“When Louis Napoleon III vaulted to a throne by perjury and treason, …the sovereign princes and aristocracies of Europe, the great landowners, manufacturers, rentiers and stockjobbers, almost to a man, exulted in his success as their own. ‘The crimes are his’, was their general chuckle, ‘but the fruits are ours. Napoleon reigns in the Tuileries Gardens of Paris; while we reign even more securely and despotically in our domains – in our factories, on the stock market, and in our offices of finance’.”

— Karl Marx, ‘A Historic Parallel’, New York Daily Tribune, 1859

“I will never tire of repeating that demagogues are the worst enemies of the working class. The worst enemies, because they arouse base instincts in the masses, because the unenlightened worker is unable to recognize his enemies in men who represent themselves, and sometimes sincerely so, as his friends. The worst enemies, because in the period of disunity and vacillation,… nothing is easier than to employ demagogic methods to mislead the masses, who can realize their error only later by bitter experience.”

— Vladimir Lenin, ‘What Is To Be Done’, 1903

“Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice,… men like Donald Trump are like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’ by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of dead fish in the environmental ecosystem.”

— Félix Guattari, ‘The Three Ecologies’, 1989

Working Class Hero

“And thank you to the autoworkers of our nation for your inspiring vote of confidence,” President Donald Trump declared at his second inaugural address on January 20th. “We did tremendously with their vote,” he added over polite applause.

Don The Con’s penchant for exaggeration will not pass for breaking news. According to an United Auto Workers poll of their membership conducted last October, in the key swing states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada – the UAW rank-and-file preferred the corporate Democrat, Kamala Harris, over the neofascist Republican by some 22 percentage points. (1) And according to a Fox News analysis of exit poll data, Harris won union members, 57% to Trump’s 41%. (2)

That hardly screams “inspiring vote of confidence,” in contrast to Mr. Trump’s retelling. Yet even a progressive bimonthly magazine, The American Prospect, could earnestly run the November headline: “Donald Trump Won As A Champion Of Working-Class Discontent.” (3)

Although a Democratic pollster wrote the article, similar post-election postmortems of the gormless campaign of Ms. Harris have been bandied by conservative and liberal punditry alike.

We should first ask though, who’s excluded from this commonplace definition of the working class? Undocumented migrants, for one; employed teenagers under the age of 18, for another; and incarcerated laborers and ex-convicts who’ve been legally barred from voting in many jurisdictions. That’s millions of workers who never had the chance to choose their supposed “champion.” And now we learn that federal employees evidently do not count as real American workers either, as the Trump administration’s reckless and vindictive mass layoffs continue apace. Take each category in turn.

Non-citizens, by going estimates, represent at least half of all farmworkers in California and nearly 25% of all construction workers in Texas. (4)(5) So we trust migrants enough to pick our crops, pour concrete, repair roofs, mow lawns, clean houses and babysit our kids, but we do not trust them enough to help decide the leaders whose decisions on immigration policy will profoundly impact the course of their lives. And, needless to say, they labor under the constant threat of hate crimes and deportation. (6)
Those too young to vote will suffer the ecological consequences of a ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’ energy policy for far longer than their elders, but they cannot vote for representatives who consider climate change a serious threat to civilization.
And we just witnessed imprisoned firefighters prevent Los Angeles from being engulfed in flames thanks to warming-exacerbated wildfires, but they can’t participate electorally in the politics of the very city they risked their skins to save. (7)

The question of suffrage rights aside, surely all three groups qualify as working class – as do civil servants, many of whom nobly forgo more lucrative opportunities in the private sector to serve their country. Yet can anyone credibly claim that billionaire Donald Trump represents their interests?

