He rememers her saying, curtly, “Oh, I will help,” then leaving.
That November, Sauritch voted for Clinton. But this fall he’s backing Donald Trump, in part because he believes that Democrats don’t actually care about the working class—a group defined, by pollsters, as people without college degrees. If Sauritch were still running Local 2227, he might have felt pressure to keep his decision private, since the U.S.W., like most unions, is supporting Kamala Harris. But he left his post in 2022 and is now free to speak his mind. Most of the rank-and-file workers Sauritch knows share his view, he told me, regardless of what union leaders say publicly. “I don’t care what you see on TV,” he said. “The grunts in the lunchroom love Trump.”
Not long ago, America’s steel mills and factories were full of loyal Democrats. These union members understood that, in the struggle between labor and capital, Republicans sided with management. One of the workers who shared this outlook was Sauritch’s father, Herman, a retired steelworker and the person who introduced me to Scott. When Herman was young, he told me, employees knew “there wasn’t a Republican in the goddam world that ever tried to help the working guy out.” Herman, an eighty-three-year-old who wears a ring inscribed with the U.S.W. logo on his right hand, still believes this. He raised his children—five sons and a daughter—in a household that he thought would instill the same perspective in them. To his dismay, three of his sons support Trump. “I don’t know where I screwed up,” he said, with a sigh.
The shifting political allegiances of blue-collar voters have made it increasingly difficult for Democrats to compete in, much less carry, parts of the country they once dominated. In 1984, Walter Mondale won ten counties in western Pennsylvania, home to the state’s once thriving steel industry. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost all but one, contributing to her defeat in Pennsylvania and, consequently, in the election. Some of the union members who had long turned out for Democrats had either moved away, after their factories shut down, or become MAGA Republicans. And a new generation of blue-collar voters was emerging, one that was less likely to belong to unions and to vote Democrat.
The counties where this transformation occurred are heavily populated by working-class whites, who were especially receptive to Trump’s xenophobic nationalism. But some polling suggests that the decline in support for the Democratic Party hasn’t been confined to the white working class. In 2012, Barack Obama carried the nonwhite working class by sixty-seven points—a margin that helped him win the over-all working-class vote. In the latest Times/Siena poll, Harris trailed Trump by eighteen points among working-class respondents, in part because the size of her advantage among nonwhite voters without college degrees—twenty-four points—was roughly a third of Obama’s in 2012. Although Black and Latino voters back Harris over Trump by large margins, the Times/Siena poll showed Harris with substantially less support from both white and nonwhite working-class voters than Joe Biden had in 2020.
The large crowds at Harris’s rallies, along with the donations that have poured into her campaign, have drawn comparisons to Obama’s electrifying race for the White House in 2008. The broad enthusiasm her candidacy has aroused is reflected in the proliferation of Zoom fund-raisers with names like South Asian Women for Harris and White Dudes for Harris. But Harris’s support rests disproportionately with affluent, college-educated voters. It’s possible that courting such Americans—including Republicans in the suburbs who dislike Trump and support abortion rights—will enable her to win. But, even if this strategy succeeds, it will raise questions about the Democratic Party’s identity and priorities. For much of the past century, its leaders have prided themselves on championing less advantaged people. If such Americans continue drifting away from the Democrats, it will be hard to dismiss the perception that the Party speaks mainly for coastal élites and upscale professionals. This is particularly dangerous in Rust Belt states such as Pennsylvania, where this year’s election may well be decided—and where nearly two-thirds of voters don’t have college degrees.
