About the Three Working Classes

In August 2024, University of Pennsylvania professor and former member of the George W. Bush administration John J. DiIulio Jr. published an op-ed in National Review on the political trends of what he called “the three working classes,” which he defined as the evangelical-white working class, the non-evangelical white working class, and the non-white working class. Dilulio argued that to win the working classes, the campaign of now-President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance would need to “dispense with the outmoded anti-union rhetoric and develop a deeper pro-worker policy agenda — and fast” to respond to the union-backed goodies packages the Biden administration had delivered and that Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign had promised.

But the Republican ticket did not follow Dilulio’s advice, and it won anyway, with a coalition largely drawn from the working classes. It turns out that adopting Big Labor’s policy and political program was not necessary to win a national election with a coalition drawn largely from voters without college degrees (Dilulio’s demarcation for “working class”) and powered by voters who make less than $100,000 per year.

Consider Workers, Not Union Bosses

Dilulio saw two flashing red warning lights for the Republican ticket’s outreach to the working classes: “Harris has . . . won endorsements from several unions, including the AFL-CIO, which represents about 12.5 million workers, and the United Auto Workers, which represents nearly 400,000.” They were not, in fact, red warning lights.

The AFL-CIO is an institutional pillar of the Democratic coalition, having endorsed every Democratic Party nominee since 1976. It is not necessarily a pillar of the “working class” as Dilulio defined it, with millions of members of the federation’s member unions being college-credentialed teachers in Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, college-credentialed government workers in AFSCME, and college-credentialed journalists in the NewsGuild-CWA. Given the extent of college and postgraduate educations in the AFL-CIO’s membership base, it should therefore not be surprising that the AFL-CIO under Liz Shuler (who took the federation’s presidency after the sudden death of Richard Trumka in 2021) has promoted radical transgender vanguardism, affirmed the purported national right to abortion under the now-reversed Roe v. Wade decision, and issued a vacillating both-sides statement on the Hamas attacks against Israel in October 2023 and Israel’s then-pending military response.

The other union Dilulio mentioned, the AFL-CIO member United Auto Workers, is the AFL-CIO writ small but more radical, not a warning sign that the working classes would remain loyal within the Democratic camp. Union president Shawn Fain took the momentum he claimed from perceived strike wins against the Big Three automakers and proceeded to campaign for an immediate Israel-Hamas ceasefire and for the Democratic candidates in 2024.

Dilulio wrote before the Teamsters union and the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) sent their own flashing warning signals to the Harris camp by refusing to endorse the Democratic ticket at the national level. But there were already indications that following the Big Labor line was not motivating union members to vote for Democrats.

We noted in May (ironically, on International Workers’ Day) a New York City local of the Steamfitters union whose business manager (effectively the CEO of a building-trades union) told Fox News his members were overwhelmingly for Trump over then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden. National exit polls may be flawed instruments (especially close to the election, before the results are re-weighted to conform to the final outcome), but the 2024 exit polls showed Trump winning 45 percent of the union-household vote, up from 40 percent in 2020 and 42 percent in 2016.

What Won It

So, if President-elect Trump did not win the working class by adopting policies to appeal to union bosses, how did he do it? For some of those answers we can turn (ironically) to The Emerging Democratic Majority, the triumphant tome that Trump’s second election buried. The authors proposed that Democrats would have an electoral advantage in part because the Republicans’ fealty to laissez-faire economic doctrines, especially on entitlements and trade policy, was unpopular.

They were correct (as much as I wish they weren’t). Whether or not Trump ever read the book, he knew it and campaigned like it—and in his first term, governed like it. Trump’s first-term approach of melding a traditional Republican pro-business and pro-market deregulatory agenda with the popular statist entitlement programs and restrictive trade policy was perceived as more successful than the Biden-Harris program of “doing whatever Big Labor and the other left-wing Groups want.”

As of writing, the incoming second Trump administration has not named its domestic economic-policy choices for roles like Treasury Secretary, Commerce Secretary, and Labor Secretary, to say nothing of roles at the National Labor Relations Board. But if the administration wants to repeat the economic successes of the pre-COVID-pandemic days of Trump’s previous presidency, it should look to the successful policies of administration 45 and not force the public to adopt the policies they just rejected in pursuit of a constituency already shifting in the new administration’s favor.