Millions of white, working-class voters in swing states stayed home in the 2016 presidential race, a potentially huge pool of supporters for President Trump to win over if his campaign can find the right message.
Whites without a college degree make up a disproportionate amount of residents in states throughout the Rust Belt and the South, creating a potent new voting bloc in trying to build an Electoral College majority of at least 270. And just as the Trump campaign turned out many white, working-class voters in his upset victory over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, there are potentially a good deal more. Winning over at least some of them would help offset the edge Democrats have gained in recent years by winning the votes of suburban residents turned off by the president’s tone and tenor.
But much of that depends on whether Trump and Republican National Committee staffers can get them to the polls. Exciting nonvoters has long been a white whale for both Republicans and Democrats, with candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont basing his primary and hypothetical general campaign on the notion that he could excite those who are normally disillusioned by national politics.
Sanders’s failure in both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries demonstrates the difficulty of this task. Nor is there any guarantee that those voters will necessarily support the candidate actively courting them. The potential spoils, however, could fundamentally shift electoral politics in the short and medium term — or as long as the Electoral College exists.
Consider Michigan, where 1.6 million of those who didn’t vote in 2016 are whites without a college degree. In Pennsylvania, that number jumps to 2.1 million, nearly 3 times the 800,000 white working-class Wisconsin residents who opted out of the 2016 election. Roughly 80,000 voters in all three states combined handed Trump the keys to the White House in 2016.
Assuming Trump manages to win just 10% of new white nonvoters in November, he could help stop his electoral bleeding in the suburbs, which have slowly been shifting toward the Democrats over the last two election cycles. Yet that assumes he maintains his grip over white, working-class voters who supported him in 2016, which some who work in GOP politics say is far from a certainty.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
One individual who worked with the RNC suggested that the Trump campaign ought to court voters at gun stores in exurban communities aggressively — like Kenosha County, Wisconsin. Instead, the individual said, the GOP has been using blanket messages about socialism and tax hikes — issues traditionally used by Republicans that often prove ineffective with the white working class.
During the presidential primary, Biden consistently outperformed Hillary Clinton with working-class whites in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, signaling that many of these voters are more than happy to switch back to the Democratic Party. Although many white working-class voters are generally less ideological than the college educated, keeping them in the GOP column requires a significant change in messaging from what might have historically played well in Fairfield County, Connecticut.
Nor are Democrats, unlike Clinton in 2016, blind to Trump’s potential political advantage in the Rust Belt. Although he’s sparingly left his Wilmington, Delaware, home since the end of the Democratic primary, Joe Biden’s few trips out of state lines have been to working-class towns in Pennsylvania.
In remarks during these trips, Biden has emphasized his support for organized labor while also distancing himself from more radical members of his party. So-called moderate Democrats like Biden carry an advantage in some of these states because they enjoy far more flexibility on social issues than the GOP with its pledges for smaller government and less spending, things that the white working class don’t necessarily support.
“When we talk about safety and security, we should also talk about the basic security of being able to look your kid in the eye and tell them everything is going to be okay,” Biden said Monday afternoon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “We won’t lose our home. We’ll be able to put food on the table.”
