Trump wins votes from working-class discontent over inflation and immigration

All over the world, with few exceptions, governments in democratic countries are losing elections. After the coronavirus pandemic and the most intense wave of inflation in four decades, discontent has spread among broad layers of the population and social media. If there is anyone capable of channelling frustration, it is Donald Trump. Riding on the damage caused by rising prices and with mass immigration as a scapegoat for almost all ills, the Republican won the U.S. presidential election resoundingly, immune to scandals. He relied on the vote of low-income citizens without college education, with working-class support that extended from whites to Latinos and African Americans.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have concluded the most pro-union mandate in the history of the United States. The president even participated in a picket line to support auto workers and his government mediated, on behalf of employees, in other labor disputes. However, the lower-income sectors have turned their backs on the Democratic Party, which on the traditional left and right axes has historically been their defender. In reality, it is no longer so much a question of left or right: voters have punished governments of both stripes almost every time they have been tested at the polls. This has happened in recent years in Germany, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Italy, and in the French legislative elections.

Trump’s demagogic populism has proven stronger than political tradition. The former president, a lover of hyperbole, has been saying for almost four years that the United States was going to hell. He has painted an apocalyptic picture of a country in decline that has little to do with reality, but which has been widely accepted with the help of the conservative media, with Fox News at the forefront.

The Republican had some strong arguments. He is inheriting a booming economy, with almost no unemployment and inflation under control, but in the four years of Biden’s mandate, prices have risen by more than 20%. Economists have stressed that inflation has particularly affected voters with lower purchasing power, due to the rise in the price of basic products, such as food and gasoline, essential in a country where a car is only dispensable in some large cities.

The question that Ronald Reagan used to put the final nail in Jimmy Carter’s coffin in the only presidential debate of the 1980 elections has come back to haunt Democrats: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” People don’t seem to remember that four years ago, amid a pandemic, the economy was in recession, tens of thousands of people were dying, unemployment had skyrocketed, and the situation in the U.S. was chaotic. But they do remember how much it cost them to go shopping, fill up their tank, or go out to dinner not so long ago.

Multi-ethnic coalition

“Trump and his campaign officials believed that it was possible to take advantage of the Republicans’ growing strength among white working-class voters to create a multi-ethnic working-class coalition. They were right,” explained William A. Galston, an expert at the Brookings Institution, on Wednesday. Frustration with economic uncertainty and rising prices has hit Latinos and African Americans especially hard, among whom Trump has gained ground while maintaining his traditional base.

For the Republican Party, this is great news. In an increasingly ethnically diverse country, its excessive reliance on the white vote put it at a disadvantage compared to the Democrats. If it manages to retain or expand that new support, the changes seen in Tuesday’s elections “could mark a new era in American politics,” according to Galston. “President Donald Trump received historic support from Hispanic voters because he has never wavered on the issues that matter most to our community: reducing costs, restoring the economy, restoring American prosperity, securing the border, and security at home and abroad,” said Danielle Alvarez, a Republican Party adviser, in a statement.

Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent ally of the Democrats, reflected on what happened on Wednesday. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he said.

Economically, the promise of widespread tax cuts — some of them tailored to the needs of the economy, such as tax breaks on tips, overtime, and Social Security benefits — has worked, as has the promise of massive tariffs on imports. Economists have warned that such protectionism will fuel inflation, but workers see it more as a way to defend themselves against the excesses of globalization.

Xenophobic message

Trump has also repeated the xenophobic message that took him to the White House in the 2016 elections. Once again, he had raw material to work with. The arrival of illegal immigrants has skyrocketed during Biden’s term, causing problems for some communities across the country. No, they don’t eat dogs and cats, nor are they responsible for all crime, but Republicans have displayed harrowing testimonies from some real victims to turn rare cases into a category.

The president-elect has also used immigrants as a scapegoat for economic hardship, even though the reality is the opposite. They take American jobs, make housing more expensive, overwhelm public services, and take federal emergency funds: whether it is a hoax or reality, the important thing is that the message was getting through, even among settled Latinos with the right to vote.

With his extremist messages, Trump chose to mobilize his followers and attract new dissatisfied voters who in the past did not go to the polls, rather than soften his discourse to seduce centrists. It has worked for him.

Among new voters, Trump has been especially successful among young men, and not just white men. He has connected with them through appearances on the shows of successful podcasters like Joe Rogan, to whom he gave a three-hour interview even at the expense of making his supporters wait two hours at a rally. He has also embraced cryptocurrencies, an asset in which many young people invest.

Trump also has enormous charisma. He is a star, a showman, capable of making outrageous statements at his rallies without it costing him. Despite being a billionaire and friend of billionaires, he still has an anti-establishment aura that favors him in times of discontent. November 5 was largely a referendum on him, rather than a choice between two candidates. And he won.

Electoral gains

The data and polls point to where his voter bases have been and where he has improved his position most compared to 2020. The polling figures show that he has improved his net results by 9.5 points in counties with more than a 25% Latino population, and 4.1 points in those with more than that percentage of African Americans. He has also been especially strong in those where less than 20% of the population has higher education, where he gained 4.8 points. And in those with a large population aged between 18 and 34, he gained 5.6 points.

Exit polls complete the picture of the voting data. CNN’s poll shows that, surprisingly, Trump won more votes among women than among men, closing the gender gap that seemed to be widening. “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,” said former secretary of state Madeleine Albright at a 2016 election campaign rally. Many women preferred not to help Harris. The difference in the Democrat’s favor is said to have narrowed from Biden’s 15 points in 2020 to just 10 on Tuesday, although the figures should be taken with caution because the results of the poll do not seem entirely consistent with the final count.

That same poll shows Trump has narrowed his gap among 18- to 29-year-olds from 24 to 13 points, with a dead heat among men. In addition to the Republican’s success in courting them, many young leftists have turned their backs on the Democratic Party over the Gaza war.

Where the survey indicates a more marked change is in the Latino vote, where the difference narrows by 25 points, from 33 to just 8, and Trump is ahead among men. In part, this improvement is correlated with another, that of 14 points among non-white voters who are not university graduates, compatible with continuing to sweep non-university whites. And the great improvement among low- and middle-income voters (12 points in the bracket up to $50,000 a year and 17 points among voters with incomes of $50,000 to $100,000) also points in the same direction. On the other hand, Harris prevailed among those with incomes of more $100,000.

But if there is one thing that is becoming more pronounced, it is the contrast between rural areas and the cities. In the former, Trump widened his lead from 15 points in 2020 to 27 in 2024, while the Democrats have improved in cities, from 22 to 23 points, according to the CNN poll. In addition, the suburbs have become pro-Trump, shifting from a two-point disadvantage to a positive difference of the same amount.

Income and urbanization data show how the traditional parameters of the left-right divide have been blown to pieces and competition is becoming more between cosmopolitanism and ethnonationalism, as political scientist Steven Levitsky argues, also highlighting the “anti-government humor” that is spreading around the world.

Trump has played his cards well. He toned down his messages on immigration and the economy, but he also softened his positions on abortion, the issue that was so profitable for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, after the Supreme Court ruling that repealed it as a federal right. He has portrayed Harris as a radical leftist with the cultural wars that mobilize his voters. He has even been able to capitalize on his scandals, accusations, trials, and convictions, presenting himself as a martyr targeted by persecution and reinforcing his anti-system image. Xenophobia, hoaxes, demagoguery, and populism, with the breeding ground of discontent, have given him the keys to the White House.

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