Why the Working Class Preferred Obama

On November 3rd, 2020, Democratic nominee Joe Biden prevailed over Republican incumbent Donald Trump by a margin of 51.3 to 46.8 percent. Eight years prior, Democrat Barack Obama defeated Republican Mitt Romney by an almost identical 51.1 to 47.2 percent. The 2020 result was widely seen as a repudiation of Trump’s chaotic term in office, while the 2012 result was described as a successful populist campaign against an out-of-touch corporate elite.

Yet despite Biden’s larger 4.5 percent victory, Obama secured 332 electoral votes compared to his Democratic successor’s 306 electoral votes. While it’s technically accurate to describe the discrepancies as an undemocratic feature of the Electoral College, a less flattering reason derives from Democrats’ hemorrhaging of working-class voters. Obama won 51 percent of voters without college degrees, including 40 percent of working-class white voters. In contrast, Biden won 48 and 38 percent of the same groups, with Kamala Harris securing only 45 percent of all non-college voters in 2024.

For progressive populists, the broad trend of the working-class vote is strange given the relative strengths of Biden’s record versus that of his Democratic predecessor. Obama arguably stood by while millions of working-class Americans lost their homes in the 2008 financial crisis, preferring instead to bail out the perpetrators of homeowners’ economic hardship. He also failed to stem the flow of outsourcing in manufacturing, after having campaigned on penalizing firms that ship jobs overseas. Both factors contributed to a significant decline in support after his election in 2008. Biden, conversely, embraced pro-worker paradigms on trade, labor, and industrial policy, leading to an unprecedented, if modest, boom in manufacturing.

Why then did so many working-class voters prefer Obama to the self-described most “progressive president in American history”? The mundane reality is that the former president’s record on issues such as energy policy and immigration appealed to a broad swath of American workers. In contrast, the policies and rhetoric of Biden and Kamala Harris resonated overwhelmingly with college-educated professionals—and alienated many of Obama’s working-class voters.

Speaking at Rice University in 2018, Obama said, “You wouldn’t always know it, but [oil and gas production] went up every year I was president…that whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil and gas producer; that was me, people.” In the eyes of climate fundamentalists, the former president’s words showcased his blatant disregard for climate change and complicity with the omnipresent villains of the fossil fuel industry.

In reality, CO₂ emissions in the U.S. fell year on year from 6.1 billion tonnes in 2007 to 4.9 billion tonnes in 2023. All the more remarkable is the fact that per-person emissions fell from 21.4 to 14.3 tonnes between 2000 and 2023. Hard as it may be for progressives to believe, almost all of these gains are the result of replacing coal with natural gas. The National Bureau of Research, moreover, estimated that the shale boom created around 700,000 blue-collar jobs during Obama’s presidency and led to an almost 50 percent reduction in gas prices across all 50 states. Unsurprisingly, 73 percent of working-class voters view increased oil and gas output as a net benefit to the country.

While Obama could tout gains in reducing emissions and promoting energy abundance, Biden’s record on both fronts was comparatively incoherent. During the latter’s term, the administration oscillated between the demands of affluent climate hawks and struggling Americans. Record oil production—mostly inherited from Biden’s predecessor—was viewed by progressives as a ‘crime against humanity’ despite a global energy crisis. The White House subsequently ceded to activist demands such as shuttering the Keystone XL Pipeline.

In the ensuing spike in gas prices following the pandemic and Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden resorted to using the country’s strategic oil reserves in order to alleviate worker pain at the pump. He then allowed oil drilling on federal lands on a case-by-case basis in order to replenish the depleted stockpile and maintain lower energy prices. Yet instead of actively campaigning on either policy, both Biden and Kamala Harris were predictably cowed by their professional constituents into fixating on the imminent wrath of climate apocalypse.

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Obama’s record on immigration tells a similar story of appealing to working-class voters while alienating upper-class progressives. In a 2009 town hall, he stated the following before a crowd of Orange County immigrants:

This isn’t gonna be a free ride. It's not gonna be some instant amnesty. What's going to happen is you are going to pay a significant fine. You are going to learn English. You are going to go to the back of the line so that you don't get ahead of somebody who was in Mexico City applying legally. But after you've done these things over a certain period of time, you can earn your citizenship so that it's not something that is guaranteed or automatic. You've got to earn it. Now it only works, though, if you do all the pieces.

I think the American people appreciate and believe in immigration, but they can't have a situation where you just have half a million people pouring over the border without any kind of mechanism of control. So we've got to deal with that at the same time as we deal in a humane fashion with folks who have put down roots here, have become our neighbors, have become our friends; they may have children who are US citizens. That's the kind of comprehensive approach that we have to take.

With every word, the former president harkened to Democrats’ longstanding, common-sense commitment to undocumented regularization and strict immigration enforcement—a combination directly attuned to both the values and material interests of workers. Obama shielded almost a million undocumented people who came to the U.S. as children from deportation via the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. His corresponding DAPA program—which was temporarily blocked and later rescinded by Trump—would have made around four million undocumented parents of U.S. citizens eligible for legal status if they paid back taxes, passed a background check, and had been living in the country for at least five years.