As labor lawyer Matt Bruenig accurately predicted last November, Trump immediately sacked Jennifer Abruzzo, union-friendly general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board, as well as the chairwoman of same, Gwynne Wilcox – the latter of whom a district court judge reinstated this month in a case that’s likely to find its way to the Supreme Court, risking a constitutional crisis. (8) (9) (10)

Add to the ranks of the disenfranchised working class all those who chose not to vote, despite being eligible. In fact, if ‘Did Not Vote’ were a presidential candidate, they would’ve won 265 electors to Trump’s 175, including beating him in the state of Texas by over 2.3 million votes. (11) Of course, that does not mean nonvoters would necessarily have opposed Republicans had they shown up on Election Day. (12) But, adopting an international vantage-point, we should compare our sad state of affairs to recent elections in Uruguay, where voter turnout was 89% and left-of-center President Yamandú Orsi won 52% of voters. By contrast, Trump’s final tally was 49.81% of the popular vote – short of a majority.

Or consider the left-populist President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, who won 61% of her country’s voters. There perhaps one can opine educatedly about the voter preferences of more than half the country; in the United States today, we simply cannot. And that’s before we broach the subject of GOP officials’ actively suppressing the vote and cynically purging the rolls. (13) (14)

So why do even some leftists consider Trump and the MAGA movement in general as working-class torchbearers? Two metrics are widely cited: having a household income under $100,000 and not having a college degree.

It’s true, not completing college typically aligns with blue-collar occupations. And reviewing the exit polls conducted in 10 key states, 62% of voters who did not finish college went for Trump. A hefty fly in the ointment often goes ignored, however: the over 30 million small business owners, most of whom lack a bachelor’s degree. To put on our orthodox Marxist hats for a second, this cohort technically counts as “petty bourgeois,” not as “proletarian.” We may welcome the fact that, over the past four years, “there have been more than 20 million new business applications with an average 441,453 filed each month – a rate over 91% faster than pre-pandemic averages,” according to the Small Business Administration. (15) Indeed, the Covid pause afforded many Americans the chance to quit unsatisfying jobs and pursue their dreams. But we must also acknowledge that a tech start-up founder who aspires to be the next Elon Musk is unlikely to share the same economic anxieties, nor the same ideas about the proper role of government, as a janitor on food assistance protected by hard-won occupational safety laws. “Protections” to a worker are “regulations” to the boss, and Republicans like Trump have always campaigned on slashing regulations/protections.

A 2016 paper published by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce studied America’s divided recovery after the financial crash of 2008. Researchers found that, post-recession, 99% of the 11.6 million newly created jobs went to workers with at least some college education. (16) So perhaps if you inherited a used car dealership from your dad, or some ranchland, or some stocks, you could afford *not* to go to college. And you also might’ve been able to buy a ticket to fly to Washington DC on a Wednesday in January of 2021.

Political scientist Robert Pape’s in-depth demographic breakdown of those who participated in the botched coup at the Capitol documented that, although the J6ers were quickly stereotyped as “a handful of nuts,” as Pape told PBS, after studying the over 1,000 people who have been charged, “what we see is fully half are doctors, lawyers, architects. They are CEOs, executives from Intel.” (17) In “all the years I’ve been profiling terrorists and politically violent individuals,” he confided, “I’ve never had to have a category called ‘business owner.’ In this case, it’s fully half the individuals who stormed the Capitol.” That’s compared to 12% of the general population.

Turning to the other proof of working class support, another pesky factoid I’ve yet to read sufficiently remarked upon is that Harris eked out a majority of those whose total family income is under $30,000 a year. Although this comprises more than 1 in 4 households, it sadly remains just around 10% of the actual electorate. In 2019 dollars, a family of five needed to earn more than $30,170 to even rise above the federal poverty line.

Overall, the working poor, to the extent they voted, still preferred candidates not named Trump. They’re the fast food and coffeehouse employees, the dishwashers, the dry-cleaners, the cashiers and couriers, some of whom we ever-so-fleetingly referred to as “essential workers”. Harris also broke even with those over age 65, mostly retirees. Corollarily, just because you earned a degree doesn’t mean you’re somehow excommunicated from the proles. Computer programmers, nurse anesthesiologists, actuaries, pharmacists, and engineers are workers too, despite their annual salaries averaging over $100,000.

