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.

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.

Donald Trump, as dark and threatening as his second presidency would be to this country, has never stopped acting like the politician as walking TV show — a reality-based character who is really, in his way, an entire series, because he carries so much drama around with him. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we have to extend the candidate-as-entertainment-character metaphor to the other players in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Yet in the case of the two vice-presidential candidates, Tim Walz and J.D. Vance, one almost can’t help it.

These two, in the campaign thus far, have really been characters: Walz the middle-aged sitcom dad, benign and earnest and well-meaning, willing to look like a goofball, yet with a plainspoken moral center and the ability to deliver a zinger that makes him the show’s secret weapon. As for J.D. Vance, he has been the smooth yuppie backstabber out of a corporate thriller, the climber willing to say anything. Given all that, I went into their debate wondering: Would Walz, likable as he is, come off as tough enough? And would Vance succeed in playing down his out-for-himself unctuousness?

Here’s what I saw, and it was all in the eyes. Vance’s are baby blue and rock-steady, with a Zen relaxation to them; when he looked into the camera, it was with a soothing sincerity. (He’s like Jared Leto’s lawyer brother.) Whereas Tim Walz looked into the camera with a frown, and when he spoke, his eyes had a tendency to pop out in a stare of boiling-kettle anger. That may sound unfair. This was the vice-presidential debate, not a men’s-magazine cover-model contest. But I focus on the eyes because they expressed so much of what the two candidates did — and didn’t — bring to their game.

Walz won on policy points: not just on having the better policies, but on having so many more of them. Kamala Harris has come in for major criticism for the lack of detail in her own presentation, and Walz, at times, almost seemed to be trying to make up for that. He was the Midwestern governor as proud wonk, full of numbers and stats, talking about what this bill did for people, and what that bill would do if we could only find a way to pass it. There’s so much florid unreality to Donald Trump’s campaign that hearing Tim Walz’s finely tilled plans for how to fight climate change, the housing crisis, or the health-care crisis always made you feel like he was on solid ground.

Yet his answers, in tone, did not inspire the kind of serene unquestioning confidence you want to feel about a candidate. Walz was working so hard to pack in the content of his programs that he seemed agitated, a bit flustered, too excited in a dyspeptic way, always talking so quickly that though you saw he was trying to be a straight-shooter about how politics works, it frequently came off as if he was scrambling to sell his points. In his way, he did a version of what the Democrats have done for 40 years: highlighting their moral commitment along with their bureaucratic expertise, a combination that’s sometimes convincing and always admirable but rarely…inspiring. It’s a pitch for leadership that’s short on poetry.

Okay, you say, but who needs poetry? Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are fighting to save America. Yes they are, and I believe they’re the ones to do it. But the way you save America is by winning the election. And on that score, J.D. Vance gave an astonishingly impressive performance that was all wrapped up in the aura of a winner. With those piercing eyes and that perfectly coiffed hair, his FM-DJ-meets-Fox-News voice, and his absolute refusal to get riled about anything, even if it was one of his pet ideologies (like the evils of immigration), he worked the debate stage with remarkable panache. He had confidence; he had calm; he had a Mona Lisa smile that allowed him to stay above the fray. And, to my surprise, he had a touch of what Ronald Reagan did — the ability to make all his statements sound like a form of assurance. That was true even when he was selling pure malarkey.   

He argued that Donald Trump…was the savior of the Affordable Care Act! That the scuttling of the Iran nuclear deal was somehow not Trump’s doing, and that the Republican policy on women’s reproductive rights is all about generous, open-minded ideas of helping people find progressive ways to create families. He dodged questions he didn’t like by going off on tangents he never returned from. And he kept dipping into two grand canards that he inflated to the level of mythology. The first was that Kamala Harris is to blame for everything under the sun you don’t like. Vance was like a broken record excoriating Harris for things she had little to no power over as vice-president.  

