One surprise from the presidential election is that a voter’s class, not race, was a greater factor in which box was ticked in the voting booth. Wall Street Journal economics reporter Jeanne Whalen joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why Democrats are reeling from being labeled the party of “elites” when they could always count on communities of color for votes in the past, how Republicans have capitalized on economic concerns, and what this means for race relations moving forward. Her article is “The New Driving Force of Identity Politics Is Class, Not Race.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Something truly unprecedented happened in American politics during the last election. It wasn’t that identity politics was a huge factor. That has been a driving force in how Americans vote for a long time now. What was unusual about the 2024 elections was that the identity that seemed to matter most this time wasn’t race. It was class. From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. That came as a blow to Democrats who had long been accustomed to very strong support from communities of color. But it was a boon to Republicans who managed to win over significant numbers of voters from traditionally Democratic strongholds based on their shared dissatisfaction with how the economy has worked for them. Here to talk about how and why it happened and whether this is a momentary aberration or a sign of what’s to come is Wall Street Journal economics reporter Jeanne Whalen, coauthor of the article “The New Driving Force of Identity Politics is class, not Race.” Written along with Valerie Bauerlein and Arian Campo-Flores. Jean, welcome to Think.
Jeanne Whalen [00:01:01] Hi there.
Krys Boyd [00:01:02] There is so much here that seems to contradict conventional wisdom that as soon as I read the article, I knew I really wanted to talk with you. What were some of the indicators in the most recent election? That socioeconomic class seems to be growing in importance as a voter classification, while racial identity seems to be declining.
Jeanne Whalen [00:01:22] One of the main things was that Trump made really big gains with voters who don’t have a four year college degree. And when we talk about class, it’s often hard to define what we mean. But the sort of the best definition that sociologists and others use is whether someone has a four year college degree. And they also look at income levels. Our story focused mostly on the education aspect. When you look at the demographic groups that swung to Trump, he made gains with nearly every demographic group, but one of the biggest swings was among voters who don’t have a four year degree. And this was, by the way, voters of all races who don’t have a four year college degree. We’re not we’re not talking just about white non-college voters. And he won these voters of all races who don’t have a four year degree by 13 percentage points this time versus four percentage points in 2020. And that was just a huge change in a group that accounts for more than half of the electorate. He saw college educated, college educated voters of all races also swinging to him, but to a much smaller degree. So so that was one of the biggest swings was among this big group of people of all races who don’t have a degree.
Krys Boyd [00:02:42] And American voters without a degree are important because they are well over half the population.
Jeanne Whalen [00:02:48] And they’re yeah, they’re definitely well over half the electorate, which I guess means they’re also over half the population to. Yes. So you’re right. And the group, that group, non-college educated people is increasingly not white these days. The biggest chunk of it is still white, but the white component is growing smaller, while the multiracial aspect of the group is getting bigger, just just like the country as a whole. But yes, a big reason for this swing toward Trump of non-college voters of all races is just that that that group itself is becoming much more multiracial these days.
Krys Boyd [00:03:26] Republicans did an effective job of painting Democrats as the party of the elites in this election. And again, elite can be defined by income. But as you mentioned, education and elite status seem to be what matter at the present moment.
Jeanne Whalen [00:03:45] Yeah education is probably the most enduring dividing line in the country. It is something that, unlike income which can bounce around in your life, you can you can earn more or less over time no matter what your education level. You can be a very high earning person with no college degree, such as, you know, a non non-college educated person who owns his own business, an electrical electrical business or any kind of small business. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, you could be a Ph.D. in medieval literature who earns, you know, $25,000 a year. So income is maybe less or less permanent and inflexible dividing line than education levels in the country, which which tend to kind of stick with a person over time. I mean, sure, you can go back to college later in life and get a degree, but but usually people, once they are on a certain educational path and life stay on that you get a degree or you don’t typically and that’s how you remain in society.
Krys Boyd [00:04:54] Should be really clear. This has not been a binary flip, right? Democrats still counted majorities of black and Latino voters in this past election.