This highlights a fatal flaw in the “over/under $100k”-statistic: it fails to account for wide discrepancies in the cost of living depending on where someone resides. “The national average household income level of $61,937 per year does not have the same meaning in Clay County, Georgia, where households earn an average of $23,315 per year, as it does in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where the average income is $236,250 per year,” political scientists from Northwestern and Boston University wrote back in 2019. (18) They discovered that “support for Trump was strongest among *the locally rich* – that is, white voters with incomes that are high for their area, though not necessarily for the country as a whole.”

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild – whose latest book, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, was written after lengthy conversations with Republicans in the poorest district in Kentucky – revealed that the folks “most enthralled with Donald Trump were not at the very bottom,” but rather “the elite of the left-behind, …(those) who were doing well within a region that was not.” (19) (20) Zooming out internationally, data journalists at the New York Times deduced that “right-wing populism across Western democracies doesn’t necessarily appeal to those with the lowest incomes, but to those who are downwardly mobile.” (21) In other words, they’re old money who are guarding previously-attained wealth and status.

If Trump’s base was really the working class, we’d expect campaign donations to reflect that. Except, 42% of those who donated to Harris contributed less than $200, which was true of only 28% of Trump donors, according to the Open Secrets database. (22) Nearly 70% of his donations qualified as large contributions, compared to 58% of Harris’. Mightn’t that suggest her supporters were more cash-strapped and more likely to be living paycheck-to-paycheck?

The nonprofit coalition Americans For Tax Fairness reported that, as early as May of last year, 50 billionaire families had already spent more than $600 million on the 2024 election. (23) “Over two-thirds of the contributions from America’s biggest billionaire family donors supported Republican candidates and conservative causes,” the group discovered. Are we prepared to claim, like a bizarro Thomas Frank, that it’s the billionaire class who are voting against their own self-interest by backing a known champion of the working class?

Space and decency do not permit me to open the much-debated can of worms as to whether Trump’s white working class support was chiefly motivated by cultural or economic factors, to the extent we can differentiate the two. But the June 2022 edition of the journal Political Geography deserves brief mention. (24) Researchers plunked sentiments among rural Americans into three buckets: a feeling of being underrepresented in decision-making, of having their way of life disrespected, and of receiving less resources. The result: “only the *symbolic* subdimensions of rural consciousness positively and significantly correlate with Trump support, while the *material* sub-dimension either negatively correlates with Trump support or is not statistically significant.” An economically materialist focus should never mean wholly dismissing the importance of group identity. Harris-Walz may have had the only plan on the table among the major parties for reopening rural hospitals, but as journalist Sarah Smarsh, author of the 2018 award-winning autobiography, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, told Jon Stewart, “The Republicans are the ones validating the pain.” (25)

A couple months back, economist Andrew Kliman reminded listeners to the Marxist-Humanist podcast that 20% of the US population lives in rural areas and they represent 21% of the Electoral College vote-share. (26) That clout is disproportionate in the Senate – 27.6% – but Kliman called out the allegedly overwhelming “political power of rural voters” as an “exaggeration,” driven more by stigma than sober analysis. A December article in The Nation, “How America Invented the Red State” by Kentucky journalist Tarence Ray is worth reading in this vein. (27)

So if we cannot blame the working class and we cannot blame rural voters, who can we? “In order to explain the election of Donald J. Trump, some of our friends on the Left are blaming those who voted most heavily against Mr. Trump,” historian Gerald Horne, who teaches at the University of Houston, noted on the Emancipations podcast with Daniel Tutt. (28) “Speaking of the Black community,” Horne relayed, they voted “9-to-1 in the case of Black women, 8-2 in the case of Black men” against him, yet “they’re being blamed for Mr. Trump’s victory because the 70+ million in Trump’s base are so outraged by ‘identity politics’.”