One mistake of Hillary Clinton’s that Harris will surely not repeat is taking the support of working-class voters for granted. According to Steve Rosenthal, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the country’s largest federation of unions, Clinton didn’t visit a single union hall in Michigan or Wisconsin after she became the nominee, in 2016. While she dismissed Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” Trump held rallies across the Rust Belt, promising to bring back jobs and deliver “a victory for the wage-earner.” Trump’s speeches were littered with bigoted remarks about Mexicans and Muslims. But, as a group of sociologists noted in a paper published in The British Journal of Sociology, he also exalted factory workers who had been stripped of their jobs, and of their dignity, by structural forces beyond their control, especially free-trade agreements backed by Democrats. (Of course, Republicans had supported the same agreements.) Trump’s message resonated with voters like Steve, a retired firefighter I spoke with while visiting Berks County, in southeastern Pennsylvania. He was dressed in a T-shirt adorned with the American flag, and told me that he’d voted twice for Bill Clinton. “Grandpop was a Democrat, Dad was a Democrat,” he explained. “They had a pro-union stance, and that was that. I learned it from them.” Then he watched the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Clinton signed, ripple through the Rust Belt, causing nearby factories to slash jobs. “Those places laid off hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people,” he said. I met Steve, who left the Democratic Party, outside a Trump field office, where he’d come to volunteer.
Once Trump was in office, he abandoned his vow to help America’s forgotten workers. Instead, he cut taxes on the wealthy. Trump appointed Peter Robb, a former management attorney, as general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, which issued a series of anti-worker rulings, including one that restricted the ability of union organizers to communicate with employees. By contrast, many scholars regard Biden’s Administration as the most pro-labor since F.D.R.’s. In Biden’s first year, the N.L.R.B. ordered employers to reinstate more workers who had been illegally fired for protected activity, such as participation in a union, than it had during Trump’s entire Presidency, and the agency has defended workers involved in organizing drives at companies like Amazon and Starbucks. In 2023, Biden walked a picket line in Michigan with striking members of the United Auto Workers, a gesture of solidarity no other sitting President has performed. (Harris walked a U.A.W. picket line in Nevada in 2019.) Biden also oversaw a boom in domestic manufacturing and construction, which was spurred by legislation—such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—that required workers’ salaries for government-funded building projects to reflect “prevailing wages,” thus encouraging the hiring of union labor.
Had Biden run again, he undoubtedly would have campaigned on this record, hoping that it would pay dividends with voters in union households, which he won in 2020 by seventeen points—more than double Hillary Clinton’s margin. Since Harris became the Democratic Presidential nominee, she has also tried to emphasize her labor credentials. Among her first campaign stops this summer was a union hall in Wayne, Michigan, one of the three locations where the 2023 U.A.W. strike began. She went there with Tim Walz, whose selection as her running mate drew praise from labor leaders familiar with his record as the governor of Minnesota, which includes signing a law granting workers paid family and medical leave. Seven union leaders spoke on the opening night of the Democratic National Convention, among them the U.A.W.’s president, Shawn Fain, who wore a “TRUMP IS A SCAB” T-shirt and told the crowd, “Kamala Harris is one of us.”
It’s not clear, though, whether most workers share this view. A few weeks after Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, I met Aaron Joseph—an organizer with District Council 57 of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, which has members in thirty-two counties in western and central Pennsylvania—at a coffee shop in Carnegie, a working-class suburb west of Pittsburgh. On social media, Biden’s decision to step aside was greeted with relief and exuberance. Joseph told me that the painters, glaziers, and drywall finishers in his shop reacted differently. “We’ve been hitting a three-to-four-year boom because of the Administration’s policies,” he said. “When Biden stepped down, it was like losing a friend.” The union has plenty of Trump supporters, Joseph told me, but Biden’s vocal backing of organized labor, and the fact that he was from Scranton and seemed at ease among blue-collar workers, had bolstered his appeal. Harris lacked these advantages. “She’s from California—that generally does not play well in western Pennsylvania,” Joseph said. “For our membership, there’s a sense of unfamiliarity.”
Celinda Lake, a pollster who has conducted extensive surveys of working-class Americans, said that unfamiliarity with Harris could end up helping her campaign, enabling her to distance herself from the less popular aspects of Biden’s Presidency, such as the high inflation he presided over. “The Trump campaign didn’t anticipate that people are ready to take a fresh look at her,” Lake said. Harris’s experience as an attorney general who took on price gougers—a record she has highlighted at campaign rallies—could also appeal to blue-collar voters. “People think of A.G.s as people’s lawyers,” Lake said. “It’s a particularly great office for women, because you can demonstrate toughness without being too tough. They’re dragon slayers—they’re the ones protecting the cubs.”
