Politics

The false narrative at the heart of Trump’s victory over Harris

Published

2 years ago

November 11, 2024

The false narrative at the heart of Trump’s victory over Harris

Since Tuesday night’s election results were tallied, there has been a recurrent refrain as to why Democrats lost so badly — they ignored the working class, both white and nonwhite.

In what amounted to the proverbial act of coming down to the battlefield and shooting the survivors, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., labeled the Kamala Harris campaign “disastrous” and said Democrats should not be surprised that “a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

There are a couple of problems with Sanders’ argument. The most obvious and glaring is that it simply isn’t true that Democrats abandoned the working class.

It simply isn’t true that Democrats abandoned the working class.

During his nearly four years in office, President Joe Biden was arguably the most pro-union president since FDR. He literally walked a picket line, supported union organizing efforts, increased funding for the National Labor Relations Board. He infused $36 billion into the Teamsters Union pension plan (an act that Sanders praised).

Biden’s attention to the working class went far beyond the symbolic. The Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act all led to a fertile job creation environment — and a significant increase in manufacturing jobs, which declined during Donald Trump’s presidency. (It bears noting that all of this legislation passed in the U.S. Senate with the support of the senior senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.)

Indeed, since Biden took office, the U.S. economy has added more than 16 million jobs — which starkly contrasts Trump’s negative job growth rate. As for wages, the working class saw a higher increase in their pay than any other group of Americans, so much so that it undid one-third of the growth in wage inequality since 1980.

During Biden’s administration, subsidies for Obamacare grew. He forgave billions in student loan debt, much of which went to community college students. His Department of Labor changed overtime eligibility rules, boosting wages for more than 4 million workers and also increased pay for construction workers on federal projects.

Critics like Sanders would likely argue that these successes weren’t messaged properly to working-class Americans. That’s not true either. As the New Republic’s Greg Sargent pointed out earlier this week, the Harris campaign poured $200 million into ads that focused on her economic message. In fact, she outspent the Trump campaign by around $70 million on ads about the economy.

What was the content of these ads? Calls to end corporate price gouging, lower housing costs, cut middle-class taxes and protect Social Security and Medicare. Other Harris ads accused Trump of only looking out for his billionaire pals and corporations and attacked him for enacting tax cuts that were primarily directed at the wealthiest Americans.

This is the definition of an economic populist message.

Critics like Sanders would likely argue that these successes weren’t messaged properly to working-class Americans. That’s not true either.

Yet, Biden’s record and the disparity in the two candidates’ economic messages didn’t increase the party’s support among working-class voters (which are defined here as those without a college degree). Arguably, it improved Harris’ margins in swing states where these ads predominately ran, but according to preliminary exit polls, Trump won them by 14 percentage points over Harris (56%-42%), a 6-point improvement over his performance in 2020.

Harris only did one point worse than Biden among white working-class voters, but she was still mired in the low 30s with them. Instead, her losses came among the nonwhite working class, a group with which she did 16 points worse than Biden — and 26 points worse than Hillary Clinton.

In short, under Biden, Democrats adopted one of the most pro-working class policy agendas in recent political memory, enacted much of it — and accrued no electoral benefit.

As for Trump, his main economic agenda item was a pledge to increase tariffs, which by increasing costs on imported items, would have disproportionately harmed low-wage workers. Did he have a plan for lowering housing or dealing with health care? What about lowering inflation?

What Trump essentially offered the working class were attacks on undocumented immigrants, which his campaign blamed for much of the nation’s ills.

As in 2016, Trump served as a political voice channeling the fears, cultural grievances and resentments of working-class Americans — and, as has been the case for much of the past 60 years for Republicans, it worked.

Of course, it’s not just Trump. The GOP’s attention to the white working class is overwhelmingly symbolic. They offer nothing substantive on policy. They oppose expanding health care access or raising the minimum wage.

During Trump’s tenure in office, his major legislative accomplishments were a tax cut for the wealthy and the further tilting of the economic playing field in favor of corporations and not workers. While some working-class voters drifted away from him in 2020, he easily won them back in 2024 (and of course, won the majority of such voters in both elections). None of his policy positions mattered much at all.

During Trump’s tenure in office, his major accomplishments were a tax cut for the wealthy and further tilting the economic playing field in favor of corporations, not workers.

Take, for example, what happened in Missouri on Election Day. Voters in the Show Me State didn’t just narrowly support a referendum enshrining a right to abortion in the state constitution by a 58%-42% margin, they backed a ballot measure raising the minimum wage and requiring employers to provide paid sick leave. Yet, at the same time, only 40% of the state’s voters cast a ballot for Harris, who, unlike Trump, supports both policy initiatives.

