Is the Working Class Finally Turning on Trump?
In a recent exchange with reporters, Donald Trump insisted that his policies to fight inflation are working “incredibly,” and that America is on the cusp of a “golden age.” This sunny appraisal is not widely shared. Trump’s tariffs are broadly unpopular. So is his decision to go to war with Iran, particularly as the ripple effects of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has disrupted global shipping and caused the price of oil to soar above a hundred dollars a barrel, have spread to American shores. In an NPR/PBS News/Marist poll published in early May, eighty-one per cent of respondents said that higher gas prices were straining their household budgets. Sixty-three per cent of those feeling the strain blamed the problem on Trump. In another recent poll, carried out by CNN, three-fourths of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, said that Trump’s policies have increased the cost of living in their communities.
Such surveys have alarmed some Republican strategists. But they do not appear to be troubling Trump, who, when asked recently how much thought he gives to Americans’ financial situations when negotiating with Iran, replied, “Not even a little bit”—a comment consistent with his view of the affordability crisis, which he dismissed last year as a Democratic “con job” and a “hoax.” These are the words of a President whose populist rhetoric has long been at odds with the substance of his policies and the concentration of billionaires in his Cabinet. They are also a reminder of how confident Trump remains that his supporters will stay loyal to him regardless of what he does, an assumption that until recently seemed warranted. During his first term, Trump passed tax cuts for the rich and appointed anti-union, management-side attorneys to run the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board. Union leaders decried these developments, but many rank-and-file workers were more forgiving, continuing to place Trump signs on their lawns and to show up at his rallies wearing MAGA hats.
Two years ago, I drove past dozens of such signs while on a trip to interview working-class voters in Pennsylvania, a key swing state that many analysts believed could determine the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election. At the time, most national polls showed Kamala Harris with a slight lead in the race. Among the blue-collar voters I spoke to, the edge clearly belonged to her opponent. “The grunts in the lunchroom love Trump,” a retired steelworker named Scott Sauritch told me. In 2016, Sauritch, who grew up near Charleroi, Pennsylvania, a once heavily Democratic mill town, voted for Hillary Clinton. By 2020, he had shifted his allegiances to Trump. Trump’s appeal extended to places like Reading, a majority-Hispanic city where I spotted a “Latino Americans for Trump” sign in a window of a red brick building that had been converted into a Trump-campaign field office. Many Democrats assumed that Trump’s racist attacks on immigrants and his plans to initiate mass deportations if elected would drive Latino voters away. This assessment underestimated how many of these voters were more worried about the rising cost of groceries and enticed by Trump’s promise to “make America affordable again,” as he vowed to do at a rally in Wilkes-Barre. According to exit polls, Trump not only defeated Harris handily among white voters without college degrees, which had been widely expected, but he also won a growing share of nonwhite voters without college degrees, which few analysts had foreseen.
Are things different now? Have working-class voters finally begun to turn on Trump? Sauritch hasn’t; he told me last week, when we spoke on the phone, “I voted for the man and I have faith in President Trump and in the Administration.” But Sauritch, who served for three years as the president of Local 2227, a branch of the United Steelworkers in West Mifflin, acknowledged that some of the Trump supporters he knows feel differently, owing to the state of the economy. “Some guys are upset, yeah, that’s the truth,” he said. “They’re not happy with the gas prices—they don’t like what’s going on.”
I heard a similar report from Manuel Guzman, a state representative from Reading. In 2024, Guzman, who is a Democrat, told me that he feared that Trump could do well in the city, particularly among Latino men, many of whom held conservative views on border security and were unhappy about inflation. More recently, he said to me, “I think a lot of those folks—Latinos for Trump—are having buyer’s remorse.” One reason is the belief that the sweeping raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have gone too far, even among those who may have favored tough border policies, he said. Another is the war in Iran and the surge in prices it has triggered. “Folks are feeling the pain at the gas tank, at the grocery store, with inflation continuing to rise,” he said. “Those bread-and-butter issues are top of mind.”
Even so, Guzman cautioned against overstating the level of disenchantment with Trump. “There is also a significant population that is kind of O.K. with what’s going on,” he noted. Trump’s enduring appeal among some working-class voters can be traced to racial and cultural grievances that he has stoked. “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” an ad that the Trump campaign aired repeatedly in 2024 claimed. Until a generation ago, the majority of workers in steel plants and automotive factories voted Democratic, in part because their political identities had taken shape on picket lines and in union halls, where a sense of class consciousness was forged. These days, as the scholars Theda Skocpol and Lainey Newman document in “Rust Belt Union Blues” (2023), the disappearance of factories and the consequent decline in union membership have meant that workers in many Rust Belt towns are more likely to cross paths at gun clubs and megachurches. Sauritch told me that he’d stopped voting Democratic because the Party’s cultural agenda had become “too extreme” and did not align with the Biblical values preached at a Methodist church with a culturally conservative bent he had joined a few years ago. (His brother Rob, who is a gay man and a retired community-college administrator, laments the influence of churches that oppose marriage equality but appear less bothered by the un-Christian conduct in which Trump frequently indulges. Rob, like his and Scott’s father, Herman, their sister, and another brother, is a Democrat, and he serves on the Allegheny County Democratic Committee. Two other brothers, like Scott, support Trump.)
