Senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute Ruy Teixeira said Friday on CNN that Democrats have lost the working class vote because of their “radical” views.
Teixeira argued that Democrats have adopted “almost radical views on race, gender, crime, immigration” and other hot topic issues and over the past 50 years have “said a long goodbye” to working class voters.
“So the result of this is a movement of the working class en masse away from the Democrats,” Teixeira said, arguing that “Republicans are now the party of the working class.”
“They get more working class votes than the Democrats do…There’s a whole identification of the Democratic Party with a group of institutions, activists, foundations, academia, you name it, that all pushed the Democrats in a direction that’s away from the priorities and the culture of working class voters and that now shows in the polls.”
Teixeira then argued Democrats lost the working class vote in part due to their stance on illegal immigration.
“Most Democrats don’t know this anymore, or if they knew it they’ve forgotten it. But Democrats were once a party that stood for controlling immigration. The Jordan Commission in the 80’s basically was-oriented for trying to damp down the level of immigration, having an e-Verify system so employers couldn’t employ illegal immigrants, and there was a sense that high level immigration basically constrict and constrain the low wage labor market and undercut unionization. But that really disappeared in the late 90’s and now in the 21st century we see Democrats identify with not exactly open borders, but pretty porous borders, and a sort of lack of concern as it were with border security.”
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“I just want to show our viewers some data of what voters — how voters went, starting from 1992 to 2020, and the voters we’re talking about here are the ones that you write about, non-college educated white voters. If you look at the data, ’92, Bill Clinton, 39%. It makes your point that it was already a majority for Republicans. It hasn’t changed that much,” host Dana Bash said. “The low mark was in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was running against Donald Trump, and it went up slightly in 2020. So it hasn’t — when you look at the coalition in and around Barack Obama, it hasn’t changed that dramatically since then.”
“One thing to notice about the [Bill] Clinton vote is he actually carried the white working class vote. Because there were so many votes for Perot so he actually carried the … white working class vote in ’92 and ’96 by a point or two. So in a way, one way to think about what’s happened is that heavily working class Perot vote on the presidential level, which was for a third party candidate, moved over time into the Republican camp en masse. And that just is not at the presidential level, but also for a lot of congressional seats and particularly a lot of Senate seats …so that’s a lot about what happened to the democratic coalition between the 90’s and today,” Teixeira said. (RELATED: Donors From The Richest Zip Codes In America Are Throwing Their Support Behind Biden)
“And again, as I’m pointing out, in 2020 and now, we see this movement of the non-white working class away from the Democrats as well. So you do see this coalition shifting. Again, where Republicans are more of a working class party than the Democrats, and that such a change from the historic image and practice of the Democratic Party and politics today.”
Democrats have seen an exodus of working-class voters since 2016, making up their losses through support of college graduates and high-income votes, according to Axios. Republicans have seen an uptick in winning races in working-class congressional districts while Democrats have begun picking up wealthier districts, according to Axios.
President Joe Biden in particular has struggled with key voting blocks, with recent polling indicating black, Hispanic, women and independent voters disapprove of Biden’s performance.