Jeanne Whalen [00:05:05] They did. Yes. That the Democrats still won and a slim majority of the Latino vote overall. And they won the vast majority of the black vote. So you’re right. It wasn’t it wasn’t as though this was, you know, an enormous flip. But there was there was definitely a swing. So black and Latino voters, particularly men, tilted more toward Trump this time than in 2020 with black support, nearly doubling to 15%. So 15% of black voters backed Trump this time versus about half that in 2020. And Latino support grew even more to 41%. And that was that was a big jump from last time around. So 41% of Latino voters supported Trump this time. And that was according to AP vote cast, which is an exit poll gatherer. As as people leave the polls, we’ll have firmer results in a couple of months when when the actual election results get published by demographic group.
Krys Boyd [00:06:12] But for Democrats, even if they did still get majorities of black and slimmer majorities of Latino voters, this was a big deal because for a long time, those two groups were considered mainstays for Democratic candidates. Right?
Jeanne Whalen [00:06:27] Absolutely. Yeah. Over many decades, that has been the case. And a lot of that is tied to the way that the Democrats were really locked in lockstep. Democrats were kind of in lockstep with the unionized labor movement for a long time. And many of the people who made up the unionized workforce out there, the non-college workforce, were people of color. Unions encouraged everyone to vote Democrat. Democrats backed unionized workers made sure that they were able to bargain for better wages and benefits. But as that that relationship has weakened somewhat over the years as the ranks of unionized workers in the nation has fallen a lot. I don’t have the numbers at hand, but the country used to have many, many more workers. A higher percentage of its workforce was unionized decades ago than it is now. And that has sort of weakened that relationship between Democrats and the working class and maybe made workers feel less connected to the Democratic Party and more willing to cast around for a different party to back, particularly as many workers feel they have fallen behind economically in our economy.
Krys Boyd [00:07:48] How specifically did Republican politicians try to win over union leaders who for a long time primarily could be counted on to endorse Democrats?
Jeanne Whalen [00:07:58] Well, you didn’t see Trump reaching out to the unions in ways that many union leaders and even workers saw as fairly superficial. So he he went. You may remember a year, year and a bit ago, the automakers or the auto workers in Detroit were on strike, actually, not just in Detroit, but all over the country. But then the workers of the big three automakers headquartered in Detroit were on strike all over the country. And President Biden went to picket with them at a factory outside of Detroit. It was the first time that a sitting president had joined a picket line for striking workers. That was seen as a really big and important political endorsement of the autoworkers cause. At the same time, Trump went to the Detroit area and met with a group of non unionized autoworkers and said that he was the real supporter of autoworkers and he kind of trashed the head of the auto workers union, John Thain, saying that he was hurting autoworkers, hurting the U.S. industry and eventually would end up ceding jobs to overseas factories. Trump kind of changed his tune later. So he went from kind of bashing the unions. Then as we inched closer to the election, I think he thought, well, let’s make some inroads with the unions themselves. And he kind of courted the Teamsters in particular, that union that makes up a lot of like I think UPS drivers are Teamsters and other workers are also Teamsters. He courted that union quite a bit and the head of that union ultimately decided not to endorse a politician in this election, which was a big break from tradition. The Teamsters and almost every other big union have always backed Democrats. And this time the Teamsters said, we’re not going to we’re not going to endorse. We’ll let our members make up their own mind. And I don’t think that was really because Trump was courting him so much or courting the union. It was more, I think, a reflection of the fact that a lot of unionized workers, the rank and file, have become Trump supporters. You know, the leadership of many of the nation’s unions are still Democrats, hardcore Democrats. But a lot of the rank and file, at least in the last couple of elections, would talk about supporting Trump, I think, because they felt, well, they probably had many different reasons. But but some felt that their wages had not kept up with the times and maybe the unions were not having their back well enough and the Democrats were delivering for them. And I think that probably accelerated because of inflation recently as well. So so Trump did a little bit of courting of unions. He also did a little bit of bashing of unions and also benefited from the rank and file of the unions just kind of migrating to him overall to try to sum it up.
Krys Boyd [00:10:53] Are you able to get any sense, Jeanne, of whether Republican leaders are eager to hang on to these gains with working class voters will take a harder line on questions of, say, corporate interests versus worker rights moving forward.
