Working-class voters in the deep blue city of Philadelphia are showing dramatic signs of switching their support to former President Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
“Democrats keep saying [Trump] is going to bring down the economy, but he was already president for four years, and taxes were lower,” former Hillary Clinton supporter Gabriel Lopez told the Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday. “We’re tired of the same politics. We got a different type of guy, and the people actually love him.”
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Lopez’s story appears to be indicative of many voters in Philadelphia, a city not immune to the ongoing political realignment. Democrats outnumber Republicans by 7-to-1.
The Republican Party appeared to be the party of big business and corporate interests before 2016. Now the Democrat party is taking up that mantle under the banner of globalism and “democracy,” a reformation of political identities dating back to Franklin D. Roosevelt and beyond. Some of the biggest issues driving the realignment are soaring costs, low wages, and tariffs. Under Trump, real wages rose amid Trump’s support of tariffs and border security to protect American workers. Trump’s proposals are especially popular in the Rust Belt states where the U.S. government allowed big-business leaders to ship manufacturing jobs out of the U.S.
“Lopez embodies one of Democrats’ biggest problems in Pennsylvania: working-class voters in Philadelphia, a once reliable voting bloc for the party, have drifted right in recent years,” Inquirer’s Anna Orso, Layla A. Jones, Julia Terruso, and Aseem Shukla reported. “And they’ve been disproportionately affected by rising prices over the last several years, an issue many blame Democrats for.”
Polling appears to support that idea. The non-white identification with Democrats is “at its lowest since the 1960s, before the civil rights movement and the 1964 election which aligned Black voters with the Dems and against the GOP,” Financial Times columnist and chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch explained earlier this year. “In 2020 the richest third of voters favoured the Dems for the first time, and the Republicans improved with the poorest,” Burn-Murdoch explained. “The GOP now appeals to working- and middle-class voters of all ethnicities.”
Lifelong Democrat Jim Kohn, a retired truck driver who lives in South Philly, said he is planning to vote for Trump and he believes his neighbors will too. “When Trump was president, everything was cheaper,” he said. “Now, everything is so sky high.”
“When I first started in politics in 1978, the managerial class was Republican — no one votes the way their bosses vote,” O’Connor told the Inquirer. “Now, most people in the managerial class vote Democratic and no one is voting the way their boss is. So it’s been a flip. Most of the bosses are Democrats and the Democratic Party has become the party of the upper middle class.”
“The question you ask at the door — doesn’t matter, Black, white — is: are you better off than you were four years ago?” O’Connor said. “That’s the universal message. And people aren’t.”
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.