Why Some Independent Voters Still Prefer to Vote for Chaos Instead of a Democrat
Understanding how the Democrats lost the working class is key to understanding her current plateau in the polls
I’m writing today in the wake of what will likely be the one debate between Vice President Harris and former President Trump.
I haven’t wanted to weigh on the Presidential race because we have So Many Other Problems in America to explore – honestly – and I don’t believe in the idea of One President saving us All. When it comes to Presidential power, there will never be one executive who can fix everything. I also don’t want this blog to be another cheerleader for Harris here; she has plenty already and from people with far more reach and influence than I do. Nor do I need to spend my time (or yours) going after Trump, as plenty of troops are carrying that water, too.
My objective is to stay above the trenches because, all too often, we get lost in the moment's immediacy and lose track of the more significant problems that befall us.
While there’s been plenty of coverage on the debate already, I want to focus on why so many Americans, according to polls, and despite the Trump campaign’s descent into ignorant madness, remain so hesitant to support Harris.
First off, let’s write off the radical Forever Trumpers, those who will support him no matter what. These people are beyond saving and not worth anyone’s time trying to understand. By their own words and actions, they are racist, misogynist, wannabe fascists who probably don’t even know what fascism is. But in most elections, there are frankly not enough of these idiots to matter.
The people who will impact this election are the sane segment of independent voters who, so far, continue to support Trump in enough places to keep this race close. These are people that, for reasons I’ll get into below, feel more comfortable voting for an obvious, rapidly declining psychopath than even consider pulling the lever for any Democrat, let alone Kamala Harris. If Democrats do not work to understand why, they will be caught flat-footed again in November.
This isn’t a matter of party politics, either. Many Trump supporters aren’t Republican, and many Republicans loathe Trump. Harris is winning people of color, women, and young people by solid margins. Since Harris’s initial surge after Biden dropped out, polling has leveled off in the last few polling cycles. Most of the mainstream sites dedicated to the polling science of the race show that, no matter how much momentum Harris has experienced, she is still very much considered an underdog who has plateaued despite her opponent defending the January 6 rioters, pledging to be a dictator on day one and demonizing immigrants. She is behind even without every Democrat’s built-in disadvantage in the Electoral College, even if they win the popular vote. The fact is, a consistent subset of voters seem to be looking for a reason not to vote for Harris in a way that we’re not seeing with Trump, whose base is baked in, with a ceiling of support that has remained the same for years now.
To understand why so many independent, largely working-class voters support Trump, it’s vital to understand how Democrats lost these voters in the first place.
1. Many independents do not trust Democrats, and for some valid reasons.
One of the core reasons I started this project is because I am one of the people who do not inherently trust Democrats to get things done once in power. But let me unpack that. As mentioned in previous posts, I grew up in a working-class neighborhood amid a very liberal New Jersey town outside New York City. They called it a ‘bedroom community’ back in the day. My neighborhood was primarily 1st and 2nd generation Italian immigrants, but not exclusively. There were remnants of the previous immigrant generations, German and Polish families, and newer, inbound immigrant families from South America. Though the wealthy in my town were very liberal, our neighborhood was on the conservative side of the spectrum. This being the 1970s and 80s, that meant in the Ronald Reagan mold: hopeful, patriotic, cut our taxes (or that of our employers), and we’ll keep more of what we (or they) earn (and hopefully our bosses pass some of those savings down to us.) These people fully bought into the ideal of America as a place where, if you work hard, you can achieve a better life for yourself and your children.
At that time in pre-NAFTA America, a lot of the divide between liberals and conservatives in the northeast was still socio-economic. On the wealthy side of town, many of the center-left Democrats, whom we called liberals, were lawyers, administrators, and other skilled, educated professionals (doctors are an exception and tend to lean conservative). On our side, most people were employed either hourly, in labor-intensive jobs, or salaried, working in one of the many factories in the Newark area. At best, a working-class family might have more success and independence running small businesses like a landscaping company or working in semi-skilled labor like construction.
This was also a time fresh off the Civil Rights and Vietnam War protest era, as well as Watergate, the 1967 Newark riot, and New York City’s “descent” into crime and drug culture, at least by way of what they watched on the nightly news. It’s important to remember, too, that, in 1980s America, the 1960s and 70s were relatively yesterday. (For context, 1985 to 1969 is the same as looking back to 2008, when Obama was first elected President.)
People were scared, as they often are in times of great change, and it felt like Democrats were in charge in the American cities where they saw most of the chaos unfolding on the evening news. Add in a decade of headlines about corrupt, power-hungry union leaders making “backroom” deals with self-dealing politicians, and you have the seeds of generational resentment toward liberals and, in turn, Democrats.
By the time this era of violence and uncertainty transcended into Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” a generation of immigrants, white democrats, many former union members, and their kids had gone from optimistic Kennedy “idealists” into cold-hearted Reagan “realists.” When the 1970s and early 80s malaise era finally gave way to exciting economic tailwinds, the late 1980s felt like America had returned from the verge of collapse. Reagan and his policies would get a lot of credit for what felt like prosperous times back then, even if those policies and zero-sum politics would also sow the seeds for so much of our broken discontent today.
But getting from there to here needs more context.
