Former President Donald Trump is crushing Vice President Kamala Harris among working-class voters by the same margin with which he led President Joe Biden in June, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.
The poll, conducted September 3-6, 2024, and published on Sunday, shows Trump leading Harris by 17 points, 56 percent to 39 percent, among non-college-educated voters.
In a poll taken in the days before the fateful June 27 debate, which marked Biden’s political demise, Trump had a 54 percent to 37 percent lead over Biden among working-class voters.
Ruy Texiera, a prominent Democrat political scientist who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the politics editor and co-founder of the Liberal Patriot newsletter, pointed out the trend in the Liberal Patriot on Thursday.
He noted that, compared to 2020, Harris is performing significantly worse than Biden was with key sub-demographics of working-class voters, spelling major trouble for Democrats:
More detailed NYT results reveal that Harris, relative to Biden in 2020, is doing 10 points worse among white working-class voters and 18 points worse among nonwhite working-class voters. The latter is despite considerable improvement for Harris among this demographic since Biden dropped out.
There’s no sugarcoating it—this is a serious problem for the Democrats. College-educated America may be delighted with candidate Harris but working-class America clearly is not. And there are a lot more working-class than college-educated Americans. Remember that they will be the overwhelming majority of eligible voters (around two-thirds) and, even allowing for turnout patterns, only slightly less dominant among actual voters (around three-fifths). Moreover, in all seven key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the working-class share of the electorate, both as eligible voters and as projected 2024 voters, will be higher than the national average. [Emphasis added]
The latest Times/Siena College poll showed that Trump had an overall 48 percent to 47 percent edge nationally over Harris among the 1,695 likely voter respondents. The margin is tighter than the four-point deficit Biden faced in June.
When asked about the top issues heading into the home stretch of the election, the economy (22 percent) and immigration (15 percent) were the number one and two responses for working-class voters.
The issues will be significant factors in deciding the election’s outcome, and they are closely related. Breitbart News’s Neil Munro detailed on Tuesday how Biden’s deputies are using immigration to grow America’s low-wage economy.
The poll’s margin of error is ± 2.8 percentage points.
