Biden Continues to Bleed Support From Working-Class Voters

President Joe Biden calls himself the most pro-union president in history and often touts his humble background, yet he and his party may be drifting further away from winning the support of working-class voters.

Biden has in recent weeks attempted to flip the script on Republicans, saying their agenda will hurt low- and moderate-income voters who didn’t attend college.

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“Under this new plan, this tax plan, the ultra-MAGA agenda, while big corporations and billionaires are going to pay nothing more, the working-class folks are going to pay a hell of a lot more,” he said May 4. Biden contrasted that with last year’s American Rescue Plan, which “started to grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out: rescue checks and tax cuts for working families that gave them just a little bit of breathing room and put food on the table and a roof over their heads.”

But real-world economics and the Democratic Party’s priorities may be sending a different message to voters.

HBO host Bill Maher blasted the left-wing movement to cancel student loans as a losing issue for Democrats that would further erode the party’s stance with the working class.

“We who didn’t go to college and didn’t benefit from that are gonna subsidize you to get your degree in gender studies and sports marketing and all the other bulls***,” Maher said. “I think it’s a loser issue.”

Maher noted that just 13% of people carry federal student loan debt, whereas 65% don’t hold college degrees. Half of all federal student loan debt is held by people seeking graduate degrees.

One of Maher’s panelists, Paul Begala, former presidential campaign strategist for Bill Clinton, joked that Democrats have “secret labs” in Berkeley, California, and Brooklyn, New York, where they come up with ideas “to completely piss off the working class. And it’s working wonderfully,” he said.

A Gallup poll released in March showed that Biden had lost support since taking office among voters who never attended college, with his approval rating with the group falling from 52% to 37%. Support slipped among those with postgraduate degrees — but only from 69% to 59%.

Democrats have long been thought of as the party of the working class, a stance that has slipped in recent election cycles. Former President Donald Trump won the overall working-class vote by 4 points in 2020.

Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic strategist, wrote in March that the shift is evident based on election data and not just with white voters.

“Democrats have generally comforted themselves that their poor performance among the working class was purely a matter of white working class voters, who they presumed were motivated by retrograde racial and cultural attitudes,” he wrote. “But since 2012, nonwhite working class voters have shifted away from the Democrats by 18 margin points, with a particularly sharp shift in the last election and particularly among Hispanics.”

Those woes come with the midterm elections just around the corner and with inflation at 8.5%, a 40-year high. Wage growth has been falling further behind inflation, meaning that real wages are falling rapidly. The issue hits low- and moderate-income voters hardest because they cannot cut back on necessities, such as gas and groceries, which have seen some of the most dramatic price gains since Biden took office.

Falling real wages help explain why voters give Biden poor ratings on the economy, even though the labor market looks strong. Friday’s report showed a healthy increase of 428,000 new jobs in April and the unemployment rate holding at 3.6% — extremely low by historical standards.

Biden’s pro-union bona fides can’t overcome the perception that Democrats are to blame for inflation and are underinvested in crime prevention, safety, and parental rights, according to Heritage Action Executive Director Jessica Anderson. She points to policies such as banning menthol cigarettes and the creation of the Disinformation Governance Board as evidence that Democrats are out of touch with kitchen table issues.

“Working-class voters care about economics, having food on the table, the rise in gas prices,” said Anderson. “Many working-class voters are parents, and they see their school culture slipping away. Democrats are getting further removed from our American values.”

Anderson predicts that working-class voters will continue to drift toward the GOP as a course correction for “woke” progressive policies.

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“President Trump was able to further solidify the GOP as the party of the working class,” said Anderson. “He galvanized those voters across the country, standing up for the small guy, the forgotten middle. Trump said the GOP will open its tent to the working class, and now we’re never going back.”