Historically loyal to the Democrats, the working-class vote has gradually shifted to the right in recent years, to the point of becoming a campaign issue, while the two candidates in the American presidential election are neck and neck.
Joe Biden scored points by securing the public support of several major unions, including the United Steelworkers (USW).
But that allegiance doesn’t guarantee that the base will follow in states where Biden and Trump are nearly tied in the polls.
“For four years, Donald Trump talked about infrastructure, but it was all rhetoric,” said JoJo Burgess, a steelworker. “Joe Biden has delivered.”
Under his mandate, Congress adopted, in 2021, a major investment plan of 1.2 trillion dollars intended in particular to renovate roads and develop public transport.
“Today we have the most pro-working American president we’ve ever seen,” insists JoJo Burgess, who is also the mayor of the small city of Washington, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
A maintenance worker at the steelmaker US Steel, Rudy Sanetta nevertheless prefers Donald Trump, “for his resistance to politics. I have no confidence in the other one.”
Working-class voters “are the most decisive, because they have shown that they want to make a choice between Trump and Biden,” even if it means switching from one to the other over the course of the elections.
Exit polls showed that in 2020, the shift to Joe Biden by a portion of the working class who had voted for Trump in 2016 “had a significant influence” on the outcome of the vote in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, according to a study by the firm Mike Lux Media and the In Union platform.
“Implode the system”
The study showed an erosion of support for the current president of the United States in Wisconsin and Michigan, while Pennsylvania remained unchanged.
“Democrats need to understand that these blue-collar workers in the interior of the country have been through a lot in recent decades,” wrote the authors of the study, whose two organizations are left-leaning.
They recommended that Democrats establish early contact with these voters through trusted intermediaries who can understand their daily lives “to limit online disinformation and social pressure.”
The authors of the book Rust Belt Union BluesLainey Newman and Theda Skocpol, see the shift of the working-class vote to the right as a result of deindustrialization that has hit the northern United States particularly hard.
This movement has weakened the influence of unions and reduced their societal role, which included events and rallies. Between 1983 and 2023, the proportion of unionized workers has been halved to just 10%, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
According to the authors, many workers then turned to other vectors of socialization such as religion or hunting, two more conservative spheres.
Some workers pivoted to Donald Trump after decades of industrial decline to “implode the system,” said Bernie Hall, USW’s Pennsylvania union leader. “I think that idea still has a lot of appeal.”
A machinist at US Steel, Alex Barna voted Democrat his entire life, before twice supporting Donald Trump, whom he plans to elect again in November. He was won over by his tax cuts and credits him with a vibrant economy before the coronavirus crisis.
“Our wallet was doing well,” says his wife Helen, who blames Joe Biden for letting inflation run wild, which has eroded household purchasing power. “A lot of people only remember his tweets for four years. But at least we were living better.”
