By Katie Glueck
In Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown, a longtime champion of working-class voters, was toppled by a rich Republican former car dealer.
In Washington, President Joe Biden — who won the Democratic nomination four years ago with the help of blue-collar voters — must now hand back power to Republicans and surrender leadership of a party increasingly dominated by highly educated voters.
And in Pennsylvania, Sen. Bob Casey, whose family name has for years been synonymous with white working-class Democrats, is confronting the real possibility of defeat.
Eight years after fury among white working-class voters propelled Donald Trump to victory, Democrats swore that this time, they would try to do better with that group.
Instead, the party’s staggering challenges with blue-collar voters have only worsened. Widespread frustration with high prices and alienation from Democrats have turned the party’s lawmakers in Trump territory into an ever-more-endangered species.
“When the change doesn’t show up, the hope for change turns into anger,” said Rep. Matt Cartwright, a battle-tested Pennsylvania Democrat from the Scranton area who narrowly lost this month. “The anger showed up.”
The new inroads Trump made this year with working-class voters of color, particularly Latino ones, have alarmed Democrats. At the same time, the party’s Trump-era Achilles’ heel — its struggle to earn the trust of white working-class voters — was even starker this year, especially in the Industrial Midwest, where the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin all broke for Trump.
In many of those states’ blue-collar counties, Vice President Kamala Harris lost by greater margins than Biden did in 2020.
Certainly, a number of Democratic House and Senate candidates significantly outran Harris. She also contended with many political barriers Biden did not face four years ago, including racism and sexism, along with the extraordinary challenge of running a 107-day campaign after the unpopular president was forced out of the race.
But she and other Democrats also faced a deepening, newly worrisome perception problem: a widespread belief among working-class Americans that the Democratic Party does not fully grasp their struggles — and in some cases, disdains them outright.
“This doesn’t have to be the end of white working-class Democrats,” said Justin Barasky, a Democratic strategist who was Brown’s 2018 campaign manager. “But it will be if we don’t start being more inclusive.”
Warring over words and culture
Democrats have not been shy about offering diagnoses for their devastating losses.
Voters, sour about pandemic-era inflation and bothered by the migrant crisis, punished the party in power. Republicans effectively caricatured Democrats as overly liberal and “woke.” Democrats needed a stronger populist message.
Misinformation thrived in a fractured news environment. The country was simply not ready to elect a woman, especially a woman of color.
There is some truth to each theory, according to Democrats who have thought deeply about politics in blue-collar America.
But one of the biggest problems, these Democrats say, is that voters in white working-class neighborhoods now see the party as unresponsive to their most pressing daily troubles.
Rep.-elect Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Mich., won a district that is home to many white working-class residents, even as Harris struggled in many counties there.
McDonald Rivet said that for many voters in her area, high costs were not just an inconvenience. They raised “fear in people, right, about their ability to make it,” she said.
To those voters, she said, litigating other subjects — whether Trump was a “fascist,” for example, or the violence of the 2021 Capitol riot — simply felt less urgent.
“Those sorts of conversations don’t impact what is happening in their lives on a daily basis,” she said. “It comes down to, what is the price of a gallon of milk?”
To some extent, voters signaled in interviews this year, Trump benefited from nostalgia for the prepandemic era — while the chaos of his previous administration receded for some.
“I don’t like the rhetoric from the Democrats,” said Jeff Markey, 66, a former airport technician from Wyoming, Michigan, a more blue-collar city outside Grand Rapids. He said he had supported Democrats until Trump’s 2016 candidacy, and supported him again this year.
“I like how safe the country was when Trump was in, internationally and financially,” he added.
A Pennsylvania problem
Perhaps nowhere were the challenges with white working-class voters more painful for Democrats than in Pennsylvania, the state of Biden’s birth and the one that cemented his 2020 victory.
This year, Harris lost the state, Republicans flipped two House seats and Casey is locked in a recount battle against his Republican challenger, David McCormick.
Casey’s struggle — even as Democrats prevailed outright in Senate races in Michigan and Wisconsin — was arguably the most striking reflection of the national headwinds the party faced, and how key slices of voters recoiled from its message.
Casey, a three-term senator, is a son of a popular former governor of Pennsylvania, Robert P. Casey Sr., and his family is an institution in state politics. For years, conservative Democrats were known in the state as “Casey Democrats.”
The younger Casey won his last race, in 2018, by 13 percentage points. This year, the recount was triggered because McCormick led Casey by less than half of a percentage point.
In an interview, former Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., reflected on the political realignment that has been especially vivid in his state.
Highly educated or more moderate Republicans have become more open to Democrats, while onetime culturally conservative Democrats have shifted hard to the right in the Trump era.
“‘Pro-labor, pro-life, pro gun’ — that was a big part of the Democratic Party in Pennsylvania,” said Dent, who supported Harris this year. “It seems that that population has migrated solidly into the Republican camp.”
Still, even some Democrats in Pennsylvania bucked the national trends.
Rep. Chris Deluzio, a Democrat from western Pennsylvania, noted that he improved his standing in Beaver County — a heavily white, working-class county — this year, though he did not win it.
He urged his party not to cede the “fighter” mantle, encouraging fellow Democrats to embrace a clear economic message that includes confronting corporate power and fighting to defend unions.
“We certainly have to have a national party that can win in the Rust Belt,” he added.
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