The most powerful campaign message the Democrats have been sending in 2020—exemplified by their diverse, stirring lineup of convention speeches—is an appeal to inclusion and identity. The party clearly is making a clear effort, in particular, to offer a positive message to Americans of all races and ethnicities.
Political scientists tell us that identity is a powerful predictor of vote choice, so it is no surprise that the Democrats have chosen this message as they seek to mobilize voters. Personally, we both have felt affirmed by the Democratic presidential campaign. One of us is Indian American who just saw the first person of Indian descent ever to be nominated for a presidential ticket. The other is a feminist who just saw a woman nominated for vice president. Both of us are stirred by Democrats’ plea for a return to decency and normalcy.
But we have noticed a striking omission in the Democrats’ messaging. During the Democratic National Convention and since then, there has been little focus on the rural and blue-collar Americans who don’t yearn for a return to normalcy for a simple reason—because normalcy hasn’t worked for them for a long, long time.
They live in communities left behind by the offshoring of manufacturing jobs in the 1980s and the automation of the 1990s. Their families and communities never recovered from the financial crisis of 2008. They are the hollowed-out middle class who see no future for their families: 90 percent of Americans born in the 1940s out-earned their parents, but only 50 percent of those born in the 1980s will. These folks are the other 50 percent. They are not the poorest Americans; they’re the fragile or formerly middle class living in economically depressed counties. Their deep demoralization is epitomized by the opioid crisis—never mentioned in the Democratic convention (perhaps we missed it?).
Overlooking these voters could jeopardize Democrats’ ability to win the swing states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan—that delivered the election to Donald Trump in 2016 by fewer than 80,000 votes because of the peculiarities of the Electoral College. “Rust Belt Revolt” voters in these states included not just the non-college educated whites who swung hard for Trump, but also Black voters whose turnout declined by the double digits, according to sociologist Michael McQuarrie.
We both believe that Democrats have these voters’ interests at heart, and that Trump does not. But Democrats need to say it, early, loud and incessantly. How should they do that?
Some Democrats have gotten distracted about whether the party should be talking about race or class. And it might seem as though they face an either/or decision between their diverse, identity-motivated constituency and the class-based message required to reach blue-collar voters whom Trump has hurt. But the reality is they don’t have to choose. Instead they must address the economic concerns of working-Americans—of all races—while also calling out Republicans’ attempts to divide Americans based on race.
We know this because in 2018, the progressive group Rural Organizing surveyed 820 rural Americans to test the power of the following message: “Instead of delivering for working people, politicians hand kickbacks to their donors who send jobs overseas. Then they turn around and blame new immigrants or people of color, to divide and distract us from the real source of our problems.” Note the three elements: 1) Americans of all races need good-paying jobs; 2) politicians have let the donor class gut Americans’ standard of living; 3) then they try to deflect the blame onto immigrants or people of color. In the survey, three-quarters of rural respondents agreed with this message, which appealed not just to liberal voters (who made up only 23 percent of the respondents), but also to the 42 percent who were conservatives and the 26 percent who were moderates.
Critical race scholar Ian Haney López calls this kind of messaging the race-class narrative, and he argues that it is critical to reaching the 59 percent of American voters he calls the “persuadables.” López, along with messaging consultant Anat Shenker-Osorio and pollster Celinda Lake, document that race-class messaging is more convincing among persuadables than “colorblind economic populism”—that is, messaging that invokes class alone. Crucially for Democrats, these scholars have found that white, Black and Latino persuadable voters all find race-class narratives more convincing than color-blind populism, by similar margins.
We can expect a significant subset of Trump voters to be receptive to a race-class message. A 2017 study by the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group found that about one-fifth of Trump voters have bipartisan voting habits and warm feelings toward racial minorities. The study calls these voters “anti-elites,” and they present a major opportunity for Democrats: 83 percent of them think the economic system is biased in favor of the wealthiest Americans, and 68 percent of them favor raising taxes on the rich.
Democrats often get tarred as the party of elites because their positions in the culture wars clash with those of blue-collar Americans, especially whites and Latinos, who tend to place a high value on self-discipline and the traditional institutions that anchor it, notably religion, the military and “family values.” Republican politicians naturally want to keep attention focused there. But Democrats should focus on making the affirmative case that their party understands voters’ economic aspirations and economic pain much better than the GOP.
None of this means Democrats will need to retreat from their reputation as the party of diversity and inclusivity. As vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris has persistently pointed out, the economic pain so prevalent today falls on many Americans, from young Black men without jobs in cities, to middle-aged white men on disability or opioids, to women of all races stuck in underpaid dead-end “essential” jobs, to gig workers trying to make ends meet, to young adults still living in their parents’ basements. There’s enough economic pain to go around that it should be a central unifying issue for Joe Biden’s campaign going forward. Democrats need to commit to bringing economic opportunity to Americans of all education levels and every region of the country. That’s why one of us, who represents Silicon Valley in Congress, has teamed up with Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) to bring Silicon Valley companies and investors to cities in Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. That’s the right message for Democrats.
Why is this so urgent? Biden’s margin in crucial swing states is razor thin. Pollster Stanley Greenberg has found that in the last two weeks before the 2016 election, when Hillary Clinton talked about the contrast between her and Trump’s economic policies and the changes she would bring, she consolidated her lead. Clinton’s largest lead was during the debates, when she hit Trump on the economy; afterward, she talked much less about the economy. Famously, Bill Clinton reportedly begged to be allowed to go to the Rust Belt but wasn’t. Let’s not make that kind of mistake again.
Biden appears not to be making the same mistake. Even during the pandemic, he has traveled to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, where he pushed a “promises made, promises broken” theme, saying: “Under Donald Trump, Michigan lost jobs even before Covid hit. What about offshoring? Has Trump delivered on stopping companies from shipping American jobs overseas? You already know the answer. Of course not.”
We hope to see a lot more of this in the coming weeks. It should be dead easy for Biden to connect with America’s “anti-elite” voters. He was born to an economically precarious family in blue-collar Scranton. He already knows what he needs to do: Signal “I see you, I value you, and I will deliver for your family and your community. Hard work should pay off for hardworking Americans—Black, white and brown.” Then, he must explain concretely how Democrats will make sure hard work pays off—and Republicans won’t.
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