Former President Donald Trump raises his first during CPAC earlier this year. Credit: Shutterstock / Jonah Elkowitz

“Donald Trump Won As A Champion Of Working-Class Discontent” reads a Nov. 19 headline in progressive bimonthly magazine The American Prospect.

The article itself was written by a Democratic Party pollster, but the same post-election autopsy of the gormless campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has been bandied about by liberal and conservative punditry alike. Several erroneous notions hide within the conventional wisdom, however.

Let’s pick on a philosopher to start. Michael Sandel teaches at Harvard University and appeared on CNN to make sense of what Trump’s win means for the good ol’ US of A. Although I applaud Sandel’s focus on downward intergenerational mobility and his nostalgia for communal spaces, he went on to ask a “sobering question.”

“If Donald Trump is as unfit and as serious a threat to democracy as we say he is, why is it that half the country, now more than half the country, prefers him to what we’ve been offering?” Sandel asked.

First off, nowhere near “half the country” voted Trump. With almost all the ballots now counted, Trump has received 77,165,518 votes out of 154,852,456 cast. That’s 49.8% — not a majority. What’s more, nearly 245 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2024 and some 90 million chose to abstain. In fact, if Did Not Vote was a presidential candidate, it would have won 265 electors to Trump’s 175, including beating Trump in the state of Texas by over 2.3 million.

Compare that to the elections in Uruguay last week, where voter turnout was 89% and left-of-center moderate President-elect Yamandú Orsi won a 52% majority. Or consider the left-wing populist President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, who won 61% of her country’s voters. There, one can speak educatedly about the voter preferences of “more than half the country.” In the United States today, we can’t. And that’s before we broach the subject of GOP officials’ actively suppressing the vote and purging the rolls.

Sandel’s query also unthinkingly excludes the millions of ex-convicts and employed teenagers and undocumented migrant agricultural and construction workers whom far too many of us simply accept ought to be denied suffrage, even though they certainly help make up the discontented working class which, according to the popular view, have allegedly chosen Trump as their torchbearer. Only 20% of felons who have paid their debt to society self-identify as Republican. And most 18-year-olds backed Harris, as the young will have to endure the longest the dire consequences of a reckless “Drill Baby Drill’ energy policy for the environment.

When it comes to what workers want, it’s worth digging into the weeds. Reviewing NBC exit polls conducted in 10 key states, Texas included, we find 62% of voters who never finished college went for Trump. Although this metric tends to correlate with less-lucrative jobs, there’s a major confounding variable that gets ignored — namely, that a majority of small business owners, over 30 million in the U.S., lack a bachelor’s degree.

To don our Marxist hats for a moment, this cohort technically qualifies as “petty bourgeois,” not as “proletarian.” We may welcome the fact that, over the past four years, “there have been more than 20 million new business applications with an average 441,453 filed each month — a rate over 91% faster than pre-pandemic averages,” according to the Small Business Administration. Indeed, the COVID pause gave many Americans the chance to quit unsatisfying jobs and pursue their dreams.

But we must also acknowledge that a tech startup founder who aspires to be the next Elon Musk is unlikely to share the same economic anxieties nor the same ideas about the role of government as a janitor on food assistance who has reaped the benefits of hard-won occupational health and safety laws. “Protections” to a worker are “regulations” to the boss.

A 2016 paper published by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce studied America’s divided recovery after the financial crash of 2008. Researchers found that, post-recession, “99%” of the 11.6 million newly created jobs went “to workers with at least some college education.” So perhaps if you inherited a used car dealership from your dad, or some farmland, or some stocks, you can afford not to go to college. And you might have been able to afford to fly to Washington, D.C.,on a Wednesday in January of 2021.

Political scientist Robert Pape’s in-depth demographic analysis of those who participated in the botched coup at the Capitol documented that “24% of insurrectionists are business owners,” compared to less than 12% of the general population.

“Only 1% are high school dropouts — lower than the electorate,” he found. Although the J6ers were quickly stereotyped as “a handful of nuts,” Pape told PBS that after studying “the over 1,000 people who have been charged, what we see is fully half are doctors, lawyers, architects, they are CEOs, executives from Intel.” In “all the years I’ve been profiling terrorists and politically violent individuals,” he confided, “I’ve never had to have a category called ‘business owner.’ In this case, it’s fully half the individuals who stormed the Capitol.”

The uncritical equation of “without a college degree” as denoting “working class” misses another pesky factoid I have yet to hear sufficiently remarked upon: Harris eked out a majority of those whose total family income is under $30,000 a year. Although this comprises more than one in four households, sadly it remains just around 10% of actual voters. In 2019 dollars, a family of five needed to earn more than $30,170 to even rise above the federal poverty line.

