Just about everyone who tries to explain Kamala Harris’s loss loves talking about the working class. They point to Harris’s loss of the working-class vote as a starting point. And then they explain the decline of the Democratic Party’s electoral fortunes as a decline in their support among workers in states like Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Of course, they draw very different conclusions from this starting point.
Bernie Sanders, for instance, explained Harris’s loss as a loss of support among black and Latino working-class voters. Others, more friendly to the professional classes, thought Harris alienated working-class voters by running too far to the left on social issues. But they shared a focus on loss of working-class votes in swing states.
At one level, that’s a fair enough starting point. Harris did lose the aforementioned states after Biden won them in 2020.
But the politicians and pundits glide through these debates without justifying how they define the term ‘working class.’ And it’s no mere academic debate.
How you define the word matters. A lot. Competing definitions put entirely different groups of people into the ‘working class.’ They thereby recommend very different strategies and tactics for bringing them back into the fold.
Bonus: A Truly Bad Definition of ‘Working Class’
The title of this posts suggests I’ll provide two definitions of ‘working class.’ But I’m actually going to supply three. We’ll start with the third definition, which is the one most commonly heard in U.S. political discourse.
Most pollsters and pundits define a working-class person as an adult without a college degree. And that’s the entire definition. They reduce class to educational attainment.
The benefit, of course, is that this makes the working class easy to measure. Once a pollster screens for adults who voted or who are likely to vote, figuring out whether they’re a working-class person becomes a simple matter of asking them one question: do you have a college degree?
While certainly simplifying the process, this is a terrible definition. I didn’t include it in the title because we shouldn’t take it seriously as a legitimate definition.
Why?
Imagine a construction contractor — most of whom lack a college degree — who earns about $200,000 per year as the owner of his company. And now imagine all the people who work for him for as little as $20 per hour.
On the pollster and pundit definition, these people are all part of the ‘working class.’
The fact of the matter is that millions of wealthy American bosses lack a college degree. When we define them as working class, we produce bad analyses.
We must reject this definition as a starting point.
Two Definitions of ‘Working Class’
With that particularly bad definition out of the way, let’s look at two much more plausible definitions of ‘working class.’
Definition A: those who do not have a four-year college degree and who are also in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution.
Definition B: those who work a rank-and-file, non-managerial job and lack the power to hire or fire workers.
I adapted Definition A from a book by Les Leopold, executive director of the Labor Institute, called Wall Street’s War on Workers. It’s an example of what I called, in an earlier article and blog post, an Outcomes Approach. It starts with the conventional definition, but it removes wealthy people from the equation.
It thereby more appropriately handles examples like the one above about the wealthy construction owner.
I adapted Definition B from my own definition of ‘working class,’ which is an example of what I called the Activities Approach in the same earlier articles. It, too, handles the construction owner example appropriately, but it does so by different means. It would exclude the construction owner because he’s a boss who can hire and fire employees.
While both Definition A and Definition B do a better job handling a lot of cases, they have two key differences. First, Definition A includes only people without a college degree, while Definition B has no degree criterion. Second, Definition A focuses specifically on lower income people, while Definition B has no income criterion. Rather than income, it puts the focus on actual relationships in the workplace.
Which Definition is Better?
Now that we have our definitions on the table, readers might want to know which is better. And you might suspect I prefer Definition B, since it’s my own definition.
Analytically, I certainly prefer Definition B. But let’s set that aside for now. The fact is that Definition A has at least two key advantages.
First, it’s much easier to study empirically than Definition B. Pollsters routinely ask people about their education and income levels. By contrast, it’s more difficult to figure out whether people work a rank-and-file, non-managerial job. So, Definition A has all the empirical advantages of the bad definition with which we began, but it better handles many real cases in the world.
Second, Definition A does a good job getting at actual U.S. politics. When Americans talk about working-class people, they usually mean people without college degrees who earn low incomes. And when we look at who neoliberal capitalism harms, it’s mostly people without college degrees who earn low incomes.
However, Definition A misses the mark in several ways. First, it misses all the people with college degrees who work rank-and-file, non-managerial jobs. Particularly in the age of the gig economy, millions of Americans graduate from college and find themselves working as contingent employees, contractors, or even gig workers.
Second, it misses the forefront of labor activism. A great deal of recent labor actions — even strikes — have come from workers with college degrees. We see this particularly among workers like school teachers, nurses, and contingent college faculty. Definition B includes these workers, whereas Definition A excludes them.
To his credit, Leopold acknowledges that he misses these groups. But he underestimates their importance, largely because actual political discourse misses them. In that sense, defenders of Definition A fail to criticize the limits of our current politics.
‘Working Class’ and U.S. Politics
For these reasons, I conclude that Definition B is a better definition when thinking about long-term economic development and political coalitions, especially for leftists. However, Definition A makes for a handier, more easily studied definition when dealing with the everyday. But it runs into sharp limits. The left needs to put together a coalition that includes not only non-college workers, but also teachers and nurses. And so, for the left’s political project, Definition B makes more sense.
We can see, then, that this is no mere academic exercise in defining a term. It helps clarify and achieve our political aims.
But the importance stretches beyond inclusion and political coalitions. It also holds more immediate relevance to the ongoing debates over why Harris lost and what Democrats need to do to renew their political fortunes.
Even if the various factions of the Democratic Party agree that Democrats lost the ‘working class,’ they might not have the same people in mind. Alternatively, they might have in mind a group that will never vote Democratic, no matter the level of pandering to them.
After all, do any of you really think the Democrats will ever build a winning coalition from small business owners without college degrees?
I didn’t think so.
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