After Trump won the 2016 election, the mainstream media – and even many leftists! – promoted a certain falsehood. They claimed Trump won on the strength of a working-class voter base.

The reality was much different.

In fact, Trump’s base looked similar to the typical GOP base. It differed only in degree. Trump won on the strength of voters who combined a high income with a low education. Most of these voters were a part of what Marxists call the ‘petty bourgeois’ class, and many of them were just regular wealthy people. I covered this more extensively in a 2018 post and a later Medium article.

The ‘one weird trick’ Trump pulled led to all the confusion. It’s a specific rhetorical trick. In short, Trump speaks about one audience, but to another. He often expresses the hopes and fears of working-class people, but he targets wealthier voters with the message. The press conflates the subject audience with the target audience. Readers can review that argument here.

But we’re not here to talk about 2016 or 2020. Trump won again in 2024, and the mainstream media – and even many leftists! – make the same claim.

So, how about this time? Surely Trump attracted a working-class target base in 2024, right?

2024 Exit Polls

Maybe.

Let’s look at the data. I’ll start by clarifying how we’ll go about this, and then I’ll present the data and my interpretation.

Cleaning Up the Data

As I’ve made clear repeatedly, the exit polls don’t actually measure working-class voters. At least not directly. They measure income, which roughly correlates to class. And they measure education, which correlates to class less well than income (even though the mainstream media typically means “education” when they say “class,” which makes a huge mess of things).

So, as with before, we’ll have to work with the data to try to draw some reasonable inferences about class.

Here’s how I tried to do that in the 2016 election: For practical purposes, I’ll assume that people who work and earn less than $50,000 per year count as ‘rank-and-file/front-line, non-managerial.’ It’s not a perfect assumption. Some managers earn less than $50,000, and some people who earn more than $50,000 are rank-and-file.

For 2024, the trouble, dear reader, is a thing called inflation. Plus, exit polls now define income in terms of ‘family income’ (i.e., entire household). Consequently, there are now lots of working-class voters with an income greater than $50,000, and quite a few even in the $100,000 to $150,000 range.

Suppose you’ve got a working-class family in a U.S. city where both parents work full-time. Most of those families will clock in north of $50,000, and many will clock in north of $100,000, especially in places like New York or San Francisco.

And so, lots of working-class voters still fit into the under $50,000 camp. But many don’t. And many of the people in the under $50,000 camp aren’t working-class voters. They’re people who earn low incomes for other reasons (e.g., some college students, retirees, and so on).

In short, it’s more complicated than it was in 2016.

Exit Poll Data

Let’s look at the data in a few different ways.

First, we can look at the data in the same way as last time. Among voters who earned less than $50,000 per year, Trump defeated Harris 50% to 47%. This further breaks down into under $30,000, which Harris won, and $30,000 to $50,000, which Trump won.

Looking at higher incomes, Trump won voters who make between $50,000 and $100,000. Many of those voters are working class, but probably just as many aren’t. And Harris won votes who make between $100,000 and $200,000. Most of those voters aren’t working class, but some are.

Overall, Trump did a little better than Harris among the income ranges where we’d expect to find working-class voters. The problem, though, is that we don’t know which of these voters are working class. And it’s the answer to that question that would better clarify things.

A final thing to note is that union voters backed Harris over Trump. The exit poll data show Harris defeating Trump 53% to 45% among the 19% of overall voters who are a part of a union household. And so, we can say that the most politically active and aware working-class voters still mostly oppose Trump.

Interpretation

I’ll draw a couple of tentative conclusions.

First, working-class voters were probably slightly more important to Trump’s voter coalition in 2024 than they were in 2016 and 2020.

But we shouldn’t exaggerate this. They’re still likely a smaller part of the overall electorate than most people think, for all the reasons I gave in 2018.

Another complicating factor is just they there weren’t as many working-class people in the electorate this time, as compared to 2020. Voters who earn less than $50,000 declined from 36% of the electorate last time to only 28% this time. Voters who earned between $50,000 and $100,000 stayed roughly the same. Overall, voters who earned less than $100,000 declined from 66% to 60% of voters, ultimately representing millions of working-class voters who either ascended classes (probably a few) or just didn’t vote this time (probably far more).

And another complicating factor is that, with inflation and question wording, we really don’t know which of these voters are working class and which aren’t. And so, the best I can do is to say that probably there has been a bit of a shift. But I’m far from certain.

Second, the explanation for this shift in voters comes only partially from the ‘realignment’ thesis that everyone in the press loves to tout. Yes, some working-class voters are moving from Democratic to Republican. But most aren’t.

The biggest factor in explaining potential Trump gains with working-class voters is that voters were unhappy with the state of the economy under Biden. Most responded to this situation by not voting. A few shifted their vote to Trump.

Democrats would help themselves greatly by having a message for these voters. They’d help themselves even more by working to rebuild the institutions of organized labor.