Why Bidenomics Failed to Win the White Working Class
Keeping in mind that the manufacturing workforce is overwhelmingly white and male, exit polling finds that 60 percent of white men in Michigan voted for Trump this year. Sixty-six percent of white men in North Carolina voted for him, too, along with 74 percent of white men in Georgia. These figures are all fairly consistent with exit polling from 2020. Exit polls also don’t reflect the many working class people who don’t reliably vote, or who voted in 2020 and didn’t this year.
This isn’t all Bidenomics’ fault, of course. But the fact that the most heavily publicized portions of the White House’s economic agenda seems to have fallen so flat politically—including in the places it’s helped the most—should prompt some soul searching about what actually ails the economy. Biden has said in recent months that his administration “invested in American manufacturing to restore the backbone of our Nation: the middle class.” Yet most of the middle class—and the working class, for that matter—doesn’t work in manufacturing. Home prices, meanwhile, have risen 45 percent over the last four years, and nearly half of U.S. renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Home insurance and mortgage rates are persistently high, and still-elevated interest rates have made car ownership—a necessity in most of the country—more expensive, too. Healthcare, childcare and college educations are wildly expensive, and can saddle people with six-figure debts for decades.
Trump promises to Make America Great Again. Biden promised to make America make things again, a slightly but not fundamentally different pledge. Harris mainly promised to not be Donald Trump. In an election defined in large part by economic frustrations, the Democratic Party’s pitches on that front (or lack thereof) left a lot to be desired. Offering massive tariffs and tax breaks to industrialists, ultimately, may have been an even worse answer to the cost of living crisis than it was to the climate crisis. It certainly isn’t helping Democrats win elections, either.