Still, in 2024, 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, went around to different job sites to talk with his fellow-members about the election. When he spoke with those who told him they were leaning toward voting for Trump, he said, he never heard any mention of transgender athletes or diversity-equity-and-inclusion programs. “It was always, ‘The cost of eggs and groceries is super high,’ ” he recalled. “It was an economic game.” And, among this subset of blue-collar voters, support for Trump is tenuous, Jared Abbott, a political scientist and the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, which analyzes polling data to determine how Democrats can craft policies and messages that will resonate with the working class, told me.
In March, Abbott and Joan C. Williams, a law professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, published a survey of nearly two thousand Trump supporters. They oversampled for working-class Black and Latino voters (those with annual household incomes between fifty thousand and a hundred thousand dollars) and included a large pool of people who had backed Joe Biden in 2020 but switched to Trump in 2024. These “switchers,” as Abbott and Williams call them, were likely not diehard members of the MAGA movement but individuals who were “just annoyed at how expensive everything was” and willing to give Trump a chance to fix the problem, Abbott said. In the survey—which was conducted in January and February, before gas prices spiked owing to the Iran War—more than half the switchers said that they are not planning to vote for a Republican Presidential nominee in 2028.
Although it is often assumed that Trump’s most loyal supporters are working-class people without college degrees, the opposite pattern emerged in the survey. Thirty-two per cent of respondents without high-school diplomas said they are now “wavering” on voting for a Republican; just eighteen per cent of respondents with four-year college degrees said the same. Black and Latino working-class voters made up a high share of those who are wavering, the survey found, suggesting that the multiracial coalition Trump cobbled together in 2024 could be coming undone. (In a New York Times-Siena poll conducted from May 11th to 15th, Trump’s approval rating with Hispanic voters had fallen to just twenty per cent; his approval among Black voters was fourteen per cent.)
Of course, the fact that some working-class voters have grown disillusioned with the Republicans does not mean that they will turn out for the Democrats. In Abbott and Williams’s survey, less than one in five of those who were vacillating about voting Republican in 2028 said that they might vote for a Democrat. Most said that they were undecided or would back neither party. “People really don’t like what Trump is doing, particularly lower-income people of color, but they are not seeing the Democrats provide something that makes them want to vote for them, either,” Abbott said.
Part of the problem for Democrats is that the Party’s current reputation pushes away some voters who might benefit from its agenda, a predicament that was underscored in another recent survey conducted by the Center for Working-Class Politics. It tested the level of support for a populist economic agenda among three thousand residents in four crucial swing states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Many of the proposals tested in the survey—barring companies that receive tax benefits from laying off workers, capping prescription-drug costs, eliminating taxes on Social Security income—drew strong support across the political spectrum. Strikingly, though, the level of enthusiasm varied dramatically depending on the messenger. When respondents were asked whether they would vote for a candidate who made various populist statements, such as “It’s just plain wrong that hardworking families are struggling to keep up while big corporations get massive tax breaks and then turn around and lay off American workers,” they were, on average, eight per cent more likely to say yes when the candidate was an Independent than when the candidate was a Democrat.
That margin is more than enough to swing an election in a state like Michigan, Wisconsin, or even Ohio, where, in 2024, the Democratic senator Sherrod Brown, a populist who has opposed unpopular free-trade deals and pushed to raise the minimum wage, lost to the Republican Bernie Moreno by three and a half points. (Brown is now attempting to unseat Senator Jon Husted, who was appointed to replace Vice-President J. D. Vance.) The authors of the survey call this the “Democratic penalty,” and they found that it was especially striking among working-class voters, Latinos, and residents of small towns and rural areas.
The perception that the Democratic Party is led by and caters to élites, which right-wing media outlets have relentlessly propagated in recent decades, and that it does not fight hard enough for boldly progressive ideas, which a growing number of their own members have come to feel, will not be easy to overcome. Among the Democrats who will be running for Congress on populist platforms this fall are Bob Brooks, a union member and retired firefighter vying to win a key swing district in Pennsylvania, and Chris Rabb, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, from Philadelphia. (Brooks and Rabb both won closely contested primary elections on Tuesday.) Compounding this challenge is the influence that big donors and establishment voices exert. When Kamala Harris ran against Trump, two years ago, she assembled a team of corporate advisers, which urged her to strike a moderate tone on issues such as price-gouging and the minimum wage. Harris promised to create an “opportunity economy,” an idea that may have pleased her donors on Wall Street and Silicon Valley but fell flat with struggling workers in places like Reading, where opportunity is scarce and the poverty rate is twenty-nine per cent.
Manuel Guzman told me that he is now worried Democrats could squander the opening created by Trump’s dwindling popularity by neglecting to focus on the issues that brought him to power. In Berks County, which includes Reading, one of these issues is the cost of rent, which will likely be exacerbated by the Trump Administration’s proposed cuts to rental-assistance and affordable-housing programs. “Let’s say we win back the House in November: Are we going to spend the next two years going through an impeachment process and not talk about everyday issues?” he asked. At the time of our conversation, which took place in early May, Guzman noted with dismay that the Democratic Party had still not released an autopsy it had promised to conduct examining the factors that led to Harris’s defeat. (On Thursday, the report was released; it barely touches on inflation.) If the growing disaffection with Trump does enable Democrats to sweep the midterms, Guzman believes that his party would be better served by learning some lessons from the President, about both what to do and what not to do. They should promise to make America affordable again, in other words, and, unlike Trump, deliver. ♦