Vice President Kamala Harris was defeated across several demographics in her loss to President-elect Donald Trump, and part of Harris’s undoing may have been losing ground with working-class voters.
Harris made some moves that were overtures to Wall Street as she attempted to form a wide coalition to defeat Trump, but instead she lost ground with most groups including rural working-class voters.
Friendly points toward Wall Street
While Harris was pushing action against alleged corporate price gouging and claimed Trump was seeking to make tax cuts which only benefited wealthy voters, she did make some points to appeal to Wall Street.
A report from the New York Times stated that while Harris had largely focused her campaign on appealing to small businesses, she also made some concessions to make herself more business-friendly than President Joe Biden.
“If you earn a million dollars a year or more, the tax rate on your long-term capital gains will be 28% under my plan,” Harris said at a campaign rally in September, endorsing a smaller rate hike than Biden had.
The New York Times had also reported that Harris had some of her economic proposals subtly shaped by Wall Street after some of her advisers had met with financiers in New York City. There was also some belief that Harris may have been more skeptical of Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, who has sought to regulate corporate America aggressively, because of the people the vice president had surrounded herself with during the campaign.
Working class continued shift away from Harris and Democrats
Trump’s three runs for president have been dominated by the president-elect shattering the Democrats’ long-standing hold on the working class and union members. While Harris worked on some overtures to Wall Street, Democrats continued the slide with working-class voters.
Biden was able to stop some of the bleeding in 2020, thanks to his working-class ties and focus on unions as part of his “Scranton Joe” brand, but Harris was unable to match that appeal.
The vice president campaigned in union-heavy parts of the key swing states and touted her union endorsements, with UAW President Shawn Fain being a frequent speaker at her rallies in those areas.
Despite the union push, there were red flags before the election that those voters were still shifting away from Democrats. The Teamsters Union was one of several labor unions that did not endorse in the presidential race, in a blow to Harris and Democrats. Harris still won union households 53%-45%, according to an NBC News exit poll, but the longtime Democratic stronghold is still shifting right.
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Trump won white voters with no college degree by 34%, a slight decrease from his figures in 2016 and 2020, while with voters of color with no college degree, Harris only won the group by 30%, down from Democrats’ 56% advantage in 2016, according to CNN exit polls.
Harris also fell further with rural voters than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did in 2016 or Biden did in 2020. Trump won rural voters by 30%, while she only won urban voters by 21%.