But his other epic lie, and this was the insidious one, was to simply wipe away reality and treat Donald Trump’s presidency as if it were a lost utopia of rising wages and world peace and low inflation and — what about those corporate tax cuts? Oh yes! — trickle-down prosperity. Sound familiar? It’s not just that Vance lied. It’s that he presented a kind of shining-city-on-a-hill mythology that he, for one, believed in like a religion. So won’t you?

This is the magic trick that Reagan brought into politics: enunciate a fairy tale with enough belief, and the voters will follow. But it’s one that the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, were able to take a page from. And Tim Walz could have used some of that poetry. He told his own personal story, but he needed to talk, much more than he did, about the larger vision of what the Democrats believe in.

Right out of the gate, answering the very first question about Iran’s ballistic-missile attack on Israel today, Walz was full of alarm about the things Trump would do in response, but he didn’t enunciate the idea that he and Kamala Harris would keep the world safe. For a long time, before James Carville ever uttered his immortal fortune-cookie secret of all presidential-campaign wisdom, “It’s the economy, stupid,” it was an unquestioned truth in America that the #1 priority for people voting for president was the issue of national security. The Democrats have long had to battle the idea that they’re not just “soft on crime” but soft global warriors who would make citizens feel, in their reptile brains and guts, less secure.

In this election, even though everyone is saying that they care most about the economy ($9 cartons of milk will do that to you), I think the national security issue looms large. Trump not only threatens to hand over Ukraine in a gift basket to Vladimir Putin. He has been talking, in his rallies, about the looming possibility of World War III — a prospect he says will be brought about by the Democrats, but the fact that he’s the one who keeps talking about it is more than a bit unsettling. Yet it was J.D. Vance who kept stroking the debate audience with a warm tone of paternal assurance. Tim Walz was the one who looked anxious.

For those of us who believe that a second Trump presidency has the potential to be catastrophic, the wave of “joy” that took place after Kamala Harris’s ascendance expressed several things at once. First and foremost, there was a cathartic relief that Joe Biden had been successfully pushed aside. There was the palpable feeling that Harris, as a candidate, had unified the party by coming off as a stronger and savvier leader than many had predicted. But the other aspect of the joy, let’s just admit it, is that we thought, once again, that we had this in the bag. (It’s what I think of as that night-the- “Access-Hollywood”-tape-broke feeling. The feeling we relive each time Trump levels up in his transgressions and we go, “Now he’s really finished!”) And of course, once again, how wrong we were.

I’m not saying that Harris will lose. But what’s become inescapable in the last few weeks is that she could lose — by a cat’s whisker of swing voters in rural Pennsylvania. And the second you voice that thought out loud (Kamala Harris. Could. Seriously. Lose.), what you’ve really said is: The country remains divided, Trump still wins over millions who should know better, and the whole fantasy of a blue wave — the fantasy that America at large will now return to its senses — is likely just that: a fantasy.

All of which raised the stakes on tonight’s debate. The reality of vice-presidential debates, though we spend one night every four years pretending that they matter, is that just about all of them do not. (Remember Lloyd Bentsen’s famous quip to Dan Quayle in 1988? The mother of all master-snark debate put-downs? “Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” It didn’t make a dime’s worth of difference.) But with the 2024 presidential contest now such a dead heat, where almost anything could tip the scales, every little bit counts. So this debate was an evening of political theater that could make the tiny bit of difference that could make…the difference.

If you read a transcript of the debate, or simply listened to it with your head, you might say that Tim Walz eked out a win. The policies he presented are sane and progressive; the aura he presented was humane and compassionate, to the point that he seemed all too eager to find common ground with Vance, a favor that Vance began to return (because I think he realized it was playing well for him). But Vance himself, behind that faux-saintly beard, proved tonight to be a slithery matinee idol of a politician who is rooted in genuine reactionary ideas (the hostility to immigrants, the idea that Trump didn’t try to steal the 2020 election), but whose ideology on the debate stage might come down to, “If it feels good, say it.” Because when you do, it makes the voters feel good too. And that’s a scary thought.