Lake believes that Harris will fare slightly better than Biden would have among working-class women and worse among working-class men. “I think there will be a big gender gap,” she said. This was borne out in the encounters I had one day in Allentown, where I attended a press conference announcing that the Economic Development Administration, an agency in the Department of Commerce, had awarded the city a twenty-million-dollar grant to help its distressed neighborhoods. Numerous officials turned out to celebrate the news, among them the Democratic congresswoman Susan Wild, who is running for reëlection in a swing district. “We are going to build an economy that works for everyone,” Wild declared at the event, which was held inside a warehouse that is being converted into a prefab-wall-panel factory by union laborers. Afterward, I talked to some construction workers at the site. One of them said that he was a Democrat but wasn’t supporting Harris because of her failure to protect the border—the subject of a deluge of Trump attack ads in Pennsylvania. Another worker, a tall man with a bushy gray beard, said, “I like Trump.” Later, I went to a diner to meet Anne Radakovits, a member of Council 13 of AFSCME, which represents more than sixty-five thousand public-service workers in Pennsylvania. Radakovits was excited about Harris’s candidacy, but wasn’t surprised that some of the guys I’d spoken to at the construction site were less enthusiastic. “We’ve never had a female President,” she said. “God forbid a woman be in a leadership position, because we scare people.”
Gender and race may be among the reasons that blue-collar white men will not vote for Harris, but there are also many working-class communities where being a woman of color in a contest against an older white man—a candidate notorious for his vulgar attacks on immigrants and Black people—could be an advantage. In early August, I visited Reading, Pennsylvania’s fourth-largest city. Two-thirds of its ninety-five thousand residents are Latino, the fastest-growing demographic group in the state. I went there to meet Nancy Jimenez, a field coördinator for Make the Road Pennsylvania, an immigrant-rights group, at its local headquarters. Since 2016, she told me, the organization had registered more than fifteen thousand new Latino voters in Pennsylvania. A group of canvassers, in powder-blue T-shirts, told me that their mission was nonpartisan. Yet several acknowledged that their jobs had become easier since Harris had replaced Biden on the ticket, which generated a surge of interest in voting. One woman said that numerous people who were registered as Republicans had asked if she could help them switch parties.
A dozen other canvassers came in. They had been knocking on doors to survey immigrant residents about the issues that mattered to them. Given Trump’s vow to carry out mass deportations if elected, it stands to reason that one of these issues was Trump himself. A middle-aged woman who had been canvassing told me that the vast majority of Latinos in Reading disliked Trump because he denigrated immigrants. But several other canvassers indicated that, contrary to what liberals might assume, many immigrant voters they’d spoken to, especially those who had entered the U.S. legally, had conservative views on border security. Moreover, immigration was not these voters’ top concern—the economy was, both because the cost of living kept rising and because local jobs often paid little more than the minimum wage, which in Pennsylvania is $7.25 an hour.
Indeed, a national survey conducted earlier this year by the Valiente Action Fund found that Latino voters ranked “economic issues/inflation” as the nation’s most important problem by a wide margin. The survey was sent to me by Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage, an organization of restaurant and service workers who are fighting to raise pay in their professions. The restaurant industry is one of the largest employers of Latinos and Black people in the U.S. This year, both Trump and Harris have proposed eliminating taxes on these workers’ tips. Trump’s embrace of this idea was ironic, Jayaraman said, since one of the first things the Department of Labor tried to do under his Presidency was propose a rule that would have made tips the property of restaurant owners rather than workers—a gift to the powerful National Restaurant Association lobby (and presumably to Trump himself, whose Mar-a-Lago employees would have been subject to the change). Jayaraman, who successfully led a campaign against the proposal, said, “Everything Trump did was anti-restaurant workers.”