Jeanne Whalen [00:11:08] It’s a very good question. And I just don’t know. I mean, certainly, you know, my my knee jerk reaction would be probably not, because they’re their main priority in past years and recent decades has been cutting taxes for big companies and lowering regulation for big companies and and not at all attempting to side with workers or focus on workers rights. That that really has been the Democrats who have and particularly President Biden did a lot to try to support organized labor. He mandated in as many ways as he could. Well, I think he was never able to mandate strictly by law, but he certainly encouraged companies to employ union unionized laborers if they were going to take advantage of federal funds that were passed in Biden backed legislation, funds for infrastructure and for building various factories. He tried to really encourage those federally funded projects to use unionized labor. He spoke often about backing striking workers. He went to the picket lines. He and his National Labor Relations Board was one of the more fiery, pro-worker NLRB’s that the country has seen in recent decades. So he did a lot for for organized workers. The Republicans really have no track record of that and actually have quite a long track record of doing the opposite of weighing in with big companies now. We’ll see whether Trump changes that. It’s a little hard to believe, but there have been some in his party, including J.D. Vance, who say that the country has spent too long ignoring the average working person and that they are going to fight for workers rights and fight to bring back manufacturing to the country. Of course, that is something President Biden has focused quite a lot on as well, bringing manufacturing back. And he’s had some success with that. So we’ve seen a lot of rhetoric on the Republican side, but not a lot of action. So we’ll see.
Krys Boyd [00:13:09] So the shift among Latino voters was even greater, greater than the one among Black voters in this election, as you mentioned earlier. Does this mean Latino voters are not necessarily relating to the plight of undocumented immigrants, which it appears maybe the Democratic Party had long assumed would be a major voting factor for these people?
Jeanne Whalen [00:13:31] You know, this is this is really not my area of expertise. So I don’t want to go over sell my expertise here. But that does appear to be the case. And from what my colleagues have written at The Wall Street Journal, it does appear that a lot of Latino voters felt that undocumented workers ought to wait their turn and come in the legal way, as you know, as a lot of Latino Americans did or their parents did, and that they just felt that the border was becoming too chaotic and that the country needed to crack down on that.
Krys Boyd [00:14:02] So, Jeanne, across racial and ethnic identifications, economic issues are a primary concern for many who voted for Trump and Republicans. Kamala Harris And down ballot Democrats didn’t entirely neglect the economy in their campaign pitches. What do we know about why Trump’s messages seem to have inspired greater confidence among Americans who are worried about their personal economic prospects?
Jeanne Whalen [00:14:30] Yeah, it’s a good question. And I should say that, you know, some demographers looked at the the shifting racial and class patterns here and thought this could this could be a blip related to the inflation that so angered all voters this election cycle that everyone was really, really angry about inflation. The biggest bout of inflation that the country has seen in 30 or 40 years. And that that, you know, without that, we might not have seen this kind of shift among all racial groups toward Trump. So it does seem that inflation really was the driving force of this election. And I think it’s correct to say that President Biden was really late to acknowledge people’s pain about that. He focused a lot in his early campaign on the the big legislative projects he got through Congress that dedicated just tens of billions of dollars to building factories and infrastructure in the country, projects that really are quite significant and will have a very lasting impact on our country, its infrastructure, on the workforce. You know, these projects are employing thousands and thousands of of workers. A lot of money is going to a worker retraining and education. They’re very significant. But none of that progress really spoke to the much more immediate pain that everyone was feeling, which was the giant spike in grocery prices and housing prices. Those are probably the two biggest pain points. Biden just didn’t really talk about that enough. And then when Kamala Harris took over in the middle of the summer, she did shift sharply toward immediately acknowledging that pain. She talked a lot about if she won, she would fight grocery store price gouging. She would build lots of new homes and try our best to bring down rising housing costs. She would crack down on unfair rental increases. She really did train the Democrats message on that. But it was it was far too late, really. Most political analysts think Trump in the meantime, you know, he did speak about inflation is a big problem for people, but didn’t offer many solutions at all. Beyond he kept saying drill, baby, drill. His his solution was going to be to increase the nation’s oil and gas production, which he said would bring down costs of many things because, you know, a lot of a lot of costs in our economy relate to the cost of the energy needed to produce them, whether it’s, you know, the gasoline you need to run a tractor to harvest a crop or the gasoline, you need to haul products across the country. His only solution that he really offered was drill, baby, drill. You know, but I think I think it was more just that people were wanting to register a backlash against the Democrats on his watch. This inflation happened. It was more of, I think, punishing the Democrats and being fed up with the Democrats rather than it was anyone being particularly wowed by Trump’s economic plans. They also a lot of voters, if you’ve talked to them, you know, they also do. Saying over and over, Will Trump’s a businessman. He’ll fix the economy. Trump’s a business. I heard that a lot in talking to voters. So, you know, whether people whether Trump was giving them really specific plans or not, people seemed to believe that he was going to steer the economy in a better fashion.
