Donald Trump appealed to the American working class

The argument

The explanation here is about who was addressed rather than about policy detail. Trump's campaign promised to renegotiate trade deals and to bring back manufacturing jobs in declining industrial and post-industrial areas. Those commitments were aimed at a specific constituency: working-class Americans in places where the work that had organised local life was gone and had not been replaced. The significance proponents attach to this is less the plausibility of the promises than what making them signalled. Voters in those areas had watched employment disappear through innovation, technological change and the relocation of production, and had heard their situation described — when it was described at all — as the unavoidable cost of progress. To be told instead that the losses were the result of decisions, that trade deals could be renegotiated and jobs brought back, was to be told that what had happened to them was neither inevitable nor beside the point. That is why they felt listened to, and being listened to is the mechanism this position identifies. Political support follows recognition as much as it follows programmes: a voter who believes a candidate has noticed their circumstances will extend a trust that survives disagreement on other matters, while a voter who believes nobody has noticed has little reason to turn out for anyone. Trump's message named a grievance directly and promised to act on it. Americans in those communities voted for him because the campaign spoke to their anxieties about work, place and decline, and treated those anxieties as legitimate rather than as something to be managed or explained away. On this argument, Trump's appeal to the American working class is why he won their votes in 2016.

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.