Why Was the Harris Campaign’s Working-Class Message So Muted?
“Harris Tailors Closing Pitch to Center-Right Voters”—headline on a New York Times story November 3, 2024
By Fred Glass
Consider the union household vote. Even taking into account its diminished capacity in the neoliberal era of the past half century, the labor vote is a crucial support of Democratic presidential election victories, because it consists of more than actual union members. Unions punch above their weight in elections not only due to relatively high degrees of communication and organizing with their membership and communities, but also because other folks in the union households tend to vote the same way as the members.
The worst union vote for labor's endorsed candidate for president since 1984 was for Hillary Clinton in 2016, 51-43. It’s no coincidence that Clinton failed to make an effective economic argument for working class voters, letting the field prepared by Bernie’s primary campaign go fallow during the election—no talk of taxing the rich, Medicare for All, support for union organizing, or reversing decades of lousy labor law.
Over the past four decades, the average winning margin for labor's endorsed presidential candidate within union households has been around 20 percent, or roughly 60 – 40. This yields a net advantage of several million votes. Clinton badly missed that mark, which was restored by Biden in 2020.
We will soon find out whether the Harris campaign numbers among union households more closely resemble Clinton’s or Biden’s. If they are closer to the historic average, you can thank union GOTV efforts, not the Harris campaign’s messaging operation.
Trump claims to be on the side of the working stiff, and he addresses the tarnished prospects facing working people in twenty first century America, amid great and growing economic inequality, by blaming immigrants, the liberal media, and bad trade deals negotiated by weak Democrats with foreign governments, while endlessly repeating the false promise of bringing back manufacturing jobs.
This “program”, while ludicrous in its ability to deliver the goods, can seem plausible at the level of working class fears and desires. Unless the Democratic candidate promotes a robust working class economic program, and shifts blame for our social ills from immigrants to the billionaire class, like Bernie Sanders did in his primary campaigns, that plausibility can damage the vote margins.
Research in 2017 found that some 10% or so of Bernie Sanders voters ended up in the Trump column in 2016. We are left to wonder how many of these people voted for the racist, misogynist and xenophobic ideas of Trump, and how many voted for the prayer that by doing things differently—any kind of differently—a president could help things get better for the people left behind by economic retrenchment.
We wonder how many people didn't vote for Clinton because she seemed like the establishment candidate and a tool of Wall Street, and how many didn't vote for her because they thought she ran a child sex slave ring out of a pizza parlor. We wonder how it was that some towns and counties and states that voted for Obama twice turned around and voted for Trump.
We especially wonder: if Clinton had embraced Bernie's ideas, and spoken consistently about economic inequality, about billionaires cheating on taxes and stealing from the common good, about how the transition to a sustainable energy future would include not just green jobs but good union green jobs—if she had promoted these things, would she have persuaded (enough of) those overlapping Trump/Bernie voters, and might that have made the difference in the electoral college?
On the eve of the 2024 election, it is worth revisiting these questions. By my own anecdotal experience on the doors of Reno NV and Phoenix AZ, courtesy of UNITE-HERE and Seed the Vote, it seems that the Harris campaign’s targeting of disaffected Republicans on the basis of restoring civility to politics and backing away from the cliff of fascism is bearing some fruit. I spoke personally with a number of voters who told me that they were lifetime Republicans who could not bring themselves to vote for Trump again, and my fellow canvassers reported similar experiences.
But these were mostly well-to-do, educated suburbanites. I had only one conversation with a working class Republican feeling that way. By contrast, my conversations with working class and poor Undeclareds and Democrats in rundown apartment complexes and trailer parks mostly unearthed a void where knowledge of a Harris economic program should have been.
In the doorways where I was able to have that conversation, we quickly got to issues like properly funding social services—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public education—and how Harris’s plan to bump up income taxes on people who make more than $400K per year would help provide the revenues for that agenda. I would seal the deal by telling the voter that in Trump’s term in office he cut taxes for the rich, thereby putting such programs in jeopardy for lack of funding. It wasn’t a hard sell. So where has the Harris campaign messaging amplifying this line of argument been?
This is an election where the largest possible popular vote majority is critical. If Harris wins the electoral college, we know that Trump is going to do what he can to claim the election was “stolen” and delegitimize that victory. A large popular vote margin would help to demonstrate alongside the electoral college the lie that he is pedaling. A Clintonesque avoidance of progressive views on economic issues may help in winning a thin slice of persuadable Republican voters, but it isn’t the approach that can bring home the larger demographic of working class voters outside the union fold, most of whose ballot box instincts might be correct if they were directly addressed.