Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has the most working-class support of any GOP candidate in 40 years, a new poll shows.
Harry Enten, an analyst and host of CNN‘s Margins of Error podcast, said that Trump is on track for the best Republican performance among union voters in 40 years. According to the forecast, Harris is leading Trump among union voters by just 9 points, which Enten noted would be the “worst Democratic performance in a generation.”
Democrats have slowly been losing support from union voters over the years. President Joe Biden won this group by 19 points in 2020—in comparison, Bill Clinton won by 30 points in 1992.
Enten said Trump is also currently polling ahead of Harris by 31 points among voters who graduated from vocational and trade schools. Harris has lost support among non-college graduates of color, although she is still ahead of Trump by 28 points. Biden won that demographic by 45 points in 2020.
“This is part of a larger trend that we’re seeing throughout our politics,” Enten said on CNN, “in which Republicans, specifically Donald Trump, is doing very, very well among working-class voters.”
“The fact is, Donald Trump seems to have gone into a hotbed of traditional Democratic support and made a lot of movement in ways I don’t think a lot of people would have thought when he went down that escalator just back in 2015,” Enten added.
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In recent years, working-class support has shifted toward Republicans, a change from the historic view of Democrats as the champions of blue-collar workers.
Trump’s 2016 victory was largely attributed to his strong support among working-class voters, and he has continued to shore up this base by framing the Democrats as a party of elites, detached from the struggles of everyday Americans.
Throughout this presidential campaign, Trump has tried to appeal to American workers with pledges to increase domestic manufacturing and industrial employment.
Newsweek reached out to Trump and Harris’ campaigns for comment via email outside of regular working hours.
While Harris is generally doing better than Biden in the polls among various demographics, “Scranton Joe” generally had better standing among the working class.
Earlier this month, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a labor union, said it would not endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, a break from decades of the union backing Democrats.
“President Joe Biden won the support of Teamsters voting in straw polls at local unions between April-July prior to his exit from the race,” the union said in a statement in September. “But in independent electronic and phone polling from July-September, a majority of voting members twice selected Trump for a possible Teamsters endorsement over Harris.”
“The union’s extensive member polling showed no majority support for Vice President Harris and no universal support among the membership for President Trump,” it added.