Democrats are a party of “doing stuff” with an electorate utterly indifferent to the stuff they do.

As Larry Mishel, former president of Economic Policy institute, who has written extensively on politics and the working class, said, there is a glaring lack of connection between material reality, even material gains, and recognition or appreciation for such gains. “Partisanship shapes perceptions. There is simply a disconnect between policy, outcomes, and political rewards.”

Is there a path for Democrats to reverse their declining support with the working class? The short and depressing answer is that they likely can’t.

Appeals to the working class might have worked for Democrats when the Republican presidential nominee was a blue blood like Mitt Romney or even a creature of Washington like George H.W. Bush or Bob Dole. But when facing off against a racist demagogue like Trump, it’s a nearly insurmountable challenge.

Moreover, the Democrats’ political coalition is liberal and overwhelmingly Black (even with the inroads Trump made on Tuesday), which only compounds the challenge. The party can’t run against undocumented immigrants or retreat on cultural issues like guns, LGBTQ and civil rights, or abortion, which are such powerful political drivers among the working class.

In 1992, Bill Clinton could get away with naked appeals to white voters, like when he attacked the rapper Sister Souljah. Back then, the Democratic Party was around 80 percent white. Today, the number is closer to 56 percent.

Quite simply, the Democratic coalition as presently constructed doesn’t allow for the kind of political appeal that might (but probably wouldn’t) win back the working class.

Indeed, when I recently asked a red state Democrat what the national party would need to do to win over working-class Republicans, he joked, “Firebomb an abortion clinic.” The cultural divide is so intense — and Republicans are so hostile toward the left — that it’s hard to see any reasonable way for Democrats to bridge it.

If there is any path for Democrats to return to national power, it might be in doubling down on what produced such significant political gains for the party in 2018, 2020 and 2022 — college-educated suburban voters. At the same time, they need to find ways to arrest their slide with minority voters. Or considering the fact that the last four presidential elections have gone Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican —which hasn’t happened in America since the late 19th century — maybe they should just wait for an inevitable anti-Trump backlash.

But if Democrats think they can win back the loyalty of the working class, they likely should think again.

Michael A. Cohen

Michael A. Cohen is a columnist for BLN and a Senior Fellow and co-director of the Afghanistan Assumptions Project at the Center for Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He writes the political newsletter Truth and Consequences. He has been a columnist at The Boston Globe, The Guardian and Foreign Policy, and he is the author of three books, the most recent being “Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans.”

Politics

Summer ICE

Published

1 hour ago

June 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A hectic summer of events brings the threat of ICE agents surging into New York City.

WINTRY MIX: The Knicks ticker-tape parade. World Cup festivities. Pride Month. America 250. The Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce wedding.

It’s all happening this summer in New York City — and those events and more may coincide with a surge in federal immigration enforcement at the direction of President Donald Trump’s administration.

The convergence of events as an ICE crackdown looms has not gone unnoticed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and immigrant-rights advocates who are already bracing for a hectic summer in the city.

Hochul last week warned that a surge would “create chaos” especially as the World Cup was getting underway. The mayor told reporters earlier today that the city — and especially the NYPD — is prepared to handle the uncertainty.

“We are the biggest city in the country,” Mamdani said at a press conference in Queens. “We are used to big events, and we are incredibly excited for this one.”

Yet the potential operation — teased repeatedly by Trump border czar Tom Homan — adds a different dimension to the center-of-the-world festivities and celebratory atmosphere that’s pervasive in New York at the moment.

“We’ve just had a lot of practice with being in the streets — thankfully celebrating,” said state Sen. Pat Fahy, a Democrat. “It’s New York. People are not going to tolerate any type of surge here.”

Homan has insisted the federal government’s New York campaign will be much different than the Minneapolis crackdown six months ago, which ultimately led to civil unrest and the deaths of two U.S. citizens.

He told SiriusXM’s Chris Cuomo last week that federal immigration agents would take a refined, precision-based approach.

“Every day we leave the office and we know exactly who we’re looking for, more likely where we will find them, because we have a targeted operation,” Homan said. “We have a folder on each target. It’s not gonna be driving around looking for people that we have no idea who we’re looking for. It’s gonna be a well-planned, targeted operation.”

Trump’s aggressive deportation campaign led Hochul and the Democratic-led Legislature this year to approve a package of measures meant to protect undocumented immigrants.

Law enforcement officers are banned from wearing masks, federal immigration authorities cannot execute civil deportation warrants in so-called sensitive locations like houses of worship, and the state moved to end cooperative agreements between local police and ICE.

“We’re much better prepared as a result of that legislation,” Fahy said. “We’ve sent a very clear and strong message that ICE is not welcome.”