Krys Boyd [00:18:00] I mean, to the extent that many voters in these of this election seem to have voted for the candidate they hoped could say bring down the price of groceries and housing and other day to day essentials we all need. How much direct control can any presidential administration exert over these things?
Jeanne Whalen [00:18:17] It’s a very good question, and not a lot, I think, is the answer. You know, our market sets prices. There are you know, there’s a certain amount of demand out there. There’s a certain amount of supply. And that largely sets pricing. And as we all know now, after Covid, the demand for a lot of goods really soared worldwide as we all were locked inside and not able to go anywhere. We couldn’t get our hair cut or go on a vacation or take advantage of other services, go to a movie, whatever. So we just started buying things, and that meant the price of things went up enormously. And it took a long time for the logistics system to adjust and try to meet that demand. And so prices just went soaring. And then there were other logistical problems. You know, workers stayed home and so ships weren’t sailing and railroads weren’t working and docks weren’t working. And so that exacerbated the problem even more. You know, goods were not flowing even as this demand was going through the roof. So that all sparked just an enormous amount of inflation. We had Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cause a big spike in global energy prices. Just a lot of bad news coming together at once to drive up prices. And you know what? What a president can do about all of that is not a lot. There are powers that states have given their authorities, their state authorities to stop price gouging during an emergency. So let’s say a hurricane hits Florida. There are there are laws at the Florida state level that say gas stations, you aren’t allowed to, you know, quadruple the price of gasoline just because you can during this time period right after the hurricane hits. You’re not allowed to charge $85 for a bottle of water. Those are mostly related to natural disasters. There’s not really there’s there are really anti price gouging authorities that the states or that the federal government have to stop companies from raising prices in a long running area. If we want to call Covid, I guess it was a disaster. But in the long running, difficult economic period, there’s no real tool that the president could have used to intervene in companies raising their prices. And that’s one thing Kamala Harris was promising, is that she would she would pass some new legislation to give the federal government more authority to crack down on what she called price gouging in situations like the post Covid period. But it was never really clear how well she would be able to do that or how well that would work and how you would define gouging, how you would police it, etc.. And how. You know, how you would police it versus. A company just coming back and arguing, Well, we were raising our prices to meet demand. And because our prices are going up to the cost of our inputs are going up. So there’s not there’s not a ton that the government can do. I guess one thing it can also do is, is crack down on big corporate mergers that tend to drive up prices for consumers. So we just saw the Federal Trade Commission crack down on the attempt to grocery stores to merge Kroger’s and Albertsons. That was denied in the courts thanks to an effort by the Federal Trade Commission. So that’s another area where the federal government does have power to prevent what it considers monopolies from forming and driving up prices more. But that that’s about the limit of the government’s authority.
Krys Boyd [00:21:58] Democrats were, of course, the incumbent party in the White House in this last election, and so they had a vested interest in making this case that economic conditions had been improving. A lot of economists looked at these sort of macro factors and said, yes, that’s true. But I mean, those arguments, do they ultimately harm Democrats prospects if individual Americans didn’t feel like things are getting better for them?
