President Biden likes to brand himself as a champion of the working class. He claims to only tax the rich and frequently accuses Republicans of favoring policies that favor big business over blue-collar workers. In a recent tweet, the president said, “We understand something that MAGA Republicans in Congress don’t. Wall Street didn’t build this country. Working people did.” He has also pledged to be the “most pro-union president” in American history. “I am encouraging unions,” Biden said. “I am sick and tired of trickle-down economics.”
Despite the Biden administration’s push for hardscrabble “Scranton Joe” to appeal to blue-collar demographics, the Democratic party has alienated the working middle class. Instead, the Biden administration routinely favors white-collar professionals and elites over rural and blue-collar workers. If Trump’s ascendance to the presidency in 2016 represented a populist shift in the Republican Party, Biden’s election in 2020 has continued this shift as working-class voters abandon the Democratic Party. Despite Democrats’ claims to be the party of “anti-white supremacy” and “taxing the rich,” their biggest demographic to win elections is affluent, college-educated white people. Findings from the 2020 election reveal the Democratic Party is now “highly concentrated in the high-income suburbs,” a far cry from the working-class coalition they’d like you to believe. The Biden administration casts itself as a savior of the working class, but its own far-left agenda is dooming the Democratic Party to further alienating working-class voters.
Leftist policies indirectly tax the American people and favor foreign imports over the made-in-America businesses. While Biden has reiterated his campaign promise that no one earning less than $400,000 will pay a penny more in taxes, his proposed budget for the fiscal year 2023 would raise taxes across the board. Biden’s budget is likely to allow the 2017 Trump tax cuts to expire, which means the standard deduction would be cut in half. According to research from the Heritage Foundation:
“For a married couple claiming the standard deduction, that means the IRS would consider $12,950 more income to be taxable. Even for taxpayers in the lowest tax bracket—those with less than $19,900 of taxable income—reducing the standard deduction would mean an additional $1,295 in taxes.”
The greatest assault on the working middle class since Biden entered office is extraordinarily high inflation rates. Last summer, the inflation rate hit 9.1 percent and continues at all-time highs. Skyrocketing inflation is an indirect tax on American wallets. Worse still, those making under $75,000 are projected to shoulder 26 percent of the corporate minimum tax thanks to Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act. Though U.S. corporations will directly pay the tax, policy analysts argue working Americans bear the weight of corporate taxes in the form of lower real wages and high consumer costs.
Contrary to Biden’s “tax the rich” rhetoric, the working middle class bears the burden of his leftist agenda, including when it comes to climate hysteria. Recently, Biden applauded former national climate advisor Gina McCarthy for taking “the most aggressive action ever” towards the climate crisis. McCarthy is most notable among leftist elites for her efforts to transition the country away from producing fossil fuels, such as coal. This aggressive climate agenda comes at the cost of American jobs.
Sen. Joe Manchin (Dem., West Virginia), for example, supported Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, yet this spending bill allocated $45 million to the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate coal plants in his state. In fact, this act gives the EPA a loophole around a Supreme Court ruling that struck down excessive EPA regulations. West Virginia is the second-largest producer of coal in the country. Such rampant regulation hurts business: a Department of Energy (DOE) report found the fuels technology sector saw an overall decline of 29,271 jobs in 2021, or a 3.1 percent job loss. Biden has also issued the fewest number of leases for offshore oil and gas drilling since 1945. Addressing the climate crisis is one thing, but these efforts don’t halt drilling or fossil fuel production; instead, they force the U.S. to depend on foreign imports. The American economy suffers as a result, and the working middle class loses jobs.
It is clear the Biden administration’s Woke policies disproportionately harm middle-class working Americans, but what does this mean for the future of American politics? The Republican Party is regaining a stronghold among blue-collar workers. Trump’s populist appeal and historic gains among minority voters continue to represent a political realignment. Working-class Americans have become alienated by the Democratic Party’s embrace of far-left ideology. Gains for Republicans among this demographic prove identity politics – a primary tactic for the left – is not sustainable. The gains Trump made in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections among Black and Hispanic voters have something in common: those who made the switch from Democrat to Republican were commonly non-college educated, working middle-class.
In an article from the American Enterprise Institute, Ramesh Ponnuru writes, “In U.S. politics today, class is more a function of formal education than of income.” According to the New York Times, just 5 percent of voters were college graduates in 1952. Today, 41 percent of voters are. College graduates make up a relatively new voting bloc. They’re more likely to be a part of the upper middle class and ideologically left-of-center. As the NYT puts it, “College graduates attribute racial inequality, crime and poverty to complex structural and systemic problems, while voters without a degree tend to focus on individualist and parochial explanations.”
Pew Research shows Bill Clinton secured 60% of white voters without a college degree throughout his presidency. In 2020, Joe Biden secured just 27% of the same voting bloc. It is interesting to note that higher-earning, upper-middle-class whites (those most likely to hold a college degree) pushed Biden over the edge to defeat Trump in 2020. Last month, the Biden administration doled out checks to this very demographic of those holding student loan debt – another campaign promise that benefits elites at the expense of American taxpayers. The Biden administration is attempting to appeal to the working class by championing unionization and blaming “big business,” yet Biden’s policies demonstrate the far-left agenda does not have working-class interests in mind. The Biden administration simultaneously declares itself as a champion of the working class while exposing its out-of-touch priorities.
Lisa Pruitt speculated in a recent Politico piece that elite progressives mistakenly view the working class as monolithic. Pruitt notes, “It was folks earning $50,000 to $99,000, those who depending on region and family size might be considered settled working class, who preferred Trump by the greatest margin of all income brackets — 50 percent to 46 percent.” Whereas the left has ignored the distinction between those in lower middle-class income brackets and those in the upper brackets, conflating white-collar professionals to blue-collar workers, Republican candidates have tapped into the blue-collar base. These are the Americans who have felt overlooked as the Democratic Party moves further left, at the expense of American livelihoods and the dignity of their work.
Headed into the 2022 midterm elections, the question remains whether Republicans will hold onto the working middle-class as a major voting bloc. Statistically, college graduates are more civically engaged and likelier to turn out the vote. What remains true is that progressive and woke agendas do not align with the interests of blue-collar workers. The U.S. cannot afford to abandon the values of this demographic, and for now, the Republican Party best upholds the conservative principle of man’s dignity in his work.