This post was published on Friday, 21 June, two days before President Biden renounced his candidacy for reelection.
The current high level of partisanship in the media, even the business press, has made it difficult at best to find objective analysis that favors neither party. For example, former President Donald Trump’s announcement of J.D. Vance as his running mate was generally met with a certain dismissiveness. The Economist’s midweek newsletter read: “Mr Vance will not swing many votes. A 39-year-old articulate anti-globalist, anti-big business, anti-immigration, pro-worker, MAGA enthusiast, he does little to broaden Mr Trump’s electoral appeal.” SIG’s analytical view is that Vance will indeed broaden Trump’s appeal to working-class, lower-middle-class, and non-white voters. Trump has been steadily taking these formerly core Democratic constituencies into his column since the 2016 campaign. And in a number of states they could very well make the difference between a Trump presidency and a Biden (or Harris) one.
Trump’s remarks at the convention Thursday night included an appeal to “every citizen, whether you are young or old, man or woman, Democrat, Republican, or independent, Black or White, Asian or Hispanic,” and in the previous days convention-goers had heard from a Muslim woman offering a prayer in Arabic, a black pastor, and a variety of non-white lawmakers and officials. The Republicans’ big-tent approach began in the campaign of the younger George Bush but Trump has steadily extended it. He did better in 2016 with nonwhite voters than Mitt Romney had four years before, and somewhat worse with white voters as a whole. Trump also could not have won without taking some Obama voters away from Hillary Clinton. Trump did noticeably well with working-class and less-educated voters. Those two groups, of course, contain a great many non-white voters. Given the national white majority and the realities of racial discrimination, working-class politics and non-white politics have often been treated as highly distinct and even antagonistic. Trump seemed to be following a different path.
Biden and the Democrats, meanwhile, were losing their once solid hold on the non-white vote. In 2012, Barack Obama carried the non-white working class (non-college-educated) by 67 points over Romney. In 2020, running against Trump, Biden carried the same demographic by just 48 points. By February 2024, one reputable poll was finding that Biden’s margin had slipped to 6 points: 47 percent to 41 for Trump. The same poll found that white and non-white voters without college degrees were converging in their views on the respective qualities of Biden and Trump and on the state of the economy. Indeed, non-white voters in this category were slightly less likely than their white counterparts to feel that Biden’s policies had benefitted them.
The Democratic party has long prioritized the non-white vote as such. What seems to be happening is not that Biden and the Democrats are losing non-white voters so much as losing working class-voters, among whom non-whites are disproportionately represented. (A 2024 poll found that 55 percent of non-whites identified themselves as in the lower or working classes, compared to 36 percent of non-Hispanic whites. The white-non-white ratio in the US is roughly 60-40.) At the same time, Democrats’ association with prioritizing the non-white, and particularly the black, vote might also have led some less-educated whites to back Trump. Both lines point in the same direction.
Trump’s working-class support is a principal reason why he is doing well against Biden in polls. In Virginia, for example, Biden has gone from a 10-point margin in 2020 to 3 points in recent polls, and possibly less. Trump, meanwhile has seen his margin of the Virginia working-class vote grow from 6 points in 2020 to 24. In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, Trump’s lead among likely working-class voters has doubled over the same period. Nationally, Trump carried the working-class vote by 4 points in 2020 and now is polling at a 17-point margin or above.
Trump and Republican officials know all this, and the party platform, which Trump had a decisive hand in shaping, reflected it. The platform was noticeably less strong than in the past on fiscal rectitude, more supportive of Social Security and Medicare, more emphatic about creating jobs (particularly in manufacturing) and less emphatic about abortion. These new positions are all in line with data about working-class policy preferences.
This waxing working-class and non-white Republican constituency is the large target at which J.D. Vance is aimed. His convention speech on Wednesday was preceded by an introduction from his nonwhite, Hindu wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, a child of immigrants, who went on to take a seat next to Trump. Vance then gave a speech squarely focused on promoting Trump and the party as ardent defenders of the American working class against their enemies foreign and domestic. His biography enabled him to do this with a believable passion that Trump has not been able to reach. But more than that, Vance brought to bear the skills of a correspondent and public-affairs specialist (his position in the Marines), an undergraduate student of political science and philosophy, and a successful author (Hillbilly Elegy). (Usha Vance studied history as an undergraduate at Yale then went on to get a history MPhil from Cambridge as a Gates scholar.) Vance was able to position his working-class story within a 250-year narrative of patriotic struggle. He referred repeatedly to his family’s graves on a hillside in Kentucky, generations of poor ancestors whom he expected to join, and whom he expected his family — the Vances have two sons, Ewan and Vivek, and a daughter, Mirabel — to one day join as well.
Vance brings a distinctive and potentially quite powerful kind of patriotic narrative in support of the years-long trend of growing working-class and non-white support for Trump and his party. That trend in turn is likely to be decisive in this year’s contest. Among the many implications for investors are the solidification of industrial policy and protectionism in the world’s most important economy, government prioritization of onshoring and the preservation of the existing social safety net.