Removing taxes on tips would make little difference to most restaurant workers, Jayaraman explained, because two-thirds of them don’t earn enough money to pay income taxes anyway. A more meaningful step would be to end the sub-minimum wages that restaurants in most states are permitted to pay—in Pennsylvania, $2.83 an hour. Harris, in fact, has endorsed this change, a move that Jayaraman praises her for. But she still worries that both parties focus disproportionately on high retail prices instead of on low wages. A few years ago, she told me, she realized how important the latter issue was to voters while doing outreach in Ohio. “We found that, if you walk up to someone and say, ‘Hey, will you sign my petition to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour?,’ they’ll stop. If you then say, ‘Hey, you can’t sign unless you are registered to vote,’ everyone does it. That’s what makes them register.” Too many service workers weren’t hearing any campaign talk about raising their wages, she told me, which she feared might lead some of them to sit out the election.
The canvassers at Make the Road Pennsylvania told me that many people they met expressed doubt that voting could improve their lives. One canvasser said that she was frequently told, of politicians, “They just want my vote, and then they forget about us.” Manuel Guzman, a state representative whose district includes neighborhoods in Reading lined with modest row houses and populated mainly by Latino immigrants, told me that he was familiar with this kind of voter skepticism. Guzman, who is half Dominican and half Puerto Rican, was confident that Democrats would carry Reading in November. But he was worried that the margin of victory would be disappointing, given the disconnect between what preoccupied Democrats in Washington, D.C., and what he was hearing from his constituents—many of whom needed multiple jobs to escape poverty, which afflicts a third of Reading residents. “We’ve become so focussed as a national party on saving democracy,” he said. “I’m gonna be honest with you—I’ve not heard one person in the city of Reading talk to me about democracy! What they’re telling me is ‘Manny, why is gas so high?’ ‘Why is my rent so high?’ No one is speaking enough to these issues.”
Guzman and I met outside a restaurant in Reading called Café de Colombia. Across the street was a red brick office building with a sign in the window: “LATINO AMERICANS FOR TRUMP.” It was a field office that the Trump campaign had opened in June. A parked motorcycle was draped with a banner that read “TRUMP 2024: MAKE VOTERS COUNT AGAIN.” Inside, a life-size cutout of Trump had been placed by the entrance, next to an American flag tacked onto a yellow wall. I wandered down a hallway and saw roughly a dozen people waiting for a meeting to start. None appeared to be Latino. When I mentioned this to Guzman, he wasn’t surprised. But he also cautioned against dismissing Trump’s appeal to local Latinos. One draw was Trump’s projection of strength, which, Guzman suspected, might win over some macho types. Another was that voters in Reading “have seen a lack of investment from the Democratic Party for a very long time.”
A few weeks after Harris entered the race, a poll of people in seven swing states found that she was leading Trump among Latino voters by nineteen points—a dramatic shift from a similar survey in May, which had shown Biden with a mere five-point advantage. But Harris’s margin among Latinos was still slightly weaker than Biden’s in 2020. Guzman, who served as the Latino-vote director in Pennsylvania for the Biden campaign that year, thought that Harris could make up the difference, but only if she did more outreach in the weeks to come. “She was a relatively unknown person to the Latino community,” he said
Shortly after Labor Day, I attended a packed Harris-Walz rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. It took place at an outdoor arena along the waterfront. As the crowd filtered in, volunteers handed out water bottles and signs that said “KAMALA” on one side and “COACH!” on the other. Walz, a former high-school teacher and assistant football coach, was the featured speaker. According to the campaign, he was “barnstorming” across the battleground state, with additional appearances in Lancaster and Pittsburgh.
