President Joe Biden speaks at an event in Milwaukee on March 13.Morry Gash/The Associated Press
U.S. President Joe Biden has a popularity problem. His approval rating is stubbornly low, he’s behind former president Donald Trump in the polls and the likelihood of him losing his bid for re-election this fall is high. And it’s all happening as the U.S. economy rumbles along, with low unemployment and rising wages seemingly doing nothing for the sitting president.
What’s going on?
The problem is that a large part of the electorate has become estranged from Mr. Biden’s Democratic Party. When Democrats talk, they tune out. Mr. Trump, in contrast, broadcasts on their frequency.
In 2002, Ruy Teixeira and John Judis published The Emerging Democratic Majority. The influential book predicted that Democrats were on the cusp of electoral dominance. A key driver would be the rapid growth of the U.S.’s non-white population, which leaned Democratic. If the party held on to its traditional voters, and added lots more, the GOP would be swamped.
That future appeared to have arrived in 2008, with the election of Barack Obama to the White House.
And then: The emerging Democratic majority failed to emerge.
Last year, Mr. Teixeira and Mr. Judis published Where Have All The Democrats Gone?. It aims to explain why their earlier predictions didn’t come to pass, and what Democrats can do to get back on track.
The problem for Democrats is that they’ve lost what was once their base: the white working class. Why? One explanation was offered in 2016 by Hillary Clinton, with her line about Trump voters being a “basket of deplorables.” If Mr. Trump wins, it’s because he’s racist. If Democrats lose, it’s because they refuse to be.
Many Democrats like that explanation. Mr. Teixeira and Mr. Judis do not. They note that a fair number of Trump voters backed Mr. Obama in 2008. What’s more, Democrats are also losing the non-white working class. According to the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, if an election were held today, Mr. Trump would win the Hispanic vote.
When you consider the Democrats who ran for the party’s nomination in 2020, Mr. Biden was probably the only one who could have won enough swing voters in key swing states – blue-collar places such as Michigan and Wisconsin – to beat Mr. Trump. He is old enough to have spent decades in the earlier version of the party, and he clearly sees himself as the president of blue-collar America.
The challenge is that he leads a coalition of groups whose biggest and loudest voice is that of educated progressive voters (who are also, incidentally, mostly white). And their beliefs and interests are not the same as those of the blue collars.
Take Mr. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. It’s hundreds of billions of dollars aimed at subsidizing manufacturing industries into locating in the U.S. The reindustrialization goal could have come from Team Trump. But in the case of the Biden plan, industrial policy and protectionism are tied to fighting climate change.
For educated progressive voters, the fact that the loudest note is about climate change makes it sound right. But for a lot of blue-collar voters, that makes the IRA confusing and off key. It sounds like the Biden administration is saying, “Make America Great So It Can Be Green.” Which is not as easy to get behind as Mr. Trump’s false, but more straightforward, slogan.
On a host of issues, cultural and economic, the view from Brooklyn or Berkeley is not what most Americans see. A recent Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that, among a long list of public institutions, companies, organizations and foreign entities, the one with the highest approval rating is the U.S. military, with a net rating of plus-70 per cent. Next in line: the police.
Or as the iconoclastic, Harvard economist Roland Fryer recently put it, talking about the distance between Cambridge, Mass., and the working-class Black area where he grew up: “You go to my neighbourhood and call somebody BIPOC, they’ll punch you in the face.”
The issue that currently threatens to hand the election to Mr. Trump is immigration. There were a record 2.5 million “irregular migrant encounters” at the U.S.-Mexico border last year. Most who crossed wanted to be stopped, so they could make an asylum claim. Most were immediately released into the U.S., pending adjudication of their claim, which will take years.
The progressive wing of Mr. Biden’s party has no problem with that, but most Americans do, including a host of Democratic mayors and members of Congress in swing districts. Fox News ginned up the story, but there’s something to gin up.
In a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll, Mr. Biden’s point of greatest unpopularity is immigration. The Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that Americans think the issue is the most important one facing the country – and Mr. Biden’s biggest failure.
So earlier this year, Mr. Biden tried to act. He promised that if Republicans in Congress passed a tough border bill, he’d sign it. It almost worked – until Mr. Trump ordered his minions to block any such legislation until after the election.
Mr. Trump doesn’t have real answers for what’s bugging blue-collar America. But give the great huckster this much: He’s been far better than Democrats, or old-school Republicans, at identifying working-class worries, and preying on them.