The same administration, however, deported a record 3 million people in its first term and 2 million in its second—half of whom were interior deportations from beyond the U.S.-Mexico border. Contrary to popular belief, the first Trump administration was a failure in its own terms with regard to illegal immigration. Even despite the Covid-19 pandemic—which caused net migration to fall near zero in 2020—irregular border crossings under Trump exceeded those of Obama’s second term. Similarly, Trump's first-term deportations totaled just 1.5 million, with a similarly lower proportion of enforcement beyond the border. And unlike Trump’s current term, the Obama administration did not condone violating immigrants’ due process.

Of course, the former president’s actual record on immigration went completely unnoticed within the televised, parallel reality of GOP partisans. In the eyes of mass migration advocates, Trump’s rise during the 2016 Republican primary was and remains proof that Democrats have nothing to gain electorally from curbing illegal immigration. The problem with this analysis is that it underestimates immigration enforcement's importance to workers of all stripes, including minorities, independents, and even working-class Democrats.

In the subsequent general election, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton actively championed the DACA and DAPA programs, which overwhelmingly appealed to college-educated voters. Yet she also went out of her way to rebuke the former president’s deportation policy and promised to only deport migrants that committed crimes. Having abandoned Obama’s winning formula in 2008 and 2012, the result was that working-class independents viewed Clinton as the elite candidate of mass, illegal labor.

Obama’s words cautioning against the flux of millions across the southern border were especially ironic considering that his vice president enabled exactly that during his future term as president. His analogy of ‘cutting the line’ similarly appealed to non-college voters’ sense of fairness as to who should be given priority to enter the country. Under Biden, around three-fourths of the more than 10 million immigrants that settled in the United States lacked legal permanent status—a direct consequence of an overly generous interpretation of asylum law.

For progressive Democrats, the asylum free-for-all was a necessary corrective for the deliberate cruelty of Biden’s predecessor. Yet, for working-class voters—such as Senator Ruben Gallego’s Latino constituents—the policy enabled mass asylum fraud by economic migrants. Among others, Gallego proceeded to successfully lobby Biden into adopting restrictions on soliciting asylum in June of 2024, causing border crossings to plummet by 80 percent. But because progressives slammed the move as ‘fascism,' neither Biden nor Kamala Harris campaigned on taking popular and decisive action at the border on enforcement. Instead, they resorted to vague rhetoric about ‘securing the border,’ a decision that led many swing voters to believe that the flow of illegal crossings remained unchanged.

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None of this is to say, as noted, that Obama’s presidency was especially successful nor that progressives lack reasonable critiques of his legacy. His administration squandered a historic opportunity to rewrite the existing terms of American politics. Like Biden, he failed to increase the minimum wage during his presidency, though he likely benefitted from the final hike of the Fair Wage Act of 2007, which raised the minimum wage to $7.25 in 2009. As the example of Mexico’s Morena has shown, voters are inclined to reward governments that raise painfully low minimum wages—particularly during times of widespread hardship such as recessions and prolonged inflation.

Obama himself augured the Democratic Party’s counterproductive rhetoric of climate catastrophism. His record on identity politics was similarly checkered, with his administration mandating a novel interpretation of Title IX allowing for trans students to compete in women’s sports. He also enabled a wave of corporate consolidation, empowering a host of tech titans hostile to pro-worker politics. Both his and Hillary Clinton’s blasé attitudes towards free trade similarly fueled much of Trump’s support in post-industrial exurbs.

At the same time, Obama’s more worker-oriented policies on both energy and immigration paid inordinate dividends among non-college voters and in the Electoral College. The former president won the disproportionately working-class states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by a margin of five to ten points in 2012 and ten to seventeen points in 2008. In the same states, Biden, Clinton, and Kamala Harris, conversely, came within two to less than half a point of Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024.

The tragic irony is that a policy mix from both the Biden and Obama administrations likely would have benefited their respective governments. Had Obama embraced a more expansive stimulus akin to that of his Democratic successor, it’s quite likely that the impact of the Great Recession would have been significantly mitigated. A robust industrial policy—ideally focused on more than just the energy transition—would have also benefited from a two-term Democratic administration's continuity.

In the same vein, a more coherent mix of policy and rhetoric on energy and immigration would have helped counter voter concerns in 2024 over higher prices and chaos at the US-Mexico border. The sad reality is that many progressive causes, such as raising wages and reining in corporate abuse, are eminently desirable from both a popular and economic perspective. Unfortunately, the Manichean vision that they have long championed with regard to issues such as energy, immigration, crime, and identity politics is arguably more toxic to voters than any of Obama’s greatest failings.

Most Americans believe in climate change and the overall utility of transitioning to clean energy. Relative to credentialed progressives, however, they are much less likely to rate the latter as a top priority and instead view lower prices and energy abundance as more beneficial to American prosperity. Similarly, most Americans agree that migrants who face credible persecution in their home countries should be granted asylum in the United States. They also overwhelmingly support regularizing migrants without criminal records that have spent decades living and working amongst American citizens. They do not, however, believe that limitless immigration is a net good and disproportionately view an oversupply of illegal labor as a detriment to their livelihoods and social services.

Unless Democrats can reconcile the views of their professional constituents with those of non-college workers, they will continue to struggle to make lasting inroads in future elections.

Juan David Rojas is South Florida-based writer specializing in U.S. and Latin American politics. He is a frequent contributor to Compact, UnHerd, and American Affairs.