Walz took the stage to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” dressed in khakis, a sports coat, and an open-collared white shirt. Soon after shouting, “Thank you, Erie!,” he blasted Trump as a plutocrat who had given his “rich friends” a tax cut, and praised Harris for standing up to the moneyed forces that screwed people over in communities like Erie. “She’s the one who took on the fraudsters,” Walz proclaimed. “She stood up to the corporate interest.” As President, Harris would fight for the middle class, he vowed, for “nurses, teachers, and farmers who do an honest day’s work”—the kind of people he grew up with in rural Nebraska. “Those are the folks who need to get a tax cut.” Swiping again at Trump, he said, “If you’re a billionaire, you don’t give a damn about Social Security or Medicare. If you’re my mom—who has to pay her heat bill and her food with it—it matters a lot.” Walz paid homage to the unions whose workers “built America,” telling the crowd that, when “more people were in them, the middle class was better off.” But he offered no specifics about raising the minimum wage.
Some progressive analysts have argued that, in an age of rising inequality, embracing a more populist economic agenda is the only way that Democrats can hope to win back the working class. A few weeks before the rally in Erie, Harris introduced a set of policies that suggested she agreed with this view. The measures included an expanded child tax credit of up to six thousand dollars, and a twenty-five-thousand-dollar subsidy for first-time home buyers—pillars of the “opportunity economy” that Harris promises to create. In swing counties like Erie, the Harris campaign appears to have delegated the task of promoting this agenda to Walz, who is accustomed to addressing voters in the heartland. “I come from farm country,” he said at the Erie rally. “Our farmers aren’t getting rich right now—they’re getting three dollars and ninety cents for corn” per bushel. The big money was being made by middlemen and grocery-store owners. “And those folks need to stop price-gouging us!” Todd Clary, a steelworker standing near the stage, was impressed. He said, of Walz, “He really connects well with the working class, because he’s lived it. Being a schoolteacher, a coach, coming from farmland, he understands the struggle at the grocery store, at the gas pump.” Clary attended the event with a group of fellow-workers, all of whom reacted positively to Walz, he said.
But some believe that Walz’s presence on the ticket won’t change much if Democrats don’t move to the center on social and cultural issues. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, in their recent book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” argue that the Party has grown increasingly beholden to an array of advocacy groups—the A.C.L.U., Black Lives Matter—whose positions on everything from defunding the police to transgender rights reflect the values of urban professionals but alienate the working class. When I spoke to Teixeira, he noted that Harris’s advantage among college-educated voters is more than forty points higher than it is with working-class voters. Her campaign, he felt, was targeting the “NPR vote.”
During the Presidential debate on September 10th, Harris tried to undercut the notion that she’s overly woke by noting that she and Walz are both gun owners. She also spoke forcefully about social issues in which Democrats have the more popular position, such as reproductive freedom. Ballot measures seeking to safeguard abortion rights have prevailed by significant margins in the past two years, including in red states such as Kansas and Ohio; moderate gun-control measures are also broadly popular. (In a recent NBC News survey, fifty-seven per cent of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint, created in part by former Trump Administration officials, that proposes increased “surveillance” of abortion patients and providers and a crackdown on the mailing of abortion pills.) At the Erie rally, Walz didn’t mention police reform or gender-affirming care for trans teen-agers, even though he supports both. But he did talk about the shooting that had just taken place in Winder, Georgia, where a teen-ager had killed two students and two teachers with a semi-automatic rifle. Walz told the crowd that he was a hunter and a former “N.R.A. guy,” but that his feelings began to change in 2012, after he met with parents of children murdered in the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut. His son, Gus, had just entered his senior year of high school, he added. “It’s bittersweet for me because”—he paused—“those killed at Sandy Hook would have been entering their senior year, too.” It was the most sombre, and affecting, moment in his speech.