Jeanne Whalen [00:22:22] I think that’s right. And I think it was it was a problem that was, I think, extremely hard for the Democrats to to navigate, because it’s true that at many of the macro levels, the economy is doing well and was doing really well during the election. You know, we had better than average GDP growth in the country compared with other countries around the world. Inflation had come way, way down from its peak in, I think, 2020 to, you know, the inflation was really slowing. We had one of the best labor markets of all time. It was one of the best times, certainly in my life and in many Americans lives for finding a new job, for getting a pay raise, because there were tons of jobs out there and not enough workers for several years. And we had inflation below 4% for one of the longest stretches ever in the country. So all of those things were outstanding economic indicators. But as you say, for, you know, if people aren’t feeling that in their pocketbook, it doesn’t matter. And to most people, what the economy is, is prices. It’s the price they pay for the things that they buy most often, which is groceries and gasoline and and, you know, their monthly rental or mortgage payments and all of those things have gone through the roof. So to ask the average person, is the economy doing well, the answer you would get would be a laugh and, you know, a grimace.
Krys Boyd [00:23:51] Yeah, it does seem like no matter what the state of the economy, you are never going to air if you say to Americans, things are too expensive and you’re not earning enough. Because I think, you know, it’s really easy for most of us to feel that way all the time.
Jeanne Whalen [00:24:06] It’s true. It’s absolutely true. The economy for us is what’s in our wallets now. You know, I will say, if we had had terrible unemployment during the election, then that would have probably been people’s focus as well. You know, unemployment is also something that that the average person feels acutely if they are unemployed. But as it happened, we didn’t have terrible unemployment, We had great employment. We just had inflation through the roof and wages that had had stagnated for many, many, many years. They did over the course of the post-COVID period as inflation really took off. Wages did eventually catch up and even exceed inflation. So workers did come out of this quote unquote, ahead wage wise. But that was after many, many years of wages stagnating. So I think people just felt fed up. And most people, when they get a pay raise, they think. Well, I deserved that. That’s because of my hard work. And they don’t feel like they should have to spend more of that to buy the same number of eggs that they were buying a couple of weeks ago. You know, so they get very angry about price rises and don’t see increased wages as anything other than something that they deserve for hard work.
Krys Boyd [00:25:22] Historically, Jeanne, the GOP was sometimes perceived as a party organized around the concerns, first and foremost, of wealthier, whiter voters than maybe the rest of the country. Has that changed in recent years?
Jeanne Whalen [00:25:38] I think, yes, it has got to be the answer, given that so many non wealthy nonwhite voters appear to be flocking to the GOP now. I mean, what are they actually the party of of of non white working class voters? Are they the party that represents those voters interests? I would say so far, no. You know, no, there’s not a lot of indication that the party is is representing the interests of those voters. But those voters have undeniably shifted more toward the Republicans, believing that the Republicans are going to represent their interests. So, yeah, I think the perception of the GOP has shifted, even if the actual action has not. And and we shall see what happens under the Trump administration. At the same time, I think the Democrats are undeniably becoming the party of more educated, wealthier Americans and in an equal and opposite shift. The Democrats were for a long time, the party of the working class and now are the party of the college educated folks of all races, many white voters, but college educated voters of all races and voters of kind of upper middle and upper incomes who increasingly have have shifted toward the Democratic Party.
Krys Boyd [00:26:58] Another perception of the GOP is that it has it’s not even perception. It’s accurate that for a long time it’s made a deep commitment to the priorities of the religious right. Of course, in this past election, we saw a number of states that helped put Donald Trump back in the White House. Also passing referendum votes, enshrining abortion rights. So what does this indicate to you about the future for the GOP and its priority?
Jeanne Whalen [00:27:23] You know, this, too, is not my area of expertise at all. So I will just be reacting as a reader. But I have found that fascinating. You know, it’s true that the GOP has for many years based a lot of its support on on its commitment to the pro-life, the anti-abortion position, and that that was a requirement to court its its base of voters. And now we see, you know, voters who are voting with the GOP for a GOP president with one hand and also supporting abortion rights referenda at the state level with the other hand. And I don’t know what to make of that other than that many voters must have endorsed, or at least some voters must have endorsed Trump’s argument that it was okay to leave the abortion issue to the states, that that the overturning Roe versus Wade at the Supreme Court, which then handed a lot of this power back to the states that that was in voters out in some voters eyes and an appropriate state of affairs that their state would be the one to protect abortion rights or not, and that they were okay with that.
