The trend for the past decade has been that the working-class, blue-collar voter goes R. This still sits oddly with many, especially old-time Dems, but it has held sway the past two or three presidential elections.

Donald Trump made it happen in 2016, cobbling together a working-class voter coalition with his energy and man-of-the-people vibe that carried him to narrow victory across the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin and put him into the White House. It brought him to within a sliver of victory in 2020, as he succumbed to Joe Biden by the slimmest of margins in those same states and lost the electoral college vote. (READ MORE: Grumpy Old Man Mumbles State of the Union)

And, even though the two major candidates weren’t going head to head in the bluest of blue-collar states, Michigan, if vote counts in their respective primaries are any indication, the trend might be magnified this time around. Biden can visit a picket line, as he did with striking United Auto Workers (UAW) in September, and UAW president Sean Fain can endorse him for president, as he did in January, but in the state’s primaries a week or so ago, Trump outpolled Biden, 757,104 votes to 618,474, and fell only narrowly short when the 150,000 uncommitted votes were added to the Democrat tally.

Indeed, Trump bettered Biden’s vote count in towns historically connected at the hip to the auto industry. In Roseville, Trump tallied 2,826 votes to Biden’s 2,250, and in Warren, 8,020 voters pulled the Trump lever, to 7,134 for Biden (968 went the uncommitted route).

Said Republican strategist Jamie Roe to pollster Salena Zito, “To win Michigan, you must have the blue-collar worker as a part of your coalition.” As of March 6, the RealClearPolitics average had Trump besting Biden by 3.6 percent in the state.

Working the Cultural Issues

While Biden won the college-educated vote by 24 points in 2020, Trump bettered the Democrat by 8 points in the overall vote of those with less than a bachelor’s degree and was 32 points better when white voters who didn’t graduate college were polled. Trump also raised his number among Hispanic voters without a college degree, winning them by 25 points more than he won Hispanics with one. (READ MORE: Liberal Elites Against Democracy)

A poll by the Left’s own Progressive Policy Institute explains these numbers. “A majority of working-class voters nationally (58%) and in all the swing states say Democrats have moved too far to the left.” They’d like to see Democrats get tougher on immigration, emphasize economic growth, and put a stop to runaway public spending. Democrats, these working-class voters say, are too greatly influenced by “special interests like public sector unions, environmental activists, and academics.” Dems best Republicans among these voters in combating climate change, managing the country’s transition to clean energy, and spinning the “defending democracy” ruse (this last by only 39 to 34 percent, however).

But it is in the gut-level cultural issues that Republicans have the upper hand with the working class. Ruy Teixeira, a liberal who writes for the American Enterprise Institute, lists the obstacles the Democrats must face in winning back the lost working-class vote. We quote at length:

• It is not the working class that sees the police as an unnecessary evil and opposes rigorous enforcement of the law for public safety and public order.
• It is not the working class that believes public consumption of hard drugs should be tolerated, with intervention limited to reviving addicts when they overdose.
• It is not the working class that believes many crimes like shoplifting should be decriminalized because punishing the perpetrators would have “disparate impact”.
• It is not the working class that believes you should never refer to illegal immigrants as “illegal” and that border security is somehow a racist idea.
• It is not the working class that believes an overwhelming surge of migrants at the southern border should be accommodated with asylum claims, parole arrangements, and release into urban areas around the country.
• It is not the working class that believes competitive admissions and job placements should be allocated on the basis of race (“equity”) not merit.
• It is not the working class that views objective tests as fundamentally flawed if they show racial disparities in achievement.
• It is not the working class that believes America is a structurally racist, white supremacist society.
• It is not the working class that sees patriotism as a dirty word and the history of the United States as a bleak landscape of racism and oppression.
• It is not the working class that thinks sex is “assigned at birth” and can be changed by self-conception, rather than being an objective, biological reality.
• It is not the working class that thinks it’s a great idea to police the language people use for hidden “microaggressions” and bias against the “marginalized”.
• And it is definitely not the working class that believes in “decolonize everything” and manages to see murderous thugs like Hamas as righteous liberators of a subaltern people.

The Democrats own those positions, and Republicans should hammer that home to working-class Americans.

Bending the Color Line

But it’s not only cultural issues that move the working-class needle. It’s also the economy — and you only have to remember how it was three years ago to appreciate it. Two somewhat recent polls have Trump cleaning up on the economic front. (READ MORE: Biden Is George III. What Does That Make Trump?)

An ABC News/Washington Post poll has 43 percent saying they are worse off financially since Biden came in, with only 13 percent saying they are better off. A CBS poll is even worse for Biden. Half of voters polled think Biden’s policies in a second term would hurt them financially, while half of voters think Trumpian second-term policies would make them better off financially.

Also, Trump is starting to look viable to more and more working-class minorities. Opines Politico:

Joe Biden is faltering among the core Democratic groups that were once the mainstay of “the party of the people” – working-class voters of color. Numerous polls have shown Trump reaching nearly 20 percent of the Black vote and drawing to within 10 points of Biden among Hispanic voters. Even if these shifts were to only partly materialize in November 2024, they would signal a lasting realignment poised to upend the party system we’ve known since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

This, too, can be laid at the feet of the Biden economy. Pre-Biden, blacks and Hispanics, many of whom hail from the working class, enjoyed low inflation, low unemployment, and rising wages, according to Jason Reilly, of the Wall Street Journal. He quotes a Christian Science Monitor story from before COVID:

The weekly wage for Americans in the 10th percentile of earners, of which minorities make up a greater share, grew by $4.24 per quarter in the first three years of the Trump presidency, compared with an average of 88 cents of gains per quarter across Barack Obama’s eight years.

The memory of Trumpian good times has yielded a Trumpian boost in the polls. A New York Times/Siena College poll released last week showed black support for Trump at 23 percent, up from 4 percent just before the 2020 election, and among Hispanics, the former president is out in front of the incumbent, 46 to 40 percent.

November is a long way off, and the Democrats have not yet begun to unleash their fusillade of hate against the former president, but the working-class numbers should instill in the Republicans hope at this point.