberance. Joseph told me that the painters, glaziers, and drywall finishers in his shop reacted differently. “We’ve been hitting a three-to-four-year boom because of the Administration’s policies,” he said. “When Biden stepped down, it was like losing a friend.” The union has plenty of Trump supporters, Joseph told me, but Biden’s vocal backing of organized labor, and the fact that he was from Scranton and seemed at ease among blue-collar workers, had bolstered his appeal. Harris lacked these advantages. “She’s from California—that generally does not play well in western Pennsylvania,” Joseph said. “For our membership, there’s a sense of unfamiliarity.”
Celinda Lake, a pollster who has conducted extensive surveys of working-class Americans, said that unfamiliarity with Harris could end up helping her campaign, enabling her to distance herself from the less popular aspects of Biden’s Presidency, such as the high inflation he presided over. “The Trump campaign didn’t anticipate that people are ready to take a fresh look at her,” Lake said. Harris’s experience as an attorney general who took on price gougers—a record she has highlighted at campaign rallies—could also appeal to blue-collar voters. “People think of A.G.s as people’s lawyers,” Lake said. “It’s a particularly great office for women, because you can demonstrate toughness without being too tough. They’re dragon slayers—they’re the ones protecting the cubs.”
Lake believes that Harris will fare slightly better than Biden would have among working-class women and worse among working-class men. “I think there will be a big gender gap,” she said. This was borne out in the encounters I had one day in Allentown, where I attended a press conference announcing that the Economic Development Administration, an agency in the Department of Commerce, had awarded the city a twenty-million-dollar grant to help its distressed neighborhoods. Numerous officials turned out to celebrate the news, among them the Democratic congresswoman Susan Wild, who is running for reëlection in a swing district. “We are going to build an economy that works for everyone,” Wild declared at the event, which was held inside a warehouse that is being converted into a prefab-wall-panel factory by union laborers. Afterward, I talked to some construction workers at the site. One of them said that he was a Democrat but wasn’t supporting Harris because of her failure to protect the border—the subject of a deluge of Trump attack ads in Pennsylvania. Another worker, a tall man with a bushy gray beard, said, “I like Trump.” Later, I went to a diner to meet Anne Radakovits, a member of Council 13 of AFSCME, which represents more than sixty-five thousand public-service workers in Pennsylvania. Radakovits was excited about Harris’s candidacy, but wasn’t surprised that some of the guys I’d spoken to at the construction site were less enthusiastic. “We’ve never had a female President,” she said. “God forbid a woman be in a leadership position, because we scare people.”
Gender and race may be among the reasons that blue-collar white men will not vote for Harris, but there are also many working-class communities where being a woman of color in a contest against an older white man—a candidate notorious for his vulgar attacks on immigrants and Black people—could be an advantage. In early August, I visited Reading, Pennsylvania’s fourth-largest city. Two-thirds of its ninety-five thousand residents are Latino, the fastest-growing demographic group in the state. I went there to meet Nancy Jimenez, a field coördinator for Make the Road Pennsylvania, an immigrant-rights group, at its local headquarters. Since 2016, she told me, the organization had registered more than fifteen thousand new Latino voters in Pennsylvania. A group of canvassers, in powder-blue T-shirts, told me that their mission was nonpartisan. Yet several acknowledged that their jobs had become easier since Harris had replaced Biden on the ticket, which generated a surge of interest in voting. One woman said that numerous people who were registered as Republicans had asked if she could help them switch parties.
A dozen other canvassers came in. They had been knocking on doors to survey immigrant residents about the issues that mattered to them. Given Trump’s vow to carry out mass deportations if elected, it stands to reason that one of these issues was Trump himself. A middle-aged woman who had been canvassing told me that the vast majority of Latinos in Reading disliked Trump because he denigrated immigrants. But several other canvassers indicated that, contrary to what liberals might assume, many immigrant voters they’d spoken to, especially those who had entered the U.S. legally, had conservative views on border security. Moreover, immigration was not these voters’ top concern—the economy was, both because the cost of living kept rising and because local jobs often paid little more than the minimum wage, which in Pennsylvania is $7.25 an hour.
Indeed, a national survey conducted earlier this year by the Valiente Action Fund found that Latino voters ranked “economic issues/inflation” as the nation’s most important problem by a wide margin. The survey was sent to me by Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage, an organization of restaurant and service workers who are fighting to raise pay in their professions. The restaurant industry is one of the largest employers of Latinos and Black people in the U.S. This year, both Trump and Harris have proposed eliminating taxes on these workers’ tips. Trump’s embrace of this idea was ironic, Jayaraman said, since one of the first things the Department of Labor tried to do under his Presidency was propose a rule that would have made tips the property of restaurant owners rather than workers—a gift to the powerful National Restaurant Association lobby (and presumably to Trump himself, whose Mar-a-Lago employees would have been subject to the change). Jayaraman, who successfully led a campaign against the proposal, said, “Everything Trump did was anti-restaurant workers.”
Removing taxes on tips would make little difference to most restaurant workers, Jayaraman explained, because two-thirds of them don’t earn enough money to pay income taxes anyway. A more meaningful step would be to end the sub-minimum wages that restaurants in most states are permitted to pay—in Pennsylvania, $2.83 an hour. Harris, in fact, has endorsed this change, a move that Jayaraman praises her for. But she still worries that both parties focus disproportionately on high retail prices instead of on low wages. A few years ago, she told me, she realized how important the latter issue was to voters while doing outreach in Ohio. “We found that, if you walk up to someone and say, ‘Hey, will you sign my petition to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour?,’ they’ll stop. If you then say, ‘Hey, you can’t sign unless you are registered to vote,’ everyone does it. That’s what makes them register.” Too many service workers weren’t hearing any campaign talk about raising their wages, she told me, which she feared might lead some of them to sit out the election.
