AP Photo
President Harry S. Truman delivers his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 15, 1948.
In my Wednesday morning piece 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.
