By Jennifer Medina
The working-class voters Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign needed were not moved by talk of joy. They were too angry about feeling broke.
For decades, Democrats had been the party of labor and of the working class, the choice for voters who looked to government to increase the minimum wage or provide a safety net for the poor, the old and the sick. But this year’s election results show how thoroughly that idea has collapsed even among Latino, Black and Asian American voters who had stuck by the party through Donald Trump’s first term.
Latinos had signaled what was coming: They drifted away from Democrats and toward Trump in 2020, before defecting in greater numbers this year. But working-class Black and Asian American voters have also now broken ranks in startling numbers.
The losses up and down the ballot leave Democrats in crisis. Voters without a college degree make up a solid majority of the electorate. Without them, the White House could be out of reach. And for a party that stands for and takes pride in its diversity, the erosion of support from voters of color calls its identity into question.
Yet interviews over the past year with hundreds of working-class minority voters revealed the challenges confronting Democrats as both clear and daunting. For many, hope had already hardened into cynicism. Promises about affordable housing fell flat and promoting accomplishments on insulin prices failed to break through. Simply put, their trust in the Democratic Party was gone.
“Democrats flipped,” said Daniel Trujillo, who owns a barbershop in Las Vegas and watched many of his customers shift from supporting Barack Obama to favoring Trump. “They went from being for the working class to, if you’re not college-educated and have money, you’re not worthy.” He said he had watched with delight as his customers increasingly warmed toward Trump.
“The right turned blue-collar and went full border-control, strong-economy and law-and-order,” Trujillo added. “Who doesn’t want that?”
In Milwaukee, Phoenix and Atlanta; in swap meets and strip malls; on the sidelines of soccer and baseball fields; and at community centers in big cities and diverse suburbs, voters sounded similar refrains. The system wasn’t working for them.
Many said Democrats’ dire warnings about threats to democracy felt far less compelling compared with the urgency of their own struggles to pay the rent.
Black voters, on the whole, still voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, as did a narrower majority of Latinos and Asian Americans. But Republicans made gains in big cities and diverse suburbs. Hispanic-majority counties shifted to the right by 13 percentage points, preliminary results showed, as did counties with large numbers of Asian American voters; Black-majority counties shifted to the GOP by about 3 points.
Though Republicans were quick to celebrate a long-sought political realignment, interviews this year with working-class voters suggest that the shifts may not prove so enduring. For many, their choices were as much a message-sending rejection of Democrats as an embrace of Trump, his policies and his party.
“A deep reckoning is needed among Democrats and other leaders who claim to represent working Latinos,” said Carlos Odio, a director at Equis, a Democratic-leaning research group that focuses on Latino voters. “What happened in this election does not come to pass without years of neglect that finally came to a head.”
David Paiz, 52, works in maintenance for the city of Las Vegas, where he moved during the pandemic, frustrated with the cost of living in California. He was thrilled when he and his wife could wear “Thug Life” T-shirts emblazoned with Trump’s face and not elicit nasty remarks from neighbors or friends.
“There’s a lot of things that I want to do, that we want to do for our sons, for their future, to prepare them for success,” Paiz said. “But with the current administration, I didn’t see that happening. Now that Trump’s going to be our new president, I see a lot more opportunities.”
For months, Democratic operatives suggested that voters like Paiz were merely “Trump-curious” and that most would eventually be repelled by Trump’s coarseness or his hard-line immigration proposals.
But nine years after he disparaged Mexicans in his first campaign, and nine days after a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City made an obscene joke about Latinos making babies, he appeared to win a bigger share of the Latino and Black votes than any Republican presidential candidate since the civil rights era.
Inflation and inequality had taken their toll.
Two-thirds of Trump voters said they had to cut back on groceries this year, compared with only a third of Harris voters, a New York Times/Siena College poll found in October.
These voters were not necessarily poor: Many said they could afford groceries, but that higher prices left them with far less disposable income. Voters earning $20 an hour complained bitterly about being unable to take their families to the movies or on carefree outings at the mall.
Others who said they felt held back by rising rents and by housing prices that put a home of their own out of reach described becoming convinced that Trump would improve their buying power.
Even as they held onto their faith in the American dream, many nonwhite working-class voters said they had come to see the Democratic Party as condescending, overly focused on issues irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. They bristled over social issues like the concerns of transgender children or the party’s focus on abortion rights. They felt scolded by liberals on COVID-19 precautions — and crushed by the pandemic’s economic fallout.
Some sounded every bit as aggrieved as the white working-class voters who first fueled Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, voicing similar complaints about migrants being given easier access to housing and food than homeless veterans living on the streets. Others said they believed that Trump — whom they viewed as particularly effective in working with foreign dictators — could bring the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East to a quick end.
“He’s a businessman, and you’ve got to run a country like business — you can’t be based off of feelings,” said Juan Sosa, 34, an immigrant from Cuba who owns three small businesses in Las Vegas. “I feel like right now we’re the laughingstock of the world. Like, there’s no assertiveness in our lives and how we come across to the rest of the world.”
Another pattern emerged in scores of interviews over the past year: Working-class voters of color often chose the same things to disbelieve, downplay or dismiss.
Latino voters, in particular, discounted Trump’s draconian promise to round up and deport millions of people in the country illegally.
“Me, worried about deportations? No, not one worry,” said Angela De Los Santos, 54, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who owns a Dominican-Oaxacan restaurant in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. “Trump knows he needs immigrants to work. Us, we’re here to work, we commit no crimes, we will not have any problem with that.”
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