The White House / Flickr (Left), Adobe Stock (Right)
CV NEWS FEED // According to a political data expert, former President Donald Trump is poised to post the best performance among working-class voters across the board of any Republican nominee in the past few decades.
Specifically, Trump is gaining and Harris is losing ground among union families, trade school graduates, and minority voters without a college degree, per a polling aggregate conducted by Harry Enten, a senior writer and political analyst for CNN.
Trump has been “doing very very well among working-class voters, whether they were in unions, whether they went to trade school, or whether they’re voters of color,” Enten said during a Monday CNN broadcast:
The fact is, Donald Trump seems to have gone into a hotbed of traditional Democratic support and made a lot of movement in ways that I don’t think a lot of people would’ve thought when he went down that escalator just back in 2015.
Enten remarked that the current Democratic nominee’s performance among union households “ain’t what it used to be” compared to the party’s past tickets.
“Look at where Kamala Harris is today,” he stated. “She’s only leading by nine points” among union households.
If these numbers hold, “that would be the worst Democratic performance in a generation.”
In 2020, the Biden-Harris ticket won union households by 19 points over Trump – more than double the Harris-Walz ticket’s projected performance against the same Republican nominee.
“You go back to 1992,” the journalist added, “Bill Clinton won that union vote by 30 points.”
Enten then pointed out that in 2016, failed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won union households by 12 points against Trump – a considerably smaller margin than her husband had won them by 24 years earlier.
At the time, Mrs. Clinton’s performance “was the lowest mark for a Democrat since 1984” among unionized workers. In that year’s contest, the party’s nominee, Walter Mondale, lost in a 49-state landslide to then-President Ronald Reagan.
However, Clinton’s performance among union households is still three points higher than Harris’ current polling numbers with the group.
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Among voters who graduated from trade or vocational schools, Trump has a massive 31-point lead over Harris, according to Enten’s aggregate.
The journalist highlighted that in 1992, Bill Clinton won this group by seven points – meaning there has been a 38-point swing to the Republican Party over the past 32 years.
“More so perhaps than any other bloc, the folks who go to trade school, vocational school, that has moved from being a core Democratic group to now being a core group of Donald Trump’s massive amount of support among the working class,” Enten said.
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Finally, Enten indicated that Trump’s vast improvement with working class voters is in a large part due to making considerable strides with working-class racial and ethnic minorities over the last four years.
“Donald Trump seems to have been having some real impact among voters of color, getting into that traditional Democratic support,” Enten said. “And I was very interested to see this.”
He pointed out that among voters of color without college degrees, Harris is leading Trump by only 28 points – compared to the 45-point margin by which the Biden-Harris ticket won the group in 2020.
“I will note that the margin among voters of color who actually graduate college has only been changed by five points,” Enten added:
The reason Donald Trump is doing so well amongst voters of color is because he has really gone and grabbed a lot of voters that he didn’t previously have among those who didn’t graduate college. And this is part of a larger trend that we’re seeing throughout our politics.
Over the past few years, multiple analysts have observed that the Trump-led Republican Party is increasingly attracting both white and nonwhite working class voters into its ranks, mainly due to taking populist positions on economic issues including trade.
Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini wrote about this phenomenon in his 2023 book “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.”
In mid-September, CatholicVote reported that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (“Teamsters”) “announced that it will support neither major party candidate in November’s presidential election.”
This marked “the first time the union has not backed the Democratic nominee since 1996,” CatholicVote added:
A FOX News columnist called the decision a “stunning move, and direct snub to Harris.” The sitting vice president had heavily courted the 121-year-old union’s support, but will be the first Democratic nominee this century to go without its backing.
The Teamsters had endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket four years ago. It is among the five largest labor unions in the country, with around 1.4 million members across a variety of industries.
