Kamala Harris Could Lose Big Among African-American and Working-Class Voters

Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini and Democratic strategist Ruy Teixiera agree that their parties have switched places when it comes to wooing non-college-educated voters.

Lex Villena/Reason

Note: Scroll down now to watch video or listen to audio.

My guests on this week’s The Reason Interview are Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, and American Enterprise Institute fellow Ruy Teixeira, coauthor most recently of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.

I talk with them about the presidential election, how the working class has become the most important—yet most neglected—part of the electorate, and whether libertarians have anyone to root for in national politics.

I recommend both Ruffini’s and Teixeira’s recent books if you’re interested in what’s happening to the two major parties. A couple of decades ago, virtually no one was predicting that the GOP would become the party of non-college grads—not to mention tariffs and industrial policy. Or that the Dems would start losing the votes of working-class whites, Blacks, and Hispanics.

What I like best about this conversation is that both these guys want their teams to win but don’t indulge in wishcasting or bad-faith arguments. This election is going to be super-tight. In 2016, the Electoral College was decided by about 80,000 votes in three states. In 2020, it was about 40,000 votes in three (different) states. It’s almost certainly going down to the wire again this year. A huge reason for the tightness has to do with working-class (i.e., non-college-educated) voters, whom Teixeria argues have been largely abandoned by Democrats in favor of members of the professional class and representatives of groups more interested in identity politics than traditional economic issues. Ruffini largely agrees, and his book charts how Trump did significantly better with Black and Latino men than Mitt Romney and John McCain did.

RealClearPolitics, October 11, 2024

Neither party has been able to fashion a stable majority or winning streak over time because they are captive to the most extreme and insane elements of their coalitions. As Matt Welch and I wrote in our book The Declaration of Independents (2011/2012), since the early 1970s increasing numbers of voters have had looser and looser ties to the two big parties. Who can blame them (us)? Both parties regularly lie to us and neither seems overly concerned with anything other than maintaining power.

Gallup, January 2024

We end up mostly voting for either a Dem or a Rep in the end, but we’re not happy about it, are we?

Below are the basic topics, and below that are video and audio versions.

0:00- Ad: St. John's College

1:17- Introduction

2:05- Can Kamala Harris win back the working class?

8:55- Party identification is tanking

11:25– Elite progressive fixations are alienating the working class

15:50- Black & Latino voters are more moderate

17:33- Trump & populism have transformed the GOP

25:05- The Green New Deal was terrible politics

26:23- Does anyone care about overspending anymore?

30:56- The future of unionization

35:49- Populism's appeal to younger voters

39:06- Ad: ZBiotics

40:52- Are we seeing generational realignments?

46:05- Everyone got richer in the last 30 years

47:39- The 'truly disadvantaged' has no real advocates

51:28- Why is neither party working to win big?

55:13- Why has immigration become such a flashpoint?

1:02:49- Why do both parties indulge their nutty fringes?

1:08:17- What about libertarians?

1:18:48- Who will win the 2024 elections?

1:22:00- Are protectionism & heavy spending the new way for both parties?

1:24:09- Have people stopped caring about COVID?

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• The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly unscripted discussion in midtown New York City that doubles as a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. The next one is on Thursday, October 24, and features the Stony Brook sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, whose new book is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Tickets are $15 and include beer, wine, soft drinks, and light food. For more information and to buy tickets, go here. To watch or listen to past Speakeasys, go here.

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