How Democrats became the party of the jet set

By John B. Judis, Ruy Teixeira

We toured Dundalk, a once-prosperous blue-collar town east of Baltimore, where many of its inhabitants worked at the huge Bethlehem Steel plant at Sparrows Point that at its peak employed 30,920 workers or at the General Motors plant in White Marsh that had employed 7,000. Dundalk, which is almost entirely white, was dependably Democratic in presidential and congressional elections until 2004, when its residents narrowly backed George W. Bush against John Kerry. Its local administration was solidly Democratic, but in 2014 it became Republican. In the 2016 election, it backed Donald Trump by 62 percent to 33 percent over Hillary Clinton. In 2020, Trump won Dundalk by 57 percent to 40 percent.

We interviewed Robert Price, who is in his 50s and worked at the GM and Bethlehem plants and now works at a shipyard. Price says he took “the last train of industrialism out of the station.” Price, who in 2004 went to Iowa to campaign for labor Democrat Dick Gephardt, now supports Trump. As we are driving to Dundalk, we asked him why so many white workers have left the Democratic Party and turned to Trump and the Republicans. “I mean a lot of it is AM radio,” he says. “There is a racist element to it. There is no question of that.” But he rejects that as too simple an explanation. “To me there are only two groups of people, the globalists and the nationalists, and unfortunately the Democrats have wound up appearing to be the friends of the globalists. And the nationalists, the Black people at work, they are veterans, they side with the right, the Republicans. In other words, it’s more about class than color, it’s more about nationalism than race.”

We turn into Dundalk, and he continues, “I think the blue-collar working-class people are the more nationalistic people. I think the Democrats are what we used to call the jet-setter class. They are the ones who go to Europe on vacation. They are the ones who don’t care where the stuff is made.....

https://www.deseret.com/politics/2024/03/21/democrats-republicans-working-class-voters/