The findings are undeniable and are already troubling Democrats as they analyze their defeat: the party is falling further behind with the working-class voters it has claimed for decades to represent, experts say. "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them," leftwing Senator Bernie Sanders said in a scorching rebuke a day after the triumph of populist conservative Republican Donald Trump. He added that the hemorrhage of the "white working class," which stunned observers during Trump's first victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, extended in 2024 to "Latino and Black American workers.
" Exit poll data compiled by the Edison Research Center revealed the president-elect won over 56 percent of people without college degrees, compared to 42 percent for Trump's election rival Kamala Harris. That marked a six-point increase for the billionaire compared to 2020. In this large sociological survey, 57 percent of American voters declared themselves "without a college degree," compared to 59 percent in 2020.
Experts noted that Trump, a New York billionaire businessman, had succeeded in convincing a significant portion of the white working class -— along with growing minorities of Hispanic, Black, and Arab voters -— that he better understood their concerns. After four years in power, during which consumer prices surged due to the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia's invasio.