Rosenthal, the former A.F.L.-C.I.O. official, argues that the problem facing Democrats has less to do with where they stand on social issues than with many working-class voters’ perception that the Party is so obsessed with the culture wars that it has stopped paying attention to their economic hardships. Rosenthal showed me a draft report, “The State of Working-Class Voters,” that draws on focus groups and polling data to argue that the strongest way to counter this distrust is by “leading with economic issues,” such as jobs and health care. “These voters believe Democrats care about everyone else but them,” the report, a joint project of In Union—a pro-labor organization led by Rosenthal—and the progressive advocacy group American Family Voices, states. “They need to hear loudly and clearly that our candidates and our party are working to improve their lives economically.”
Because many working-class voters have become cynical about politics, simply airing TV ads about economic policy is unlikely to move them, Rosenthal told me. They tend to be more trusting of messages from organized labor. In Union has been sending newsletters to more than a million working-class households in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. (The group receives support from various unions.) A recent edition profiled J. D. Vance, highlighting the Ohio senator’s opposition to the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would increase penalties for companies that violate employees’ right to participate in union activity, and noting Vance’s close ties to the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel.
Numerous liberal analysts have argued that working-class Americans who support Republicans are voting against their own interests. In “Rust Belt Union Blues,” a book published last year, Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology at Harvard, and Lainey Newman, a former student of hers, reject this view. They argue that political preferences are shaped less by policy than “by how people see themselves within their communities and their perceptions of who is (and who is not) on their side.” Drawing on field work conducted in western Pennsylvania, they trace the rightward shift among working-class voters to the decline of unions—in particular, to the fraying of social bonds that organized labor once nurtured, not only in mills and factories but in fraternal organizations, sports teams, and union halls. Workers interacting in these settings developed a shared identity as “good union men” and as devoted Democrats—the party that they assumed was their defender.
As union density declined, these gathering places disappeared, Skocpol and Newman note. Like most Americans, working-class people grew more isolated. When they get together today, it’s often in very different social and political environments, such as conservative megachurches or at places like the Fairhope Rod & Gun Club, which is an hour south of Pittsburgh. I went there recently with Herman Sauritch, the retired steelworker whose son is voting for Trump. We sat at a horseshoe-shaped bar as people talked about another shooting that had been in the news. Everyone agreed that the incident shouldn’t be blamed on the proliferation of firearms. “A gun is just a tool,” an older man drinking a beer said. “Guns don’t kill people—people kill people,” a waitress mused.
Sauritch also took me to Monessen, a town on the Monongahela River where, at the age of nineteen, he’d landed his first job, at a wire mill. He betrayed no nostalgia for the position, telling me that the conditions at the mill, which had long since closed, had been so dangerous that workers often lost fingers. But he spoke wistfully about the Chateau Lounge, a bar where he and his co-workers used to go after shifts. Other workers had favored the Italia Unita Club, across the river in Charleroi, where Sauritch grew up and still lives. He told me that the lawns and houses in his neighborhood used to be well maintained; now many were so overgrown with weeds and vines that they looked abandoned. The downtown shopping area, which Sauritch said used to be so thronged with workers that you could barely find a place to stand on the sidewalks, was filled with vacant lots and empty storefronts. In recent years, a growing community of Haitian immigrants had settled in Charleroi. Trump recently declared that Haitians had “inundated” many Pennsylvania communities, and that Charleroi had been left “virtually bankrupt.” It was not as cartoonishly racist a charge as Trump and Vance’s repeated assertions that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating people’s pets, but officials in Charleroi strongly denounced the claim. “Rather than acknowledging the real economic issues the town is facing, some have chosen to unfairly target the Haitian community,” Kristin Hopkins-Calcek, the president of the Charleroi Borough Council, said in a statement.
Sauritch took us a few miles outside Charleroi and stopped his car in front of an abandoned concrete pile the size of a football field. It was the metal-pipe plant where he’d worked until the nineteen-eighties, when it, too, shut down. To visit such ruins is to understand why discrete economic proposals—such as promising to protect health-care benefits—can strike the residents of western Pennsylvania as inadequate. “I don’t think benefits are unimportant, but it’s too individualistic,” Skocpol told me. “People look around at their communities and they see wastelands.”
