Donald J. Trump has been reelected president of the United States. Kamala Harris got throttled in the 2024 election, once again toppled by the average American voter. It was a working-class uprising buoyed by a shift in suburban white women and Hispanics. It’s not accurate to say this election was a red wave—this was the red tsunami that was brewing in 2022. How Latinos voted in this election should be the final sign for liberals to realize that open borders, lax immigration enforcement, and mass amnesty are losing arguments. We can discuss that later, but again, Democrats got thrashed because they don’t know how to talk to working-class voters anymore.
To boot, they don’t have these voters, the former backbone of the Democratic Party, within their ranks anymore. CNN might be awash with liberal tears, but they’ve had some moments of clarity where the divide on education is explicitly clear: Democrats are viewed as too elite and educated and, therefore, cannot relate or communicate with working families. The irony of the 2024 cycle is that the Democrats are the 'weird' people.
You cannot win the election with just white college-educated voters, single women, and some black folks. The initial base is too small; most Americans don’t have college degrees. To compound the communication issue, Democrats view the less educated as less than at best and neo-Nazis as worst. These people had enough of these white, wealthy, college-educated elites telling them their concerns aren’t necessary because they lack a higher education degree. Even worse, how many times have you heard these blue-haired freaks say, ‘I have a degree,’ to shut down debate? That means nothing, child. It means you likely wasted a home mortgage on a worthless degree. It also doesn’t give you a leg up in any debate.
Revenge of the average, everyday working class American. My reaction to Trump’s crushing victory on @cnn pic.twitter.com/JkhixYVGLS
— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) November 6, 2024
Some were rather prescient in their observations about a Harris loss. If that were to happen, it would be because the Democratic Party and their consultant class have totally lost the ability to communicate with the average voter, who views these people, rightly, as aliens from space (via The Guardian):
…Harris reminded her supporters of Project 2025, the “detailed and dangerous plan” that she believes an “increasingly unstable and unhinged” Trump will follow to cement “unchecked power”. She sounded the alarm about the dire threat Trump poses to “your fundamental freedoms” and how in his second term he would be “essentially immune” from oversight.
This is hair-raising stuff. And the campaign thinks that menacing warnings like these will motivate some urgency to march to the polls for Harris. The only problem is that voters, especially working-class voters, seem uniquely uninspired by the appeal.
The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) recently tested a variety of political messages on voters in Pennsylvania, a key battleground for both campaigns, to determine what kind of rhetoric is working to nudge blue-collar voters toward Harris. In collaboration with the polling firm YouGov, we polled a representative sample of 1,000 eligible voters in Pennsylvania between 24 September and 2 October 2024. We asked respondents to evaluate different political messages that they might hear from Harris and Trump, and to score them on a scale of favorability.
In line with our past research, we found that economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative fared best relative to Trump-style messages about Biden’s competence, immigration, corrupt elites, critical race theory, inflation, election integrity and tariffs. No surprise there. Meanwhile, Harris’s messages on abortion and immigration fared worse than any of the economic or populist messages we tested.
Yet no message was as unpopular as the one we call the “democratic threat” message.
Much like Harris’s recent rhetoric, this message called on voters to “defend our freedom and our democracy” against a would-be dictator in the form of Trump. It named Trump as “a criminal” and “a convicted felon” and warned of his plans to punish his political enemies. Of the seven messages we tested, each relating to a major theme of the Harris campaign, the “democratic threat” message polled dead last.
It was the least popular message relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And it was the least popular message among the working-class constituencies Harris and the Democrats need most.
Among blue-collar voters, a group that leans Republican, the democratic threat message was a whopping 14.4 points underwater relative to the average support for Trump’s messages. And among more liberal-leaning service and clerical workers, it was also the least popular message, finishing only 1.6 percentage points ahead of the Trump average. Even among professionals, the most liberal of the bunch and the group that liked the message the best, the message barely outperformed Trump’s messages.
The exact opposite is true for the “strong populist” message we tested. This message, which combined progressive economic policy suggestions with a strong condemnation of “billionaires”, “big corporations” and the “politicians in Washington who serve them”, tested best with blue-collar workers, service and clerical workers and professionals.
[…]
…the distaste for the democratic threat message among working people, and the total obliviousness to that distaste among campaign officials, is evidence itself of the huge disconnect between Harris and the working-class voters she desperately needs to win. Worse, every ad or speech spent hectoring about the Trumpian threat is one less opportunity for Harris to focus on her popular economic policies; one less opportunity to lean into a populist “people v plutocrats” narrative that actually does resonate with the working class.
If Harris loses, it’ll be because the campaign and the candidate represent a party that is now fundamentally alien to many working people – a party that has given up on mobilizing working people around shared class frustrations and aspirations.
The ballots have been counted, which is exactly what happened on November 5. The Democrats have been here before with Hillary Clinton in 2016, but it was largely ignored, possibly because the former first lady won the popular vote. Trump won the Electoral College and the popular vote, while the GOP retained the House and reclaimed the Senate. The working-class voter had to smash the Democrats over the head with a sledgehammer again. Will they get the point? Or will they wallow and drown in more anti-Trump hysterics? It’s more of the latter right now, as the Left is incapable of self-reflection due to the cancer of self-righteousness and nauseating arrogance.
Checking in on House Dem sources this AM…
— Max Cohen (@maxpcohen) November 6, 2024
“This is as bad as I’ve ever seen. This was a total and complete repudiation of the Democratic Party. People are not buying what we’re selling. Period.”
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