They're Blue Collar, and They Like That Biden Is an Average Joe

But his greatest compensating advantage right now is notably durable support from a multiracial coalition of working-class voters who feel a kinship with the former vice president and believe he is the Democrats’ strongest general election prospect.

At fundraisers and on campaign stops, Biden is warning his party against overlooking voters who were once a core Democratic constituency but had found some elements of President Donald Trump’s message compelling in 2016. His campaign believes the Democratic Party risks narrowing its Electoral College path in 2020, and hurting its standing on Capitol Hill, if candidates do not appeal directly to these more moderate voters in battleground states in the Midwest and Sun Belt.

And both explicitly and more subtly, Biden is portraying his chief rival, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and another top candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders, as liberals who are overly focused on expensive and theoretical government overhauls.

“Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood, the last thing I liked is people telling my family and me what we should know, what we should believe,” Biden said as he criticized Warren’s advocacy style, speaking at a recent CNN town hall in Iowa. “As if somehow we weren’t informed, that we — just because we didn’t have money we weren’t knowledgeable. I resent that.”

Warren, who is running as a corruption-battling economic populist, surpassed Biden in a number of polls this fall, and she is often the favorite of white, college-educated voters — but Biden still leads comfortably with high school-educated Democrats in many surveys. That dynamic has stymied Warren’s growth after her early-autumn surge, and it has sometimes benefited Sanders, who also has strong connections to blue-collar voters.

In dozens of interviews, from parades and union rallies to black churches and political picnics, working-class Democrats who support Biden explained their views in practical terms: they know and trust the Scranton native from his long tenure as a Delaware senator and as Barack Obama’s vice president, they find his incremental policy proposals realistic, and they think he can win.

“I liked what him and Barack did together,” said Doris Stuekerjuergen, who worked at a fireplace factory and attended an October event with Biden in this small rural community of West Point. “Hopefully he leads us back to where we were. The world we live in now is pretty scary.”

The Democrat who forges a cross-racial coalition of working-class voters almost always wins the party’s presidential nomination. It is a path that was disrupted only in 2008 when Obama was able to achieve what few of his predecessors had — fuse the support of upscale whites with black Democrats.

But surveys in this race indicate a return to the long-standing tradition in Democratic primaries of voters splitting along class lines, and illuminate a key slice of Biden’s base.

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of Democratic primary voters in general election battleground states found that among white voters without a four-year degree, Biden had double the support — 30% — of Warren and Sanders. But the numbers for Biden and Warren were nearly reversed among white college graduates. In Iowa, where Biden is struggling, he was still the strong favorite of voters who did not go past high school in another recent New York Times/Siena College poll of likely Democratic caucusgoers.

And in South Carolina, where the Democratic electorate is dominated by black voters and where Biden is strong across the board, a Monmouth University poll from late last month showed him receiving the support of 38% of voters without college degrees, well ahead of his rivals.

“He is the only candidate right now that I feel can beat Trump,” said Ivie Barnwell, who stood in the shade selling her handmade sweetgrass baskets in Galivants Ferry, South Carolina. Around her, T-shirt-clad activists and a host of presidential candidates descended on the town for a political festival earlier this fall. “This Trump man has got to go,” she said.

For some voters, Biden appeals because there are strategic assumptions at work: Many black working-class Democrats believe that white America will only support a well-known white male, such as Biden, while a number of working-class white Democrats also believe he is the most acceptable nominee. Some voters cited the misogyny and racism that female candidates and candidates of color have experienced in previous races.

And then there is the crucial fact that many of these voters — whether because of his down-to-earth persona, the tragedies he has endured or a combination of both — simply have warm feelings for the man they often address as Joe when they see him.

“He relates well to blue-collar voters and to non-college voters,” Jeff Link, a veteran Iowa Democratic strategist, said. “Those Scranton roots kind of come through.”

Despite this advantage, some Democrats are skeptical that Biden, who turns 77 Wednesday, can sustain this support.

Since he entered the race in April, Biden’s poll numbers have dipped, he has suffered from a series of self-inflicted errors that raised concerns about his age, and he has absorbed ferocious attacks from Democrats and Republicans alike — including baseless attacks on his family from Trump.

Ty Livesay, operations manager at a mall in Conway, South Carolina, said he connected with Biden — “I’m a common Joe; he’s a common Joe” — but acknowledged having doubts about Biden’s strength in the primary. “Is Joe going to be able to handle it?” he asked.

Others harbor no such reservations.

“I don’t care about his personal opinion, gaffes or comments he makes — what means most to me is what type of man he is,” said Pete Garrett, who works at an auto parts production company and wore an Obama campaign pin to a Biden appearance in Birmingham, Alabama.

For all of his advantages with blue-collar voters in the Democratic primary, Biden so far does not appear to significantly cut into Trump’s base of white working-class voters. And he is not the only Democratic candidate perceived as electable. Early polls, which are parsed by some committed voters but are not predictive at this stage, show several Democrats beating Trump in head-to-head matchups.

Still, Biden’s rivals recognize the advantage he has built up with blue-collar voters and are seeking their own inroads with them.

Even as she has unveiled a lengthy roster of detailed policy plans that thrill college-educated liberals, Warren, for example, also highlights her modest Oklahoma roots, her brothers’ military service and her own time as a teacher.

Sanders also enjoys a blue-collar following, polls show. While the most politically muscular element of the Democratic working class — the labor unions — has largely remained on the sideline, after feeling regret over their early intervention on behalf of Hillary Clinton in 2016, Sanders has recently notched some endorsements. They include the country’s biggest nurses’ union and a teachers’ union in Los Angeles. Sen. Kamala Harris, who is struggling in the polls, was endorsed by the United Farm Workers.

Sanders in particular is sitting on voters Biden could use, especially if Warren continues to make gains with college-educated Democrats — though she increasingly faces competition for those voters from Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana.

One union that does support Biden is the International Association of Fire Fighters. And that union’s president, Harold Schaitberger, said Democrats should be wary of again losing some of the voters who sided with Trump in 2016.

Schaitberger said these voters want to feel “that they are connected with someone who wants to be president of the United States but isn’t, if you will, looking down on them or preaching down to them.”

Asked whether he meant those remarks as a swipe at any of Biden’s opponents, Schaitberger, himself a high-school educated voter, demurred. But he noted that “there are some candidates that, you know, speak in a very high intellectual, professorial” fashion.

Warren is a former Harvard professor.

Biden has also scolded Democrats over their drift from bread-and-butter issues like wages, pensions and union rights.

“I bet some of you voted for Donald Trump because we stopped talking to you,” he said at a campaign stop in Newton, Iowa, over the summer, adding, “We sort of stopped talking to our base: high school-educated Americans.”

Biden’s research has indicated that such voters respond particularly well when reminded of Biden’s middle-class youth as a car dealer’s son and that he had lost his first wife and daughter in a car accident and his elder son to brain cancer. He made his biography central to his initial advertising, linking his support for the Affordable Care Act to his searing family story.

Steve Buchmeier, a 54-year-old farmer from Kellogg, Iowa, has seen Biden’s campaign ads, and he was one of the Obama-Trump voters in attendance at Biden’s campaign stop in Newton.

“The U.S. isn’t ready for a girl,” he said as he reflected on the 2016 election, stressing that his own decisions are not influenced by gender.

This time around, Buchmeier said, he found Biden’s experience as vice president impressive, though he was not committed to switching back to the Democrats in 2020.

But, he said, “this guy is on the top of my list if I do.”

This article originally appeared in

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