I live just outside the Rust Belt city of Syracuse, New York. And for the last two years, it’s been hard to avoid the topic on everybody’s mind: Micron. As part of Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act, $6.14bn in federal support has lured the chip manufacturer to the northern suburb of Clay. Barring repeal of one of President Biden’s main legislative achievements, Micron plans to invest $100bn to build four chip plants and create 9,000 direct jobs for our struggling city. But very few thought to thank Joe Biden for it, or the Democrats. As for the election results, in Syracuse’s Onondaga County, Kamala Harris received about 14,000 fewer votes than Biden in 2020 – a decline of 10 per cent. Many of the districts around Micron’s destination of Clay went to Trump.
Why this lack of gratitude from the American working class? The Biden administration made a commitment to revive manufacturing in order to return disaffected working-class voters to the Democratic fold. But they puzzlingly made very little effort to brand such investments as part of a political project to improve those people’s lives. As the left in America and the world still reels from this result, they should examine why their successes as well as their failures have been spurned by the working class.
Part of the problem was the Biden administration’s approach to policy itself. Topics that rarely comes up in relation to the Micron project are Joe Biden, Bidenomics or the Democratic Party’s turn towards “industrial policy”. I would guess most voters in the wider Syracuse area have little idea that this investment is linked to the government legislation. By centring the private sector, they made the government’s role invisible. Likewise, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) used tax credits to attract high levels of mostly private investment, but those investments come under the names of firms like Ford and First Solar. Is it any surprise polls show most Americans have never heard of the legislation?
Many committed administration officials excel at the technocratic politics of policy design and impressively got legislation passed with a razor thin Senate majority via budget reconciliation. But elegant policy design is no substitute for making sure voters understand your politics. I get the sense Democratic leaders find such branding propagandistic and crude. The Republicans have no such self-doubt. At a Harris campaign rally Barack Obama ridiculed Donald Trump for putting his name on stimulus checks, but voters remembered this when they cast their vote for Trump.
The American left used to be shrewder. The New Deal centered public investment and directly linked Franklin D Roosevelt’s image with visible logos for the new government agencies they created. This wasn’t just branding, though. The New Deal built the kind of socially useful infrastructure that often evades the short-term interests of private capital. They planted trees, built libraries and dug public swimming pools. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration invested in local art and theatre projects. While private utilities demurred due to lack of profits, the Tennessee Valley Authority produced cheap electricity designed to electrify impoverished rural communities. Their slogan “electricity for all” – we’d call it left-populist now – sounds like it could have come from Bernie Sanders.
New Deal investments created more than just “jobs”; they created visible imprints on the landscape that linked government with material improvement and the public good. Each of these projects hired government staff and workers who brought a public mission to local communities, whereas the Microns of the world need only look after their bottom line and shareholders. Of course, in the wake of such public-minded investment, FDR won in a landslide in 1936, taking every state except Maine and Vermont.
Yet it’s also apparent that simply putting a political brand on specific projects and investments is not enough. We know the top issue motivating voters was inflation and the cost of living. A factory opening here and there is no answer to the concerns of millions upon millions of working-class families struggling to afford food, housing and utility bills. For all the excitement around Biden’s failed “Build Back Better” legislation, by 2024 most voters probably remembered the Democratic administration as the one that oversaw the dismantling of a whole set of Covid-era protections that provided support to millions of tenants, student debtors, parents and the unemployed.
Many have commented how this global year of elections has punished incumbent regimes over inflation and the rising cost of living. But there is a striking counter-example just to our south in Mexico: Claudia Sheinbaum, and her Morena party, received a larger share of the popular vote in 2024 than her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Amlo), did in 2018. Liberal commentators often disagree with his methods, but there’s no denying Amlo and the Morena party delivered widely felt material gains to the poor and working-class majority in Mexico. His administration doubled the minimum wage, empowered unions, and enacted a massively popular pension reform and other direct cash support programmes that reportedly lifted over five million people out of poverty during his term. For the voters who just elected Sheinbaum, their support was rooted in linking these material gains to a visible political project.
Mexico offers a rare example of a left-wing party reconstituting a working-class coalition characteristic of 20th-century mass politics. Meanwhile, in Europe and the United States non-college-educated working-class voters of all races are shifting rightwards. Since the US election, there has been much consternation about a polarised media environment where social media algorithms sort the electorate into more and more extreme portals of culture war, disinformation and conspiracy theory. But this mode of politics only succeeds in the absence of governments offering concrete material improvements to people and communities. The antidote to a politics waged on screens is what we might call “actually existing” politics – or what my students might call politics IRL (“in real life”).
Poor and working-class people have become rightfully cynical about the capacity or willingness of government to fight for them as opposed to the wealthy and connected. But if the Democrats want to win these voters back into their coalition, they had better start figuring out a way to convince them that the party can improve their lives in a material way. Of course, now they will have to wait at least four more years for even the chance to try.
[See also: Twilight of the American elite]
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