Analysis by Ronald Brownstein, CNN

 13 minute read 

Published 6:00 AM EST, Tue December 10, 2024

Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Drake Enterprises, an automotive parts manufacturer, on September 27, 2023, in Clinton Township, Michigan. Scott Olson/Getty Images North America/Getty ImagesCNN — 

The Democrats’ last line of defense against Republican inroads among working-class voters is continuing to crumble.

Even labor unions, which have provided Democrats their best vehicle to reach blue-collar voters, could not prevent Donald Trump from making big gains among their members without a college degree in last month’s presidential election.

Trump ran up large margins among White voters without a college degree who belong to labor unions and also significantly improved among unionized non-White workers without advanced education, according to previously unpublished results from the exit polls conducted by Edison Research and the AP VoteCast survey conducted by NORC. Those are the two major data sources measuring voters’ behavior in the election available so far.

While Vice President Kamala Harris ran strongly among union members with a college degree, Trump’s strong showing among the blue-collar components of the labor movement illuminates how high a wall of distrust Democrats face in working class communities at the close of Joe Biden’s presidency.

“Look, the Democratic Party has lost their way to some extent with working class voters,” said Ted Pappageorge, secretary treasurer of the powerful Culinary Workers Union Local 226 in Las Vegas. “When we were (knocking) at the doors … it was pretty clear that Trump was winning the fight about dealing with inflation and kitchen table issues and Democrats essentially were being viewed as the party of abortion.”

The disconnect Democrats faced in 2024 among many union members without advanced education is especially striking because it came after Biden made such a sustained effort to court them. Most observers agree Biden largely delivered on his frequent pledge to govern as “the most pro-union president in American history” with a historic array of policies that promoted organized labor and expanded opportunities for blue-collar union workers, particularly in construction and manufacturing. And yet, “regardless of the facts, Trump was more compelling to working people that he would help them” than Democrats were, said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Labor unions communicate with their members far more intensively – and begin from a position of greater trust with their audience – than Democrats can ever match with the broader electorate. If even organized labor, with all those advantages, cannot arrest the drift toward Trump among workers without a college degree, it underscores the magnitude of the challenge Democrats face in regaining ground with the broader universe of working-class voters who don’t belong to unions.

Harris’ lost ground

Compared to Biden in 2020, Harris lost ground this year among the most broadly defined group of voters with ties to labor unions. The exit poll measures the voting behavior of union households, which includes both the members of labor unions and people who live with them. Among those union households, which comprised about one-fifth of all voters, the exits found Harris beat Trump by only 8 percentage points (53% to 45%), half of Biden’s 16-point advantage in 2020. VoteCast recorded a similar 10-point advantage for Harris over Trump among union households, down from Biden’s 14-point edge four years ago.

VoteCast also separates the results between the actual union members and others in their households. Through that lens, it found Harris very slightly improving on Biden’s 2020 performance among union members (winning 57% of them, compared to Biden’s 56% in 2020) but losing substantial ground among the other residents in union households.

But these overall results obscure the continued impact within union ranks of the educational polarization that has reconfigured the broader electorate, particularly since Trump’s emergence as the GOP’s leader in 2016.

In the exit polls, Harris beat Trump among college-educated White voters in union households by a resounding 67% to 32%; that was up from Biden’s 27-point advantage among such voters in 2020, and more than four times Hillary Clinton’s edge over Trump with them in 2016, according to results provided by CNN’s polling unit.

In almost mirror image, Trump routed Harris by 62% to 36% among White voters without a college degree in union households, a substantial deterioration for Democrats relative to Trump’s 17-point lead with those unionized blue-collar voters in 2020 and a comparable deficit to Trump’s 28-point lead over Hillary Clinton with them in 2016.

According to the exit polls, Harris also won Latinos in union households by just 9 percentage points, way down from a 44-point advantage among them for Biden and 22-point lead for Clinton. Harris carried just under four-in-five Black voters in union households; that was down from 2016, when more than nine-in-ten of them voted for Clinton. (Though the exit polls did not have a large enough sample to report separate results for Black union members in 2020, other results suggest Biden won over 85% of them.)

Harris, the exit poll found, also surrendered substantial ground among male voters in union households, losing them by 9 percentage points after Biden had won them by 10 and Clinton by 3. In sharp contrast, the surveys found Harris won female voters in union households by 28 percentage points, up slightly from Biden in 2020 (24 points) and significantly from Clinton in 2016 (15 points).