<em>The Atlantic</em> Politics Daily: Where Working-Class Voters Stand

It’s Friday, February 7. Tonight’s Democratic debate at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, will begin at 8 p.m. EST.

In the rest of today’s newsletter: Joe Biden’s electability argument fell apart in Iowa. Plus: what the moment of reunion feels like for a military spouse.

*

« TODAY IN POLITICS »

(DANIEL ACKER / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES)

The Biden Base that Ghosted Him

Politicians from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump have placed their support for working class Americans front and center while on the campaign trail.

But in 2020, it’s Joe Biden who’s touted his working-class support as a key part of his case for why he alone was best-positioned to beat Trump. On Monday in Iowa, his theory got put to the test. While the caucus results rolled out in pure chaos, one thing was clear: the voters Biden was counting on went to someone else.

As my colleague Elaine Godfrey, a native Iowan, has reported, the state has more Obama-turned-Trump counties than any other. Biden prevailed in just one of them.

Here’s what one person told her:

“Biden wants to go back to the way it was before [Donald] Trump, but things weren’t working all that well then, either,” Lonnie Herbert, a 50-year-old forklift driver, told me when I asked why he and his neighbors hadn’t supported the former vice president. Sure, Sanders is a bit radical, he added, but America needs “a hard shift.”

“Working class” encompasses far more than the narrow subset of voters that parachuting reporters seek out in proverbial Midwestern diners (apologies for the journalism cliché). And as my colleague Emma Green has pointed out, Trump did win working-class white voters by a large margin—but they didn’t necessarily flock to him for economic reasons:

Besides partisan affiliation, it was cultural anxiety—feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment—that best predicted support for Trump.

The president has had less success with minority working-class voters: Just 7 percent of non-college-educated African Americans voted for him in 2016, for instance. Without a lift in those communities, Trump still faces tough reelection prospects.