Michael Podhorzer, an expert in data-driven politics, explains why so many Biden voters failed to turn out for Harris in the 2024 election.
spoke with Michael Podhorzer, former longtime political director for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, to gain more insight into what went so wrong for
Rather than ask what Democrats can do to win back working-class voters, Podhozer says the better question is: “What do working people have to do to get a Democratic Party?” The other related and necessary collective project, he says, is taking on a Supreme Court that has deemed itself Washington’s only “actual functioning legislative body,” and has fundamentally rewritten the rules of our democracy.
Do you have any theories or have you seen any compelling arguments as to why those 20 million people might have stayed at home this year? As I said, for the most part, there weren’t that many voters who had voted for Biden, who had been Democrats, but were now joining the Republican coalition. Pick any group you have heard about “moving right,” say non-college voters. The category, non-college voters, in 2024 is not the same set of individual non-college Americans who cast ballots in 2020. A very disproportionate share of those 2020 non-college Biden voters stayed home.
The biggest thing that’s not part of that conversation, is that, especially beginning after the crash in 2008 and then the Great Recession, the way in which the labor market changed radically meant that everybody who has come into the workforce since then is coming into a future that is more constrained and more precarious than they were expecting.
I’ve had an issue with that media narrative, and you hear it occasionally from Democrats — they’ve sort of flipped and flopped on whether to acknowledge there’s this ongoing cost-of-living crisis, or say theis good. Since the start of the pandemic, the Census Bureau has been collecting data on whether people have difficulty paying their bills, or whether they’re struggling to afford food. And those numbers have all been higher,of the temporary Covid-era expansion of the social safety net.
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