Workers' votes in November: 'Won't get fooled again'?

Will some workers again vote against their own interests in November or – as The Who sang in 1971 – “won’t get fooled again”?

Union households didn’t overwhelmingly support Donald Trump in 2016 or 2020 (or this year). However, a surprising percentage of homes where union members live did: 43% in 2016 (to Hillary Clinton’s 51%), according to Roper; 40% in 2020 (to Joe Biden’s 56%, also according to Roper); and now, 47% for Trump/Vance (to 49% for Harris/Walz), according to a September poll from Emerson College.

There was a reason Trump was attractive to a sizable number of working-class voters, according to researcher Jared Abbott from the Center for Working-Class Politics. Last month he released his analysis of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, collecting all available statements and speeches until election day, and he found that though Trump tried to link immigrants to job shortages, he had no proof so that didn’t really resonate. However, he had a knack for reaching some understandably disaffected workers. That resulted in getting some working people to deny their own economic interests – to vote against their futures.

In his 2016 campaign, Trump spoke about jobs and trade much more than immigration, Abbott says, adding, “Trump used pro-worker rhetoric nearly three times as often — and anti–economic elite rhetoric more than twice as often — as he brought up controversial social issues.”

Abbott adds that while there is little doubt that cynical, fear-based appeals to the worst impulses of working-class whites are an important part of the story, “if we look at the content of Trump’s appeals to working-class voters, we see that a narrow focus on the darkest aspects of Trump’s rhetoric belies consistent and often quite powerful appeals that tap directly into decades of economic dislocation experienced by millions of American workers.”

Throughout Trump’s 2016 campaign, he:

* bemoaned a stagnant standard of living he pledged to turn around;

* claimed to identify with working people from his years as a developer contracting with workers in the building trades; and

* railed against trade deals such as the North America Free Trace Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization, and blasted an “elite” preventing the nation from returning to some idyllic and unspecified past.

“These remarks could just as easily have come from Bernie Sanders or [the late] AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka and are consistent with legitimate research on the negative impacts of trade policies on American manufacturing jobs in the 1990s and 2000s,” Abbott says.

“Taken together, these appeals make it pretty clear why so many disaffected working- and middle-class voters — who either experienced these economic crises directly or, in the case of many comparatively more affluent Trump voters, saw it all playing out in their communities — would find Trump appealing,” Abbott says. “Unlike virtually any politician they had ever heard before, Trump not only spoke over and over again to the economic pain felt by so many working-class Americans but also called out the elite culprits by name, something that traditional politicians typically shy away from.”

Taking advantage of resentment about years of exploitation by the rich and powerful has been smart.

Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich said Trump “became president by exploiting the anger of millions of white working-class Americans who for decades have been economically and culturally bullied by corporate executives, Wall Street, and upper middle-class urban professionals.”

Of course, even in politics, talk is cheap, and Trump’s own actions showed he was playing us. After taking office in 2017, Trump stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union corporate/management attorneys; failed to revive the U.S. manufacturing base, as promised; threatened to veto the Protecting the Right to Organize bill (the PRO Act) updating labor law (which the House passed); and engineered massive tax cuts that added $1.9 trillion to the national debt and overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy – the highest-income U.S. households received almost half of its benefits, according to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

“Trump and his lackeys work for the oligarchs – cutting their taxes, rolling back regulations that protect the public but that cost the oligarchs, and dividing the rest of us into warring factions so we don’t look upward to see where most power and wealth have gone,” Reich said.

That’s become more obvious in recent months.

Rolling Stone magazine reporters Catherina Gioino, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng summed up July’s Republican National Convention as an attempt to court “the working class with hollow, populist rhetoric.”

And David Graham in The Atlantic magazine described Trump’s working-class appeals as the “fakest populism you ever saw.”

Trump’s ability to use his taste of populism and his celebrity hasn’t just affected a chunk of working Americans, of course. Some seniors liked making America “great” like they remembered from times past (perhaps forgetting the Great Depression, World War II and Jim Crow segregation). And today, 53% of men younger than 30 plan to vote for Trump, according to a New York Times/Sienna College poll (possibly lured by his bullying machismo exemplified by supporters such as Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan, speculation that rings true given that 67% of women under age 30 favor Harris).

But many likely voters have tired of Trump’s schtick, however  weird, fascinating or even funny it can be. USA Today humor columnist Rex Huppke last month got serious, describing Trump as “a former one-term President who tried to overturn a free and fair election, and has since become a convicted felon, a fear-mongering nonsense sprinkler who will gladly badmouth his own country if it helps him win.”