Krys Boyd [00:28:34] Are there ways that public policy can make jobs for people held by people with less education, less education than a college degree pay significantly more? Like, how much influence can government have on that?
Jeanne Whalen [00:28:47] Well, I think I think that it can. And one thing that Biden really has done very well and I think hasn’t gotten enough credit for is, as I said earlier, he he pushed through Congress with the support of the Democrats and a few Republicans here and there, these massive pieces of legislation through three laws, in particular, the Chips in Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure law, and the Inflation Reduction Act. All of those total are dedicating just tens of billions of dollars to the construction of new factories around the country and new infrastructure around the country. And those projects which are building. You know, chip factories, semiconductor factories in Arizona and Ohio and Idaho and upstate New York and in Indiana. And they’re building roads and bridges all over the country. Where I live in Chicago, there is a giant project underway to fix the elevated train line, the Chicago subway called the “L.” All of that is being funded by one of those three Biden backed laws. And all of those projects require skilled workers to build them. They require electricians and plumbers and steel workers and all kinds of people who go through a lot of training often and often within their unions to be able to to do this difficult work. And the pay for those jobs often quite good. It is it is often unionized work. It’s work that if a person is in a union, comes with a really great benefits pension, you know, in some cases pensions and really good health care. And so to answer your question by by passing all of this legislation, the government has created these construction projects that are are employing a lot of workers, increasing demand for those workers, and therefore boosting the wages of those workers everywhere. So I think Biden has shown that there are things that the government can do to improve people’s income and livelihoods for sure.
Krys Boyd [00:30:48] Jeanne, you and your colleagues for this article talk to some voters of color who told you race was just not a huge factor in their decision making in this election? Does this mean that they feel they have more in common with fellow Americans who are in similar economic circumstances but maybe belong to a different ethnic or racial group or have a great deal more or less education?
Jeanne Whalen [00:31:12] I think it does. I mean, you know, I wandered around Chicago for a couple days talking to people on the street after the election to try to figure out, you know, why people voted the way they did. And one of the one of the areas that I visited was this was this construction project I just mentioned the big project to to overhaul Chicago’s elevated train. And the construction workers there are all unionized they’re all earning pretty good wages. And, you know, I visited with some of them, talked to some of them during their breaks and right away encountered a couple of Black workers who offered that they were Trump voters. And for both of them, it was well, I should say for one of them, it was the first time she had voted for a Republican. For the other, he had sometimes well, you know, I guess for both of them, it might it might have been the first time they voted for a Republican. And at the national level is what they told me. I’m trying to remember the exact details now. Anyway. It was it was a it was a rare thing for them to vote for a Republican. And they said, you know, look, we we just felt like Trump would do a better job with the economy. It’s not about race. I asked the black woman, construction worker, did you feel at all that you should support Kamala Harris because she was a Black woman and that she she told me, no, not at all. That, you know, it’s not about race for me. It’s about who can do more for me as a citizen of this country, who can do more for me economically. They both and other folks I talked to said that they were upset with seeing the government spend so much money or any money at all on the migrants who came to Chicago, the ones who ended up in the city, either because Texas sent them here or because they just came here on their own. And here I’m talking about the undocumented migrants who came across the border the last couple of years. There was a lot of consternation among the Chicago voters that I talked to that some of some of the migrants were being put up in housing and given other support by the state or the city when these voters felt that, you know, other low income Chicagoans and even homeless Chicagoans who’d been here a long time were not being supported. And they said they felt for the migrants, they didn’t have anything against the migrants, but they just didn’t like seeing that government funds were going toward, you know, people who are not citizens and not helping long term Americans as much. That was that was a big thing that I heard over and over again.
Krys Boyd [00:33:49] And presumably, when you get to this question of class versus race or, you know, it, it would seem to be that voters with lesser amounts of education perceived that they have more to lose in the economy from the presence of unchecked undocumented migration.
Jeanne Whalen [00:34:08] I think that’s probably right. I can’t say that I heard that from a lot of people myself, to be honest. It wasn’t so much that they were saying, I think that these folks are going to take my job. It was more it was really more I don’t like seeing that they’re getting stuff that they’re getting benefits from the government when I’m not. And and people who are even worse off than I am or not. It was it was more that side of things I have to say.
