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FEBRUARY 9, 2023

Meyerson on TAP

Biden's Trumanesque Strategy

As in 1948, so in 2024-blue-collar workers are the ball game.

In my Wednesday morning piece
<[link removed]>
on President Biden's State of the Union address, I argued that the
prominence that Biden gave to what he called his "blue-collar blueprint"
was something that no Democratic president had done in the past 70
years. "You have to go all the way back to Harry Truman," I wrote, "to
find a Democratic president who made those themes the centerpiece of his
presidency. And against all odds, we should recall, Truman was returned
to office."

That requires some elaboration, so herewith, a look at why the Biden
team is resurrecting the politics of Truman's 1948 campaign-well,
some of those politics-for its 2024 campaign. The point of commonality
is the emphasis on the working-class vote.

Right through the closing days of Truman's 1948 campaign against
Republican Thomas Dewey (and third- and fourth-party candidates Strom
Thurmond of the States' Rights Party and Henry Wallace of the
Progressive Party), Truman was considered the underdog. (Indeed, right
through the first hours of vote-counting on election night, hence the
famous premature

**Chicago Trib** headline "Dewey Defeats Truman.") Truman's own
morning-after analysis of his victory was characteristically succinct:
"Labor did it," he famously remarked.

At the time, unionized workers in the Northeast and Midwest constituted
nearly half of the entire private-sector workforce, and as women had
been largely banished from workplaces when the men came home from World
War II, a 50 percent unionization rate in, say, Michigan probably meant
that 70 percent of state voters had a union member in their household.
While Dewey was visibly the candidate of the old WASP Eastern elite,
Truman, who'd vetoed the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act and pushed
through raises in the minimum wage, was running as the workers'
friend. And as the first beneficiaries of the GI Bill were still
enrolled in college in 1948, workers were overwhelmingly blue-collar.
Analyzing the 1948 vote, public-opinion analyst Samuel Lubell concluded
that the Truman-Dewey vote broke overwhelmingly along class lines.
Outside of the Deep South, whose all-white electorates went for
Thurmond, blue-collar America was solidly Democratic.

Truman's was the last Democratic presidential campaign that focused so
overwhelmingly on blue-collar workers and their families. In the 1950s,
two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson focused on the
growing ranks of professionals (in a withering essay, "Stevenson and the
Intellectuals," critic Irving Howe noted the absence of pro-worker
economic issues from Stevenson's campaign). Before the closing days of
the 1968 campaign, many white blue-collar workers outside the South
preferred third-party segregationist Gov. George Wallace of Alabama to
either the Democrats' Hubert Humphrey or the Republicans' Richard
Nixon. The UAW and other unions had to move heaven and
earth-documenting the low wages and dearth of worker rights in
Wallace's Alabama-to push those workers into Humphrey's column.

Today, like parties of the center-left in Europe, the Democrats have a
base consisting chiefly of professionals, white-collar workers, racial
minorities, and, for reasons as much cultural as economic, women and the
young. The blue-collar share of the workforce is radically smaller now
than it was in Truman's time, or even Reagan's, and, as unions have
been decimated, the Democrats have seen their support within the old
white proletariat drop as low as 30 percent. Clearly, there's no way
they can approach Truman levels of support, and there's no need to.
But to win elections nationally and in key states, they have to do
better than that 30 percent.

Hence, Biden's targeting of that constituency with a comprehensive
economic program, investing heavily in infrastructure and a revitalized
domestic manufacturing and energy sector. Fortunately, none of this
program comes at the expense of the groups already in the Democratic
base; building green factories is both worker- and enviro-friendly.
Unlike Truman, though, Biden has to reconstruct the American economy if
he's to win more blue-collar votes.

Truman didn't need an industrial policy; at the end of World War II,
with the factories of both Europe and Asia in ruins, America was
producing more than half the world's goods. Biden's America, by
contrast, desperately needs an industrial policy, most particularly in
those parts of the nation whose economies have been hollowed out by
decades of corporate flight to the dirt-cheap labor of distant lands.
That has required Biden to break with the Wall Street-backed
neoliberal economics of the past three Democratic presidents, and
that's exactly what Biden has done-most emphatically, in Tuesday's
State of the Union address.

In 1948, blue-collar Americans were the Democrats' base. In 2024,
they'll be the swing voters the Democrats will be wooing most
assiduously and concretely (and not just Biden, but Sens. Brown,
Baldwin, and Tester, all up for re-election). Some things old are new
again.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter <[link removed]>

[link removed]

The Transformation at the Heart of Biden's Middle-Out Economic Agenda
<[link removed]>
The economy is not about money; it's about people. BY NICK HANAUER

The Tenants Who Went to Washington
<[link removed]>
The Homes Guarantee Campaign got the attention of policymakers at the
highest levels. Now these tenant organizers want to get the policy. BY
RAMENDA CYRUS

Electric-Vehicle Charging Swerves Around Speed Bumps
<[link removed]>
Big Oil has its eye on the EV charging infrastructure sector. BY
GABRIELLE GURLEY

Democrats' Debt Ceiling Debacle
<[link removed]>
For some reason the party decided to hand the Republican House majority
a live economic grenade. BY PROSPECT STAFF

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