Evidently ‘identity politics’ does not include, as Horne went on to draw parallels, the Israeli lobby’s promotion of genocide in Gaza, which may have repelled younger voters, nor the white Christian nationalism animating a critical mass of MAGA world. And assuming “working class” is an identity worth politicking over, it’s curious that Black and Latino support never seems to fit the bill. The long-running General Social Survey (29) reports that 70% of Latinos consider themselves working class, alongside 54% of Blacks and only 41% of whites. While Black Americans are 12-14% of the population, they’re 28% of home healthcare workers, 40% of public transit workers, and 21% of postal workers.

None of this tedious journey through the weeds in any way exempts the Democratic Party from criticism and condemnation for “abandoning the working class.” (30) Indeed, the reaction of some so-called moderates has been “Good riddance!” In the Washington Post’s opinion pages, CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria wrote an editorial titled, “Biden failed to win the working class. Democrats might want to stop trying.” (31) Pundit Jonathan Chait was more definitive in The Atlantic: “Maybe It Was Never About the Factory Jobs / The theory that populist economic policies can win back the working class for Democrats has been tried, and it has failed.” (32) Yet as director of operations for Teamsters Local 623, Dustin Guastella, and founding editor of Jacobin, Bhaskar Sunkara, wrote in The Guardian shortly after the election, “Only 2.3% of Democratic candidates worked exclusively in blue-collar jobs before entering politics.” (33) Evidently that’s what the Dems consider giving it the old college try.

Long story short, talk of a “class dealignment” from party affiliation is more than appropriate, but headlines purporting a working class *re*alignment, to me, seems premature. (34) The fact remains, there’s no major labor party in this country and, even if Harris had narrowly escaped defeat, we’d be in much the same sorry boat, electorally speaking, as before. As author Ta Nehisi Coates told former MSNBC host Joy Reid, “Kamala losing almost underestimates the disaster.” (35) Appraising the Democratic Party’s track record since the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, Coates said, “You’ve lost affirmative action. You lost a woman’s right to choose. Labor is under siege. You have lost the environment… You lost campaign finance reform. You lost the Supreme Court. You may lose Obamacare, which itself is a conservative compromise. What did you win? What did all this strategizing and all this deep knowledge ultimately win?… You don’t have the tactics, you don’t have the strategy, you don’t have the morals, so what do we have then? It’s not like these people take immoral positions and then win – they don’t. They don’t.”

So the situation is bleak, and unbiased witnesses can agree that the ship of state is currently taking on a lot of water. Just please don’t make the mistake of presuming that the majority of US workers have somehow stamped a mandate on this mess. (36) That’s confusing alienation with assent.

Participatory democracy is not something that occurs once every four years, it’s ongoing. And we cannot abandon Trump’s base, many of whom will be uniquely screwed by tariff wars and the dismantling of public services. Real republicans – whether independently wealthy or forced to earn a living, whether from the hinterlands or the metropoles – always reserve the right to change their minds.

— Kevin Sanchez is a columnist published fortnightly by the San Antonio Current. An earlier version of what’s above first appeared there.

(1) https://uaw.org/uaw-poll-shows-member-support-for-harris-growing-significantly-in-battleground-states-as-unions-member-engagement-program-delivers-results/

(2) https://www.foxnews.com/elections/2024/general-results/voter-analysis

(3) https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-19-donald-trump-champion-working-class-discontent

(4) https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-03-12/california-farm-groups-look-to-stabilize-workforce-amid-crackdown-illegal-immigration

(5) https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/empowering-texas-immigrants-contributions-construction-industry

(6) https://www.motherjones.com/food/2025/03/haiti-migrant-meatpacking-jbs-labor-deportation/

(7) https://www.themarshallproject.org/2025/01/11/los-angeles-palisades-prisoners-firefighters

(8) https://jacobin.com/2024/11/trump-election-nlrb-abruzzo-labor

(9) https://www.epi.org/policywatch/firing-nlrb-general-counsel-jennifer-abruzzo/

(10) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-nlrb-national-labor-relations-board-gwynne-wilcox/

(11) https://www.environmentalvoter.org/updates/2024-was-landslidefor-did-not-vote