Krys Boyd [00:34:34] I will stipulate Jeanne, that your beat is economics and not racial dynamics. But I wonder if you got see if you got a sense of whether this recalibration of voter positions and loyalty is along economic and class lines suggests that we might be moving toward an era of reduced interracial conflict if people are united in a party across racial lines. Is there reason to think people might be united in other areas of American life?
Jeanne Whalen [00:35:02] I mean, very possibly this truly is not my my area. But I think it’s not just the fact that, you know, people are mixing more along political lines. We are just mixing more generally. The country is becoming more multiracial. It’s becoming less white. And I think that in itself, over time must have some benefit to racial relations and some calming of racial tensions. If more of us are going to be biracial or of different racial backgrounds, that maybe there will be less stark black versus white conflict or other kinds of stark conflict down the road. That just it does make sense, doesn’t it? But I can’t say that I have any particular crystal ball there when it comes to that.
Krys Boyd [00:35:45] Fair enough. There are, of course, working class voters in cities and in rural areas and plenty of suburban areas in between. Did you get a sense of how political trends are shaped by where in the country people are located?
Jeanne Whalen [00:35:59] I think as we’ve all seen, cities have become bastions of blue over time and that urban voters definitely tend to shift to vote more for Democrats than rural and kind of ex urban or far flung suburban people do. That’s that’s definitely been a growing trend over time. Blue voters tend to cluster in cities. Red voters tend to to spread out in the rural areas, though this time we did see also a shift even in the big cities toward Trump. There was a somewhat of a shift in Chicago. One of the one of the city’s wards actually voted for Trump this time. That it’s very rare. I’m not sure whether it’s unprecedented in recent elections, but certainly quite rare for a district of Chicago to to be red. And it did happen in one district this year. And we saw big shifts in New York and in other big cities and in some blue states, New Jersey, New York state, Illinois is shifting a bit toward Trump this time. So even as we do kind of tend to cluster in these blue and red areas of the country, some of the blueness shifted in a red word direction and some new strongholds this time, which I think was a real a real warning sign for Democrats.
Krys Boyd [00:37:23] Why do people with college degrees now tend to have a vastly larger amount of the share of this country’s wealth than they did even three decades ago?
Jeanne Whalen [00:37:35] It’s a very it’s a very good question. We had some figures in our story that I think it was several decades ago that the college educated, college educated portion of the country was about 20% of the population, but it had about half of the household wealth. So. So, yes, 30 years ago, Americans with a college degree were 20% of the population and held half of the household wealth, while those without a college degree held the other half. So it was 50/50. Today, Americans with a college degree account for 38% of the population and 73% of household wealth. So not only are there, there are more college educated, educated people today than there were 30 years ago, but they hold even more. A share of the household wealth and household wealth, just meaning that the total value of the assets that the typical household holds, the value of your home, your car, your bank account, your 401K, whatever. So over time, there’s been a huge shift of the nation’s wallet toward those with with a college degree. And why that is I, I don’t know. I suppose it’s because. There’s been this big explosion of wealth at the upper end of the economy in tech and other fields that require an education. And at the same time, a lot of the ways of building a life and some household wealth at the lower end of the spectrum have have disappeared over time. The kind of the factory job that paid a livable wage in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s. A lot of those jobs have gone overseas now chasing cheaper labor. It’s harder to get a job like that, certainly much harder these days to get a job like that that is unionized and paying a really good hourly wage with good benefits and pension and all of that. So a lot of the sort of tickets to the middle class that the lower end of the spectrum used to have in the kind of golden era of the American economy, say, 50s, 60s, 70s those those those are gone now.
Krys Boyd [00:39:56] And please correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I think a lot of the manufacturing that remains in this country is is heavily automated. So there may be manufacturing working in this country, but it doesn’t it’s not necessarily a thousand jobs where people are like on the line putting things together.