Overall, the working poor, to the extent they voted, still preferred the Democrat. They’re the fast-food and coffeehouse employees, the dishwashers, the dry-cleaners, the cashiers and couriers whom we ever-so-fleetingly once referred to as “essential workers.” Harris also broke even with those over the age 65, mostly retirees. Corollarily, just because you earned a degree doesn’t mean you’re exiled from the proles. Computer programmers, nurse anesthesiologists, actuaries, pharmacists and engineers are workers too, despite their annual salaries averaging over $100,000. This highlights another fatal flaw in the “over/under 100K”-statistic: it fails to account for wide discrepancies in the cost of living depending on where someone lives.

“The national average household income level of $61,937 per year does not have the same meaning in Clay County, Georgia, where households earn an average of $23,315 per year, as it does in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where the average income is $236,250 per year,” political scientists from Northwestern and Boston universities wrote for the Washington Post back in 2019. They discovered that “support for Trump was strongest among the locally rich — that is, white voters with incomes that are high for their area, though not necessarily for the country as a whole.” The MAGA hat-wearers I meet out at bars are quite happy to buy me a drink or two, but one wonders if the same generosity would obtain if they lived in New York City and much of their discretionary income was eaten by rent.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, whose latest book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right was written after long conversations with Republicans in the poorest district in Kentucky, revealed to Vox that the folks “most enthralled with Donald Trump were not at the very bottom,” but rather “the elite of the left-behind” — those “who were doing well within a region that was not.”

Zooming out internationally, data journalists at the New York Times deduced that “right-wing populism across Western democracies doesn’t necessarily appeal to those with the lowest incomes, but to those who are downwardly mobile.”

Space and decency do not permit me to open the much-debated can of worms as to whether Trump’s white working class support was chiefly motivated by cultural or economic factors, to the extent we can differentiate the two. But the June 2022 edition of the journal Political Geography deserves a brief mention. Researchers plunked sentiments among rural Americans into three buckets: a feeling of being underrepresented in decision-making, of having their way of life disrespected and of receiving less resources.

The result: “only the symbolic subdimensions of rural consciousness positively and significantly correlate with Trump support, while the material subdimension either negatively correlates with Trump support or is not statistically significant.” Harris-Walz may have had the only plan on the table for reopening rural hospitals, but as journalist Sarah Smarsh, author of the 2018 award-winning autobiographical book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, told comedian Jon Stewart in an interview, “The Republicans are the ones validating the pain.”

Anyone passingly familiar with these United States has no right to act shocked by Trump’s loyal following. Over 80% of evangelical Christians voted for him, and so did two out of three service members. The church and the military remain sacrosanct institutions in our society, and over 70% of Americans still identify as white and/or Christian.

Yet “in order to explain the election of Donald J. Trump, some of our friends on the Left are blaming those who voted most heavily against Mr Trump,” historian Gerald Horne, who teaches at the University of Houston, noted on the Emancipations podcast with Daniel Tutt. “Speaking of the Black community,” Horne relayed, they voted “9-to-1 in the case of Black women, 8-2 in the case of Black men” against him, yet “they’re being blamed for Mr Trump’s victory because the 70+ million in Trump’s base are so outraged by ‘identity politics.'”

Evidently “identity politics” does not include, as Horne went on to say, the Israeli lobby’s promotion of genocide in Gaza, which may’ve repelled younger voters, nor the Christian nationalism animating a critical mass of MAGA world. And assuming working class is an identity worth politicking over, it’s curious that Black and Latino support never seems to count.

“Seventy percent of Latinos consider themselves working class,” alongside “54% of Blacks,” compared to only “41% of whites,” according to the long-running General Social Survey. While Black Americans are 12-14% of the population, they’re 21% of postal workers, 28% of home healthcare workers and 40% of public transit workers.

Compare that to Austin podcaster Joe Rogan, whom Spotify reportedly paid $200 million. While Trump may well be Rogan’s chosen champion, can we describe Rogan as an archetypal example of Trump’s working class support?

None of this is to reprieve the Democratic Party from criticism and condemnation for “abandoning the working class.” Talk of a “class dealignment” is more than appropriate, but headlines purporting a class realignment seem premature. Perhaps this fraught situation will offer unions the opportunity to play one party off the other and extract greater concessions from both than they otherwise could.

But there’s no major labor party in this country and, even if Harris had narrowly escaped defeat, we’d be in much the same sorry boat as before. Given how poorly Trump handles national emergencies, the ship of state may soon take on a lot of water. Don’t presume that “more than half of the country” has somehow stamped a mandate on whatever’s to follow. Don’t confuse alienation with assent.

Democracy is not something that occurs once every four years, it’s ongoing, and we could choose to remove Trump from office the day after his inauguration, with sufficient solidarity. Real republicans always reserve the right to change their minds.

Subscribe to SA Current newsletters.

Best of San Antonio Nominations are Now Live

Bad Takes: Let’s stop with the myth that working class voters handed Trump the election

This $3 million mansion for sale in San Antonio has a 3-story living room

This San Antonio house for sale was built in 1905 for a relative of King William himself

25 San Antonio restaurants with casual patios perfect for nice weather

An interior designer’s elaborately restored 1942 San Antonio home is now for sale

Related Stories