Donald Trump appealed to the American working class

The argument

Trump promised to renegotiate trade deals and bring back manufacturing jobs in the declining industrial and post-industrial areas to appeal to the American working class. Working class Americans who were left behind by innovation and technological change felt listened to.

Context

Around 31% of Americans are working class. This group includes those in waged labour, especially in manual labour, manufacturing and industrial sectors. Deindustrialisation in the second half of last century created structural unemployment in sectors including these, and led to the formation of the Rust Belt area in the US. This region faced industrial decline due to international competition in manufacturing.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Most of Trump's voters in 2016 were not actually working class. Approximately a third of the Trump electorate had household incomes below the US median income, roughly a third earned between $50,000 and $100,000 (around 43,825 - 87,650 euro), and one third earned more than $100,000. Hillary Clinton actually received more votes from working-class Americans in 2016 than Donald Trump, a result indicating that working-class voting patterns that tend to favor Democrats over Republicans.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Not disputed as a description of the campaign, but a promise is evidence about what was offered, not about who responded to it. [Rejecting P2] The premise conflates two groups. The Trump electorate in 2016 was spread across the income range — roughly a third below the national median and about a third above $100,000 — and Clinton drew more votes from Americans on lower incomes. The shift that mattered was concentrated among white voters without a degree in a handful of Midwestern states, a narrower category than "the working class" and one that excludes much of a working class that is disproportionately Black and Hispanic. [Rejecting P3] Even for the group that did move, the causal claim is unresolved. Research on 2016 finds measures of racial and cultural attitude at least as predictive as economic hardship, and the areas most exposed to trade competition did not shift uniformly. "Felt listened to" is also compatible with the appeal being about recognition rather than about the trade programme — in which case the conclusion names the wrong mechanism.