Jeanne Whalen [00:40:12] That’s right. Yeah. And so there will still be some jobs in that factory, but more of them now will require a degree in order to operate the computers that operate the robots. You know, if you want if you want jobs in those factories and automated factories, some of them sure will still be for unskilled laborers or laborers without a college degree. But more of them now, these days are for people who have a degree or if not a four year degree, at least a two year degree, or some specialization in computers or robots. So education is more than ever really crucial, at least some level of education, as I say, not necessarily a bachelor’s degree, but some level of specialization. And education is really crucial toward getting the jobs that pay well in these modern factories.
Krys Boyd [00:40:59] It’s a little hard to say. I recognize exactly what will happen until we hear everything laid out. But if President elect Trump moves ahead with his stated plans for significant new tariffs on goods coming in from Mexico, from Canada, from China, how much will paycheck to paycheck working class households be affected?
Jeanne Whalen [00:41:19] They’ll be talked to a whole lot and in in two different ways. Well, it certainly in one big way, which is what they’re paying for items. So if if Trump does go ahead and put a 25% tariff on everything coming in from Canada and Mexico, let’s say, which is one of his most recent threats, that means that the cars that we sell here in the U.S., many of which rely on imported parts from Canada and Mexico, are going to get even more expensive than they already are. And cars are already crazy expensive. As we all know, cars will get more expensive, food will get more expensive. And we import, believe it or not, a lot of produce from Canada where it’s grown in these vast greenhouses in Ontario. You know, the next time you buy cherry tomatoes, you might look at the label and see grown in Canada. And that’s because a lot of cherry tomatoes are grown in these giant greenhouses that are right over the border from Detroit. Those will get more expensive. Avocados from Mexico will get more expensive. All kinds of things will get more expensive. And that’s not to mention the products coming in from China, the big screen TVs and the electronics and the clothing and everything else that we import from China. All of that will get more expensive. Now, on the flipside, there are those, you know, and even I hear this, a lot of money, working class voters who want to see these terrorists because they say rightly, that a lack of import tariffs into our market has encouraged manufacturers to base themselves overseas where labor is cheaper. If you can if you can make clothing and electronics in a country like China, where Labor’s law is a lot cheaper and used to be much more cheap, when some of these factories were being set up 20 years ago, the difference was a lot bigger. But if you can set up a factory where labor is cheaper overseas and bring your products into the US and not have to pay or not have to pay any tariff on them, your importers don’t pay any tariff on them. Why not do that? If you if you have free access to the U.S. market to sell your stuff and you can make it more cheaply, of course companies are going to do that. So these workers would argue and and supporters of Trump would argue, look, let’s put up some barriers. Let’s charge tariffs, Let’s make it more expensive for these foreign made goods to enter our market and encourage some of these companies to come back here and make their stuff here. And and we’ll see how all that works. There was some evidence at the margins that the Trump that the tariffs Trump put in during his first term did encourage some reshoring to the United States, some some movement of manufacturing back to the US. But the the bigger movement that happened was companies moved their production from China to Mexico because Mexico has cheap labor and goods made in Mexico can enter the US tariff free under trade agreements that we have with Mexico. So, you know, now I guess Trump is saying let’s let’s erect some tariff barriers on goods made in Mexico and we’ll see whether any of that causes manufacturing to move back to the US. Certainly there is the hope among Trump supporters that it will, But one of the immediate effects for most Americans will be that the goods that we buy will get more expensive.
Krys Boyd [00:44:43] Some voters switched allegiances in this election from Democrats to Republicans because they noted the Democrats had simply failed to deliver on their economic promises. I’m curious about how much patience you think folks might have with their new party. As you know, the hard part about being voted in is that now you have to deliver on all this. Did the Republicans effectively get the next four years to show that they can make things very different in this country?
Jeanne Whalen [00:45:08] It’s an excellent question. And who knows? I think that we’ve seen over time that Trump supporters tend to love him no matter what he does and no matter which promises he keeps or not. The, you know, the voters who maybe supported him more grudgingly, thinking that he was going to improve their their economic life a lot in life, they may have a much higher standard that he needs to meet to satisfy them.
Krys Boyd [00:45:33] Jeanne Whalen is an economics reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where you can find her article, “The New Driving Force of Identity Politics is class, not Race.” Jean, thank you for making time to talk this through.
Jeanne Whalen [00:45:45] You’re very welcome.
Krys Boyd [00:45:46] Think is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
