Rebecca Droke/AP Photo
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks with patrons during a campaign visit to Penzeys Spices, September 7, 2024, in Pittsburgh.
Perhaps the clearest differences—improvements, really—between Kamala Harris’s economic proposals and the much maligned Bidenomics are those where she’s taken Biden’s policies further. Had Biden been able to get his Build Back Better proposals through Congress, these might not really be differences at all. That said, the keystone of Harris’s economic policies is material aid to families with children: providing $6,000 to families during the first year of their child’s life, and creating a universal program of affordable child care to help families meet the rising costs of this necessity.
But one element of the Democrats’ weakening appeal to working-class Americans, most particularly working-class men, is that many of them simply can’t afford to form families. As numerous studies from all points on the ideological spectrum have shown, the rate of working-class marriages has declined far more than the rate of middle- and upper-class marriages. To cite one such study, from Pew Research last year, in 2021 the share of 40-year-olds who’d never married ranged from 18 percent among college graduates to 26 percent among those who’d attended some college classes but never graduated to 33 percent among those with just high school diplomas or less. The rate of 40-year-old men who’d never married (28 percent) was significantly higher than the rate of women who’d never married (22 percent). Of course, there are many millions of Americans living with a partner who aren’t married, but the class and gender differences seen in marriage rates persist within those unmarried partnerships as well.
As early as the 1980s, sociologist William Julius Wilson attributed the declining rate of marriage among Blacks to the disappearance of family-wage (or even adequate individual-wage) jobs available to Black men, as the number of unionized jobs in manufacturing began its long-running decline. Subsequent studies by MIT economist David Autor and his colleagues documented that the disappearance of such jobs led to declining marriage rates across all races of working-class Americans.
All of which is to say that the absolutely necessary and long-overdue family policies that Harris is campaigning on can’t be expected to have much impact on young working-class men employed in a private sector where the rate of unionization is a bare 6 percent, where gig employment is a frequent necessity (as a second or even first job) just to get by, and where the absence of job stability or an adequate income or both doesn’t make them prime marriageable material. If these young men are out of reach to Democratic candidates, it’s not because most of them are anti-abortion or homophobes; polling shows that’s not the case. Some of them do fall prey to xenophobic or homophobic demagogues, but at the same time, most Democrats simply don’t have a compelling message to which they can relate.
The New Deal did have such a message: job creation by the millions, chiefly involving manual labor, through such government employment programs as the Works Progress Administration. At the time, of course, unemployment topped 20 percent, which made such programs politically possible (indeed, politically popular). No such conditions exist at that scale today, but that shouldn’t deter Democrats from reaching out to a class and generation of young men for whom adequately remunerative employment is excruciatingly hard to find. Were Harris to call for the construction of not just three million new homes over the next four years, but, say, ten million new homes, creating a government agency that funnels workers into the building trades’ and community colleges’ apprenticeship programs (whose expansion the government would fund), and then into the building trades unions themselves, while continuing in her commitment to provide $25,000 for first-time homebuyers and tax credits for developers of those homes, that would likely be a message to which lots of working-class young men could relate. It would also be damned good policy.
In an ideal world, Harris’s emphasis on family policy would not be “gendered”; but in the world we live in, and the world that will go to the polls in November, such policies are likely to win more female than male votes. If she wants to close the gender gap that has widened considerably among voters under 30, the correspondingly “gendered” policy of creating millions of unionized or at least decently paying construction jobs might just reduce that gap to the point that she could win the election. It’s late in the game to be trotting that out, of course, but not too late for Harris to start pushing it—and certainly not too late for Democrats to focus on this for at least the rest of the decade.