It’s those very same laws, though, that stoked Homan’s plans to focus on New York. He’s warned that, without cooperation with local law enforcement, ICE will need to take a much more expansive approach to deportations.

It’s all led immigration advocates to ready communities for an unpredictable summer.

“New Yorkers are going to stand up for their neighbors,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition. “You’re going to see local communities organizing more, potentially protests, people standing up for New York and New Yorkers. This is an attack on all 19 million New Yorkers.” — Nick Reisman with Gelila Negesse

FROM CITY HALL

Mayor Zohran Mamdani continues to discuss disbanding the SRG but has offered no timeline.

POLICING PARTY CITY: Days after being sworn in as mayor, Mamdani declared that his promise to abolish the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group wasn’t up for debate.

“We need to disband the SRG,” he said on Jan. 28 after the unit had been involved in arresting anti-ICE protesters. “I’m currently in conversations with the police commissioner about the ways in which we do so that are operational.”

Six months later, the SRG remains intact — and Mamdani is singing a very different tune.

When asked today if it was appropriate for the police department to deploy the SRG in response to the chaos following the Knicks’ NBA Finals victory, the mayor had this to say: “The NYPD handled themselves appropriately in delivering safety across the five boroughs.”

Mamdani told reporters he remains committed to the idea of “decoupling” the SRG’s protest responsibilities from its counterterrorism duties and that he continues to talk with his NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, about how “to disband SRG to ensure that we have responses to each.” He did not give a timeline for how soon that could happen or elaborate on the nature of the holdup, though.

Mamdani’s thumbs up for the SRG’s response to Saturday’s Midtown mayhem speaks to the awkward terrain he’s navigating as his more politically moderate police commissioner continues to reject his push for breaking up the unit.

Tisch, in fact, has continued to publicly and privately praise the SRG as a critical tool in the NYPD toolbox. On Sunday, she gave members of the unit a salute in a department-wide email thanking officers for their work the night before, when frenzied Knicks fans set fire to or destroyed several school buses in Midtown, smashed NYPD vehicles with bats and even fired shots in Times Square, wounding a 17-year-old.

“You managed to meet the challenges that came with one of the most closely watched periods this city has seen in years,” Tisch wrote in the email obtained by Playbook that included a shoutout to those engaged in “SRG disorder-control response.”

While pushing for breaking up the SRG as a mayoral candidate last year, Mamdani noted the unit’s members face disproportionately high rates of misconduct claims, especially as it relates to violating protesters’ First Amendment rights.

In dragging his feet on the SRG issue, Mamdani has put himself at odds with his own political base.

The local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America issued a rare public rebuke of the mayor Friday for not making good on his campaign pledge to eliminate the SRG.

The DSA’s statement also knocked Mamdani for not fulfilling a separate campaign pledge to abolish the NYPD’s gang database (which critics say is a “drag net” for young Black and Latino New Yorkers, but which Tisch touts as a necessity). On top of that, the DSA — Mamdani’s “political home” — also took aim at him for supporting an increase to the NYPD’s uniformed headcount this year despite having promised as a candidate to keep it flat. — Gelila Negesse and Chris Sommerfeldt

From the Capitol

State Sen. Zellnor Myrie’s 2021 gun-control measure remains in effect after the Supreme Court declines review.

GUN BILL SURVIVES: The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a New York law aimed at opening up gun companies to civil liability suits.

Federal law has made the firearms industry generally immune to lawsuits since 2005. But state Sen. Zellnor Myrie proposed a workaround in 2021, authoring a statute to expand New York’s ability to sue manufacturers and dealers whose “reckless” actions endanger public safety.

The law that passed was quickly challenged by the gun industry. A series of lower courts have upheld the law in recent years, and the Supreme Court has now decided it won’t consider an appeal.

“For New Yorkers and residents of the ten other states that have adopted similar laws — covering close to 117 million Americans — this serves as affirmation for victims, survivors, and communities across the nation that live with the realities of gun violence on a daily basis,” Myrie said in a statement. “We are not helpless. Gun violence is not inevitable.” — Bill Mahoney

IN OTHER NEWS

— ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: Progressives Champions PAC, which has spent nearly $400,000 in attack ads against NY-17 Democratic candidate Cait Conley, is reportedly funded by Republican groups. (Popular Information)

— MAKE IT MAKE CENTS: Mamdani’s administration will no longer delay billions of dollars in repayments to contracted nonprofits. (NBC New York)

— INSURANCE SCRAMBLE: Federal cuts will leave 450,000 New Yorkers enrolled in the state’s Essential Plan without healthcare coverage beginning next month. (New York Focus)

Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.