President Joe Biden is struggling specifically with non-white working class voters, polls show, as the White House’s attention to a green energy agenda and far-left social causes as well as its shrugging off rising crime turns them off.
In the 2020 presidential election, Biden swept critical swing states against then-President Trump with the help of non-white working class voters — those without a college degree. He won the group by a 48-point margin.
Today, a recent New York Times/Siena College poll reveals Biden is leading non-white working class voters by just 49 percent compared to Trump’s 33 percent. For comparison, former President Obama won this key group of voters by a 67-point margin in 2012.
The dropoff of support for Biden, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) senior fellow Ruy Teixeira writes, is a result of the Democrats’ embrace of Critical Race Theory (CRT) that proclaims “systemic racism” runs throughout every institution in the United States, soft-on-crime policies, a green energy agenda, and transgenderism that suggests gender is a spectrum with variations.
To come to such conclusions, Teixeira reviewed a massive survey conducted by AEI and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) which found that on these major policy issues, non-white working class voters differed greatly from the Democrat Party’s base of upper middle class, college-educated non-white and white liberals.
On economics and cultural issues, the survey shows Biden and elected Democrats adopting a national agenda driven by college-educated liberals and few others.
In one example, 61 percent of moderate-to-conservative non-white working class voters said racism derives from individual people and not society as a whole. In contrast, 82 percent of white college-educated liberals said racism stems from American society and 78 percent of non-white college-educated liberals said the same.
“That tells you a lot about who influences the Democratic Party today and who does not,” Teixeira writes.
On transgenderism, seven in ten moderate-to-conservative non-white working class voters said sports ought to require athletes to play on teams that match their biological sex. Among non-white and white college-educated liberals, though, allowing athletes to join teams based on their so-called “gender identity” is backed by a 40-point margin.
Likewise, on the vital issue of crime, 63 percent of moderate-to-conservative non-white working class voters said police departments should be fully funded to fight crime. Meanwhile, 69 percent of non-white college-educated liberals said police funding should be moved to social services instead, as did 76 percent of white college-educated liberals.
Perhaps most surprising for Democrats is the unpopularity of the Biden administration’s rapid green energy push that could eliminate millions of American jobs in the oil and gas industry as well as in the auto industry.
Moderate-to-conservative non-white working class voters said by a 50-point margin that they want to see oil, coal, and natural gas, along with renewable energy, used in the American economy.
Conversely, 64 percent of non-white college-educated liberals said they want oil and gas banned entirely and for the United States to rely solely on renewable energy. About 66 percent of white college-educated liberals said the same.
In the last two presidential elections, in 2016 and 2020, research repeatedly found that most likely U.S. voters are populists and nationalists when it comes to the American economy and lean slightly conservative on cultural issues.
“Democrats should think very carefully if they can afford an image and policy commitments that are so unattractive to so many nonwhite working-class voters,” Teixeira writes.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