While driving with Sauritch, I saw dozens of Trump signs on lawns. I didn’t see a single Harris sign. At the gun club, Sauritch said that he often overheard members bashing Biden and praising Trump. Despite being outnumbered, he sometimes tried to argue that Trump’s policies favored billionaires, not workers. He rarely convinced anyone. “They never let facts interfere with their point of view,” he joked.
Some liberals believe that arguments about economic self-interest don’t sway Trump’s working-class supporters because they are motivated primarily by racial grievance. This is undoubtedly true of some, and racial prejudice can be hard to disentangle from economic concerns. In a recent Times article, a working-class voter from Wilkes-Barre told a reporter that she was not racist, but went on to say that opportunity should be “for everybody,” not just “Blacks and people of color,” whom she alleged were being handed money while white Americans were “being let down.” Trump has deftly exploited such sentiments. But, in “Rust Belt Union Blues,” Skocpol and Newman point out that white working-class voters have long had prejudiced attitudes about race—a fact that, until recently, didn’t stop them from supporting Democrats. Newman, who grew up in Pittsburgh and conducted dozens of interviews with current and retired union members in western Pennsylvania, including Herman Sauritch, told me that she had noticed a pronounced change in whom workers saw as their enemies. For older union members, “ ‘us’ was the workers and ‘them’ was business, which Republicans were lumped into,” she said. For their younger counterparts, “ ‘them’ was largely based on perceptions of a cultural élite.”
This new conception has taken hold, in no small part, because conservative media outlets, from Fox News to talk radio, have relentlessly propagated it. But Democrats also bear some responsibility for the shift. Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., noted that, in the nineteen-seventies, Democrats began telling a story about economic progress that made almost no mention of the conflict between workers and capitalists. From Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton and on through to Barack Obama, the new narrative was “a variation of the Republican story that prosperity comes from unencumbered businesses,” Podhorzer said. This faith in markets would have startled pioneering labor leaders like Walter Reuther. The Democrats’ business-friendly turn occurred, ironically enough, just as inequality was widening to levels not seen since the Gilded Age—a problem that deepened as Democrats embraced free-trade agreements. They also supported the deregulation of Wall Street, which helped cause the 2008 financial crash. After the meltdown, the Obama Administration bailed out banks that had engaged in fraud but did little for the homeowners they had victimized, who could hardly have been faulted for wondering whose side the government was on.
Biden’s tenure, in particular his large public investments and support for striking workers, has marked a break from this approach. But, as the political philosopher Michael Sandel has noted, Biden’s Presidency has been oddly “themeless”—bereft of a captivating explanation of why these policies are necessary to create a more just society. The theme Harris has emphasized in her campaign—expanding opportunity to revive the middle class—implicitly acknowledges how deeply entrenched inequality has become but seems directed as much at business owners as it is at workers. Tellingly, the speech Walz delivered in Erie contained more details about the fifty-thousand-dollar tax deduction that Harris wants to offer to new small businesses than about her plans for increasing the pay of low-income workers. On her Web site, Harris devotes a mere sentence to the latter issue, promising that she will “fight to raise the minimum wage” without indicating by how much.
Another thing Newman noticed in interviews with younger workers was their anger at union leaders who reflexively supported the Democratic Party without getting anything in return. I heard this sentiment from Scott Sauritch, Herman’s son, who praised Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters, for speaking at the Republican National Convention rather than rushing to “kiss Kamala’s ass.” (On September 18th, the Teamsters declined to endorse a candidate in the election, after internal polls showed that nearly sixty per cent of its members backed Trump. But local Teamsters unions in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada immediately endorsed Harris.) The language that Sauritch used to describe Harris—whom he referred to at one point as an “evil bitch”—made me wonder how much his aversion to her had to do with her gender as opposed to her policies. Yet I could see why he felt that union leaders were too beholden to the Democrats. In 2018, two years after he’d attended the Hillary Clinton campaign rally, he was invited to a press conference at the White House announcing new tariffs on steel imports. The day before the event, he told me, the U.S.W. had instructed him not to wear his union shirt, in order to prevent Trump from using the footage in a commercial. Sauritch feels that the request would never have been made if the same policy, which he saw as helping workers like him, had been introduced by a Democrat. He wore the shirt anyway. (A U.S.W. representative told me that Sauritch had been advised that wearing union gear was optional.) During the press conference, at Trump’s invitation, Sauritch told the story of how his father lost his job at the metal-pipe plant when Japanese imports were battering the steel industry. Even more than the tariffs themselves, what had lingered with Sauritch from the event was the feeling of being recognized, unlike at Clinton’s rally. “He showed respect,” Sauritch said, of Trump.
