The Republican Party‘s transition to the preferred party of the working class has given it an enormous opportunity to cement itself as the nation’s majority party and keep control of the federal government and key states for years to come.
On Nov. 5, President-elect Donald Trump cemented the realignment of the political parties as he decisively won the Electoral College, as well as the national popular vote for the first time in his three runs for the presidency. No longer does the GOP rely on high-income suburbanites to drive its electoral coalition. Rather, it now relies on low-income voters who once formed the bedrock of the Democratic Party’s coalition dating back to the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.
An exit poll from CNN highlights this remarkable result: Trump carried voters whose income was less than $100,000 per year by 51%-47%, while Vice President Kamala Harris carried voters who make more than $100,00 per year by the same margin. An NBC exit poll found similar results: Trump carried voters who made between $30,000 and $50,000 per year 52%-46%, and voters who made $50,000-$100,000 by the same margin. Harris, meanwhile, carried voters who made more than $100,000 by a narrow 51%-48% margin and voters who made more than $200,000 by a margin of 52%-46%.
A realigned working class
All told, the Democratic Party now has a working-class problem. It is practically impossible for Democrats to build a winning coalition on the national level without the support of middle-income voters, who make up the majority of the electorate. However, that problem will only persist so long as the Republican Party listens to working-class voters and their interests.
The working class did not abandon the Democratic Party overnight but rather only after the party abandoned its roots and embraced an urban and corporate-friendly agenda that catered to special interest groups advancing an unpopular social agenda while embracing an economic agenda favored by large corporations that included support for unpopular trade deals that offshored manufacturing jobs and allowed an army of illegal immigrants to undercut the wages of workers.
Trump was able to rally these voters to his cause expressly because he repudiated the corporate-friendly approach to trade and immigration that had been championed by both parties for years. However, he also helped nudge those same voters to support Republicans down the ballot, at least for now.
To put it simply, the policies that Trump has championed in his political career are, in many ways, out of step with the policy preferences of many Republican politicians. His protectionist trade policies, with a free-wheeling approach to tariffs, have wrangled the free market libertarians within the GOP, as have his vows to crack down on immigration. However, if Republicans are going to continue to be the working-class party, they must listen to the concerns of the working class because this fickle demographic will abandon the GOP as quickly as it embraced it if the party takes their votes for granted.
Don’t be the Tories
If the Republican Party wants to see what happens when working-class voters change their voting habits away from the party they long supported, only to abandon their new party just as quickly, they need only look at the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom.
In 2019, the Conservative Party, led by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, ran on a simple platform: Get Brexit done. This simple tagline gave the party the message it needed to galvanize the support of the working-class voters who historically had supported the Labour Party but had voted for the U.K. to leave the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
That year, the Conservative Party won a landslide victory on the back of its vow to “Get Brexit done,” winning an 80-seat majority in the House of Commons, the largest victory for the party in three decades. This historic majority was driven in part by major gains for the Conservatives in the “red wall,” a string of constituencies in northern England that had long supported the Labour Party but defected in the era of Brexit.
Despite their enormous majority, the era of the Conservative government failed to deliver on the promise of Brexit. Instead of reining in immigration after separating from the EU, the government expanded it. Instead of pursuing an economic agenda that prioritized domestic manufacturing and industry, the government effectively engaged with the EU on the same footing as before.
The results were predictable. Five years after its ignominious defeat, the Labour Party came roaring back and secured an even larger parliamentary majority than the one enjoyed by the Conservatives. In the 2024 general election, the Labour Party won 211 more seats than it won in 2019. The liberal party gained back nearly all of the red wall seats it had lost to the Conservatives while picking off a number of seats in constituencies that the Conservatives had long dominated. However, there was one exception.
In the constituency of Ashfield, Lee Anderson won his seat in 2019 as a member of the Conservative Party. His victory marked the first time that the Conservatives had won the seat since the 1970s. However, in the lead-up to the 2024 election, Anderson quit the Conservative Party and joined the insurgent right-wing populist party Reform UK, led by the famed Brexit crusader Nigel Farage. He held his seat and became one of the first members of Parliament for Reform UK.
The tragedy of the 2019 Conservative landslide and subsequent 2024 defeat is a warning for the Republican Party. What should have heralded the beginning of a new era of Conservative governance ended in its greatest repudiation. However, at the same time, the working-class voters who abandoned the Labour Party did not return to it in 2024. Rather, they simply tuned out. Betrayed by their longtime party, they turned to the alternative, only to get burned again. Rather than go back to their original party, these working-class voters stayed home. In its 2024 landslide victory, the Labour Party actually got 500,000 fewer votes than it received in the 2019 general election, which wiped the party out.
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Delivering for the working class
Whether it likes it or not, the Republican Party is now the party of the working class. With Trump as its leader, the party must now deliver on the promise it made to voters. That means lower costs, a secure border with an end to lawless immigration, limiting government spending abroad, and securing a fairer deal for workers who have seen their jobs outsourced to Mexico and China.
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As he builds his transition, Trump has made clear that he intends to follow through on some of the more controversial aspects of his campaign promises, namely, imposing tariffs on foreign goods to protect domestic manufacturing and implementing mass deportations of illegal immigrants. At the same time, some Republicans in Congress are balking at certain aspects of his agenda, including his overtures to labor unions such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which boasts more than a million members who overwhelmingly backed Trump’s campaign, according to the union’s own polling.
In the grand scheme of things, Trump’s term is short. He will be gone from the political scene in four years, but the Republican Party will live on. In 2026, the party will again face the voters as it seeks to hold its minuscule majority in the House, but this time without Trump on the ballot, and in 2028, the party will field a new candidate for president for the first time since Trump burst onto the scene in 2016. Whether or not the party succeeds in holding its governing trifecta in these elections and beyond will depend on the party’s ability to deliver for the working-class voters who have flocked to it. Failure to do so will doom the party to a fate similar to that of its conservative counterpart across the pond.