Who really cares? Democrats lost the white working class before Trump won them
by Lucy Belknap (class of 2025)
Since Trump’s second presidential win in November 2024, political pundits have been offering a vast range of explanations for this result — just as they had after his first election in 2016. Once again, many pointed to his unique appeal to the white working class, building on claims made in 2016 that he had drawn this group toward his camp in unprecedented numbers.
Looking back on 2016 data, however, researchers have measured a different reality — while Trump did win the majority of the white working class, this was not a unique phenomenon. So had six other Republican candidates since 1980, including those running in the three elections prior. In other words, much of the white working class has gradually progressed toward the Republican Party for decades. But if Trump wasn’t the catalyst for this shift, then what was?
To answer this question, I use data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) to analyze the public’s assessments of whether each party’s presidential candidate “really cares” about people like them in every election since 1984. This measure tests the extent to which respondents perceive candidates as capable of understanding and responding to their group’s needs. If Trump uniquely appealed to the white working class, then we should see a sharp improvement in attitudes toward the Republican candidate between 2012 and 2016. Instead, what emerges is the declining popularity of Democratic candidates in the years leading up to 2016.
While many analysts use educational attainment alone to identify members of the working class, I classify as working class those who do not hold a college degree and report annual household incomes below the 68th percentile, as considering education and income together makes for a more effective predictor of class. While the 68th percentile is high, this number works best within the constraints of ANES data, and considering education in addition to income helps to eliminate any respondents who should not be included in the working class.
When asked whether the phrase “really cares about people like you” applies to each party’s presidential candidate, respondents were provided with the options of “extremely well,” “quite well,” “not too well,” and “not well at all.” I placed respondents’ evaluations on a 100-point scale, which I used to create an average response among the white working class for each election year. These averages for every election year from 1984 to 2020 are plotted in the figure below.
An interesting pattern is presented in this graph: rather than a sharp increase in evaluations of Trump in 2016, we instead see a sharp decline in evaluations of the Democratic candidate, beginning with Barack Obama in 2012. In fact, evaluations of Trump in 2016 are practically even with evaluations of Mitt Romney in the previous election. Until this drop, the white working class consistently evaluated every Democratic candidate more favorably than the Republican candidate; however, between 2008 and 2016 these evaluations plummeted by over 23 percentage points.
In the context of the white working class, the question about the extent to which a candidate “really cares about people like you” speaks to concerns this group might have about being left behind by an increasingly globalizing social and economic environment. This fear was only exacerbated by events preceding the 2012 election — firstly, after the 2008 economic recession, rural areas struggled to recover even as urban areas regained and built upon their former prosperity. Secondly, Obama was finishing his first term as the US’s first Black president, which perhaps induced racial resentment and status anxiety among white voters. These factors, which combined in their effect on the white working class in particular, might have led this group to reject the party they saw as behind them.
But how different are this group’s evaluations of candidates from evaluations made by other Americans? The following two graphs compare the average responses of the white working class with those of the rest of the population, as well as specifically the rest of the white population. They both display similar trends: while each group’s evaluations of both Democratic and Republican candidates were fairly on par through 2008, they widely diverged in 2012. Evaluations of Democratic candidates plummeted among the white working class, producing a nearly 16-point gap between this group and the rest of the full population by 2020 compared to just a 7-point gap in 2008. Meanwhile, evaluations of Republican candidates plummeted among the rest of the population in 2012 while remaining stable among the white working class — the gap between the two groups grew from just 1 percentage point in 2008 to over 21 percentage points by 2020. Trend lines of evaluations by the non-working class white population demonstrate that while this divergence can be somewhat attributed to race, race alone cannot entirely explain the diverging opinion of the white working class. Among all white respondents, there is still a significant difference between the opinions of those in and outside the working class, indicating that socioeconomic circumstances are a significant factor in addition to race.
It is clear that Trump alone was not the sole motivator of a mass switch from voting Democrat to voting Republican among the white working class. Instead, these data shed light on declining faith in Democrats as a longer-term motivator. Again, this decline might be the result of a combination of economic and racial factors, where both the 2008 economic recession and the first Black presidency worked together to exacerbate feelings among the white working class of being left behind both economically and culturally.
Given this context, it becomes apparent how members of the white working class might have lost faith in the Democratic party by 2012 — a drop in confidence that came before Trump had even entered the political picture. While Trump was hardly the catalyst for the white working class’s movement toward the Republican Party, he did seize a unique opportunity to capture a voting bloc that was newly disillusioned by the party in office and searching for an alternative. He clearly made good use of this opportunity, as demonstrated by the sharp uptick in his favorability among the white working class by 2020, and his electoral victory in 2024 only further proves his success. Crucially, though, the groundwork was already being laid for this switch in support ahead of his candidacy.