To prevail in Pennsylvania, Harris doesn’t have to win the western counties. She just has to “lose them less badly,” as Skocpol put it. Harris also needs to drive up support and turnout in regions of the state where many working-class residents have felt contempt from Trump—because of their skin color or their status as immigrants.
Among the Pennsylvanians in this group are the cleaners, security officers, and food-service workers who gathered one morning at the headquarters of Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ, in Philadelphia. They’d come to canvass for Harris on a sweltering day in August, in a city where the working class looks nothing like the all-white crowd I’d seen at Herman Sauritch’s gun club. Local 32BJ has close to two hundred thousand members, about half of whom were born in a foreign country. In Philadelphia, most of the union’s members are Black. Twelve of the nineteen members who turned up to canvass on the day I visited were Black women. One of them, Barbara Cherry, told me that she’d been sitting in the front row at the rally in Philadelphia where Harris had announced Walz as her running mate. “It was magnificent,” she said. When Harris replaced Biden on the ticket, she recalled, the shift in enthusiasm in Philadelphia was seismic. Now, when she knocked on doors to encourage turnout, people were telling her, “Of course I’m coming out—the whole house is coming out.”
Sam Williamson, the Pennsylvania director of Local 32BJ, said that, since Harris became the nominee, the union had witnessed a “surge in members coming in to volunteer and phone-bank.” In informal surveys, he said, support for Harris was running at roughly eighty per cent, both among members and among local working-class voters whom its canvassers were contacting. “This spring, we weren’t seeing those kinds of numbers with Biden,” he said. But Harris’s support among such voters isn’t as strong as some of her backers may assume. Her twenty-four-point lead among nonwhite working-class voters in the Times/Siena poll is more than twenty points lower than Biden’s was four years ago.
For all the excitement that Cherry and the other canvassers sensed, plenty of working-class Philadelphians had reservations about Harris. Her background as a prosecutor raised some eyebrows, especially among Black men. Audra Traynham, a cleaner who was sitting next to Cherry, blamed a lack of information about Biden’s strong labor record, such as his appointment of staunch workers’-rights advocates to run the N.L.R.B. When I asked Traynham if Philadelphians knew how hostile to workers the N.L.R.B. had been under Trump, she shook her head. But people did remember the stimulus checks bearing Trump’s name that they had received during the pandemic. Cherry said that she’d recently spoken to three young Black men who, citing those checks, told her they were leaning toward Trump. Working people needed to brush up on their labor history, Traynham said, but she understood why they hadn’t done so: “Right now, capitalism has people working so hard—two, three jobs trying to survive—that they can’t even lift up their heads to get the information.”
In Harris’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, she described the community in the East Bay where she grew up as “a beautiful working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses, and construction workers.” Traynham, who is fifty-seven, told me that she was raised in a similar neighborhood, on a block in West Philly where families could survive on just one job. The neighborhood had hardly been rich, but it had been stable, she said. When Harris talked about building a strong middle class as a “defining goal” of her Presidency, Traynham could connect this vision to concrete memories from her childhood. But she could see why many of her current neighbors might find the notion difficult to visualize. “I’m gonna be honest with you,” she said. “We don’t have a middle class anymore here. What we have is the working poor.” Then she gathered her things and rose from the table. “Gotta go knock on doors,” she said. ♦
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