President-elect Donald Trump’s win last week in Pennsylvania was always right in front of you if you were objectively listening to the concerns of the people and the data showing the most important, misread trend of all: The Republican Party had now become the party of work.
In interview after interview, waitresses, welders, rank-and-file union members, plumbers, HVAC small-business owners, hairdressers, and barbers would tell national news reporters, including me, that they were voting for Trump.
No matter how often these voters said this, it often was dismissed as an outlier. Or it was placed in a silo of race, meaning it was only the white working class. The blindness among reporters and Democrats was they thought it was only white middle-class voters behaving that way, missing that working-class voters of all races were voting shoulder to shoulder.
Why? Because these voters are culturally connected to each other through their communities where they live together, their children attend schools together, and they work side by side. Plus, they share other cultural touchstones, such as church attendance, elevated concerns about crime in their neighborhoods, and the economic stress that affects them all.
Middle-class Latino, black, and white voters voted together as a continuum of the working-class realignment in this state that catapulted Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris. This was a direct result of Democrats shedding voters from formerly guaranteed Democratic Party constituencies.
The election cycle of 2020 should always be thought of as a fluke in a pattern in this state for a number of reasons. First, Trump’s rival, Biden, had spent decades here parading himself as the “third senator from Pennsylvania,” showing up for Labor Day parades and getting local Democrats elected. Second, Trump’s greatest strength is as a fighter, and COVID was impossible to fight against. Biden picked off just enough (80,000) working-class voters and won.