Recent coverage of (white) working class voters in the run up to 2024

Here's a Feb. 21, 2024 New York Times column by Thomas Edsall titled, "Does Biden have to Cede the White Working Class to Trump?"  Here's an excerpt:

“For Victory in 2024, Democrats Must Win Back the Working Class,” Will Marshall, the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute, wrote in October 2023. “Can Democrats Win Back the Working Class?” Jared Abbott and Fred DeVeaux of the Center for Working-Class Politics asked in June 2023; “Democrats Need Biden to Appeal to Working-Class Voters” is how David Byler, the former Washington Post data columnist, put it the same month.

However persuasive they are, these arguments raise a series of questions.

First, is the Democratic attempt to recapture white working-class voters a fool’s errand? Is this constituency irrevocably committed to the Republican Party — deaf to the appeal of a Democratic Party it sees as committed to racial and cultural liberalism?

Edsall includes this interesting quote from Yale's Jacob Hacker and colleagues:

even as Democrats have increasingly relied on affluent, educated voters, the party has embraced a more ambitious economic agenda. The national party has bridged the blue divide not by forswearing redistribution or foregrounding cultural liberalism but by formulating an increasingly bold economic program — albeit one that elides important inequalities within its metro-based multiracial coalition.

I wouldn't mind some clarification of what they mean by "elides important inequalities within its metro-based multiracial coalition."   Does that mean socioeconomic and racial inequalities are elided in metro areas?  And if so, what does that mean for nonmetro residents?  

Edsall doesn't answer that question but does move on to this: 

With Democrats’ strongest base concentrated in cities, the need to remain competitive, Hacker and his co-authors wrote,

has made the Democrats’ growing reliance on prosperous metro areas (i.e., suburbs) both necessary and consequential. The party’s base has long been in cities, but the party has dramatically expanded its reach into less dense suburban areas that are economically integrated with major urban centers.

Interesting, but still no mention of nonmetro areas.  

Frances Lee of Princeton suggested that the strategy described by Hacker could prove problematic: 

To the extent that the nation’s political discourse is driven by highly educated people, there is danger that opinion leaders are falling increasingly out of touch with the rest of the population.

William Galston of Brookings also commented negatively on Hacker's vision of the Democratic Party strategy (in a way that sorta' implies the strategy does omit rural folks, and highlights the growing cross-racial coalition among working-class folks--a coalition moving toward Trump and Republicans): 

The lines between the white working class and the nonwhite working class are eroding. Donald Trump received 41 percent of the non-college Hispanic vote in 2020 and may well do better this time around. If this turns out to be the case, then the old Democratic formula — add minorities to college-educated voters to make a majority — becomes obsolete.

Then comes Edsall's column one week later, titled "The Red-Blue Divide Goes Well Beyond Biden and Trump."  Here's the lede: 

One of the major reasons white non-college voters turned to Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 is the fear of lost white hegemony — that the United States will become a majority-minority nation sometime in the near future.

All I can say is that I would love to see one empirical source cited for this proposition.  Surely there are several, but I'd like to see just one for this bold and very damning proposition.   

Here's another piece, this one from The Liberal Patriot, on the non-white working class "bailing out on the Democrats."  Speaking of Obama's 2012 Presidential victory, Ruy Teixeira writes:  

Obama carried nonwhite working-class (noncollege) voters by a massive 67 points, while losing white college graduates by 7 points. That means Obama did 74 points betteramong the nonwhite working class than among white college graduates.

In the next two presidential elections, that differential steadily narrowed as Democrats did worse among nonwhite working-class voters even as they improved among white college graduates. In 2020, Biden carried the nonwhite working class by 48 points (19 points less than Obama did in 2012) while carrying white college graduates by 9 points (16 points better than Obama). That cut the Democrats’ positive differential between these two groups almost in half, down to 39 points.

Now it’s Biden running for a second term and, astonishingly, that positive differential may have entirely disappeared.