What fed those seeds into a deeply rooted, multi-generational distrust of Democrats are the neoliberal economic policies supported by President Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party in the 1990s and 2000s.
Though actual liberals, those to the left of the Democratic party in the 1990s, fought NAFTA tirelessly before it was passed, for many people, especially in the Rust Belt, its passage nonetheless cemented the Democrat party as the party of urban, wealthy professionals, what some working people and all the right-wing dog whistlers call “the elites” to this day. And it wasn’t just NAFTA; Democrats passed a slew of deregulation and tax reforms that exacerbated the trickle-up economics that Reagan and George HW Bush started. Even though the 1990s were a time of significant economic expansion and a revolution in workforce structure and productivity, it was also a time of disorienting change in a rapidly globalizing economy, and many workers felt left behind. The party in charge would get the blame for that.
By the time Al Gore ran for President in 2000, Democrats were clueless about their massive loss of working-class support. Though they only “lost” the election by 537 votes in Florida thanks to the Supreme Court, they were on track to lose the next election to George W Bush in a landslide in 2004.
2. Obama didn’t save them.
When Obama won the White House in 2008, he did it with a lot of independent voter support. A lot of white people, including white men, voted for Obama, hoping that he would deliver on his rousing agenda of Hope and Change. I know this firsthand, as several of my Trump-voting friends voted for Obama twice back then. People were not only in the thick of the Great Recession; they turned against the disastrous war we chose to wage in Iraq and were hungry for a new start.
When Obama proved to be less a “change President” than a technocratic one, Democrats lost much of the goodwill these voters gave them. Of course, no President operates in a vacuum, and most of Obama’s two terms were purposefully paralyzed by an obstructionist Legislative branch. Americans could see this happening, and he won reelection in a landslide in 2012. Despite reelection, Obama didn’t, and in many ways couldn’t, given the necessity of generating support in a deeply divided Congress, address systematic problems that continued to worsen, especially in small cities and towns. By the end of his term, wealth inequality was at an all-time high, and the opioid crisis was raging. At the same time, it seemed like wealthy and well-off people in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and D.C. continued to reap and even revel in the benefits of our globalized economy.
By the time the 2016 election rolled around, Washington seemed to be more broken than ever, especially in the wake of seeing the big banks get bailed out of the 2008 economic crisis while millions of homeowners lost everything. Couple this with a coastal culture and, by default, Democrats, who seemed to be solely focused on addressing ongoing, systematic discrimination, gender equality, and other essential but non-economic issues, all while many people were still reeling from the fallout from the Great Recession, and its no wonder so many people saw a party disinterested in their troubles. The final nail in the coffin was offering up a Presidential candidate who helped helm the economic betrayal in the first place 20 years before: Hillary Clinton. Many also felt that the Party gamed the primary against Sen. Bernie Sanders. Bring it all together, and it sure as hell felt like the Democratic party was doubling down, again, on being the party of wealthy, urban elites.
3. Trump is a Flamethrower
Enter Donald Trump. When Donald Trump came on the political scene in 2015, many people didn’t view him as a Republican in the traditional sense. Not only did he spend decades living in New York City and supporting Democratic candidates, but he was also able to speak to corruption and the backroom dealings of both parties. He talked about how lobbyists controlled lawmakers and how rigged our tax system was for the wealthy. In this way, Trump captured the mantle of an authentic outsider to many. He was incredibly potent to many working-class voters who felt abandoned by the Democrats and betrayed by Republican policies that only helped the wealthy. This was Trump’s appeal, and that same appeal remains among people who feel that Washington is a corrupt cesspool of career politicians and educated elites who do not understand what “the rest of America, real America, is going through.”
Harris’s challenge with this group is that, to this day, Democrats feel like the party of well-off, urban professionals, while establishment Republicans have done little to nothing to help working people. They have no one else they feel is in their corner or who shares their rage. Trump, despite his apparent mental decline, overt racism, and stunning ignorance as to how many of our economic, health, and democratic systems even work, is still the candidate who will ‘burn it all down’ to make it better. They think he’s the only one who can clean out Washington. Many even write off his behavior as a gimmick and have nothing to do with how he’ll govern once in office.
None of this is true to any rational, thinking viewer. Trump is in it for Trump, full stop. He tried to remain in office by force and frivolous lawfare on January 6, 2021, and he’ll do anything to stay in power should he get there again. But to many, rational thinking and “rational” voting haven’t served working people as much as it has served the rich for the last 50 years. Not only have the wealthiest 1% of Americans left the stratosphere in terms of relative wealth to 99% of us. For many of us, they seem to have their own healthcare and justice systems, too. Meanwhile, our infrastructure is falling apart, our health systems are straining, and education, the one proven path out of the working class, is more expensive and out of reach than ever, all while our cultural institutions seem more fragmented than ever.
Of course, Americans are furious and frustrated with Washington D.C. The question is, can Kamala Harris convince enough of them to take one more chance on a Democrat? And if she wins, will she deliver the kind of change so many are hungry for? The more people feel she can, the more they will turn away from Trump's cynical promise and toward Harris's practical hope.
We’ll see in November. And if she does win, I just pray she and her team shoot for the fences, tell the story of their efforts well and often, and have a House and Senate willing to work together.