On the night of May 20, I stood in my tuxedo inside the storied Auditorium Louis Lumière at Cannes and listened as more than 2,000 people in black tie gave an eight-minute standing ovation for the film I wrote: The Apprentice. The movie is a Frankenstein origin story about Donald Trump, played by Marvel star Sebastian Stan in heavy prosthetics and a golden toupee. It follows Trump as he rises in Manhattan real estate during the gritty 1970s and gaudy ’80s under the tutelage of right-wing lawyer turned fixer Roy Cohn, played with dead-eyed menace by Succession’s Jeremy Strong. The biggest controversy centered on a scene—spoiler alert—that depicted Trump sexually assaulting his first wife, Ivana. (There were audible gasps in the room when it played.) Other scenes showed Trump getting liposuction, undergoing scalp reduction surgery, and popping amphetamine diet pills—details reported in Harry Hurt III’s 1993 Trump biography, Lost Tycoon. (Trump denied the claims at the time.)

The premiere generated headlines worldwide. But during the after-party with views of oligarch-owned yachts anchored in the harbor, I began getting news alerts on my phone: Trump announced he planned to sue to block the movie’s release. “We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said. He called the movie “malicious defamation,” “election interference by Hollywood elites,” and said it belonged “in a dumpster fire.” I felt a pit in my stomach as I scrolled the headlines. But I also felt strangely validated. Life was imitating art. Trump’s legal threat followed the first rule Cohn elucidates in the movie: Attack, attack, attack.

Two days later, Trump’s lawyers sent the film’s director Ali Abbasi and me cease-and-desist letters. The legal document sounded like an outtake from an unhinged Trump rally speech: “I demand that you immediately cease and desist distribution and marketing in the United States of the foreign-funded and directed hit piece masquerading as a movie.” It warned Hollywood companies against distributing the movie domestically: “Any person in the United States providing services, including marketing services, publicity, legal services, and public distribution of the movie, must be mindful of the restrictions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”

I hoped the controversy would translate into a deal. Studios and streamers normally compete fiercely to acquire the buzziest titles at Cannes. Two days after our premiere, Netflix reportedly paid approximately $12 million to acquire Emilia Pérez, the genre-bending transgender drug-cartel musical that won the festival’s Jury Prize.

But the specter of Trump’s lawsuit had a chilling effect on would-be buyers. By the time I flew home a week later, no Hollywood company had made an offer to release the movie in the United States.

In the spring of 2017, millions of Americans were processing the upside-down reality that Trump occupied the White House. Some turned to therapy. Others booze. I coped by writing a screenplay. I had been thinking and writing about Trump for 15 years. My first journalism job was reporting on Manhattan real estate for the weekly New York Observer. So you can imagine my shock years later when I found myself covering Trump’s first presidential campaign for New York magazine. Longtime Trump associates like Roger Stone told me Trump was winning because he followed his mentor Cohn’s three rules: Attack, attack, attack. Deny everything, admit nothing. And always claim victory. The insight sparked the idea to write a fictional film about Cohn molding his apprentice into the orange-tanned demagogue he is today.

I discovered their relationship had the elements of a Shakespearean drama. Desperate to outshine his provincial father, Trump sold his soul to Cohn in order to learn Cohn’s dark arts. Cohn’s mentorship fueled Trump’s rise to the pinnacle of New York society. But instead of showing gratitude, Trump virtually abandoned Cohn while Cohn was dying from AIDS in the mid-1980s. (The closeted, self-hating lawyer insisted to the end he had liver cancer.) I felt chills when I read a dying Cohn’s quote about Trump. “I can’t believe he’s doing this to me. Donald pisses ice water,” Cohn reportedly said. Cohn was widely regarded as one of the worst people of the 20th century. If Trump could hurt Cohn, what did that say about Trump?