Revolt of the Normies

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump came back with a bang. The former president is on track to win not just the Electoral College but the popular vote. Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t overperform in a single state, and lost significantly in many of the places which led to President Biden’s 2020 victory. In a race that was heralded as neck-and-neck, Trump appears to have made a clean sweep of the swing states, shocking the chattering and political Democratic classes. His victory was less surprising to people paying attention to the class divide and the political realignment in this country, especially when you look at which kinds of Americans turned out for Trump, and which cast their votes for Harris.

Exit polling reveals Trump’s victory came from solidifying his support with working-class Americans of all races. Trump won 44% of union households, and a staggering 54% of Ohio union voters. Overall, Trump grew his support of voters without a college degree—especially non-white voters without a degree. Clinton won that group by 56 points, and Biden carried them by 46 points, but Harris only won them by 30 points. Meanwhile, Harris improved on Clinton’s and Biden’s share of white college-educated voters. Harris carried these women by 16 points, and swung these men by 11 points, winning the white college-educated vote by 7 points overall.

Trump also made significant gains with voters of color with a degree; these white college-educated liberals were the only group to swing to Harris in a significant way. Meanwhile, Latino men—a population overrepresented in the working class—swung to Trump in a huge way—by 35 points relative to 2020.

The gender divide, too, was salient: Trump carried men by 13 points, and Harris carried women by 8 points, creating a 21-point gap between the sexes. This makes sense: The 2024 presidential race overlayed the class divide onto the gender divide. Harris campaigned on a fake threat to women—that Trump would institute a national abortion ban, something he actually vowed to veto—while Trump campaigned on the real threats to working-class men: cratering wages due to a limitless supply of cheap labor, the unaffordable cost of groceries due to skyrocketing energy prices and inflation, terrible trade deals that short-sell American labor, and foreign wars. The Obamas berated men to protect their wives and daughters from a made-up threat to their lives and vote Harris, but it was working-class women who turned out to support their husbands and sons from the very real threat of foreign competition. Speaking of sons, younger voters, too, shifted to Trump, while Harris improved with voters 65 and older—the Americans least likely to be struggling economically these days.

It is at this point undeniable: There has been a realignment in American politics. The Democrats are the party of the rich and poor, winning with Americans making less than $30,000 a year and over $100,000 a year, while the Republicans are the party of the working and middle class, winning everyone in between. The Democrats are the party of college-educated women, while Trump has won the majority of Latino men and up to 25% of black men in some states. The GOP under Trump has cobbled together the multi-ethnic working-class coalition that the Democrats used to brag about.  

How did this happen? It’s simple: Trump captured the Democrats’ would-be voters by actually implementing what the Democrats once promised.

In my book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women, I interviewed working-class Americans across the country about whether they felt they still had a fair shot at the American Dream. Some did but most didn’t. They felt their economic prospects had been sold out by the elites of both parties—through bad trade deals like NAFTA, which shipped their jobs overseas to build up the middle class in other countries, or through the lax border policy embraced by both parties which welcomed in low-wage competition from other countries to the tune of millions, or through the defunding of vocational training.

When Trump showed up, he closed the border, effectively putting a stop to plummeting working-class wages, and then fought a trade war with China by slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum, which created a protective netting around American workers in a host of industries. He gave tax cuts to middle- and working-class Americans. And with his protectionist policies, he did what the free market types of both parties only pretended to: He created an economy that lifted many, many boats. And he was the first American president to initiate no new wars, refusing to send working-class kids overseas to die. Like so many other issues, the cost of America’s foreign interventions is borne by the working class while the elites reap the benefits.

Though the Democrats cast Trump as an extremist, a threat to democracy, a new Hitler, if they ever want to win again, they need to admit the truth: Trump won on a consensus campaign based on policy that was, until very recently, the Democrats’ own. Acknowledging those real interests has helped give him a mandate to lead.