Democrats lost working-class voters to Trump ― even in this blue bastion

LYNN, Massachusetts ― Mark Callahan has voted Democratic in nearly every presidential election he can remember. Until this year.

Callahan, 67, cast his ballot for President-elect Donald Trump because of concerns about rising costs of living and fears that Democratic leaders didn’t have a plan to fix the economy.

A longtime resident of Lynn, a suburb just four miles north of the liberal enclave of Boston, Callahan said he isn’t sure whether Trump’s policy proposals will lower prices at the pump, or in the grocery aisle. But he’s hopeful the former president will at least “make a change.”

“Everything was too expensive. What we had wasn’t working,” Callahan said, as he stood on a cracked sidewalk lining a row of local take-out restaurants and convenience stores in the suburb’s downtown.

As the dust of the 2024 election settles, the rightward bent of voters like Callahan in historically liberal-leaning states has laid bare the sweeping nature of the Democratic Party’s problems with its once trusty base of working-class voters.

Those challenges, felt predominately in the blue wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan in Pennsylvania after the 2016 election, have now emerged in hundreds of former union and Democratic strongholds across the country, even in places like deep-blue Massachusetts.

A bright blue crystal ball

Massachusetts is one of the most liberal states in the country. In 1972, it was the only state that voted for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern over Republican Richard Nixon. The last time the state voted for a Republican presidential candidate was in 1984 for Ronald Reagan.

The state overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, again in this year’s election.

Yet it also experienced one of the most profound rightward shifts of any state in the country, largely driven by a rise in new Trump voters across working-class communities and a drop in Democratic turnout.

Garrett Dash Nelson, a historical geographer who focuses on the relationship between community structures and political ideology, analyzed the election results and U.S. Census demographic data for Massachusetts’ municipalities to better understand which communities lurched more conservative.

No matter what method he used to define class, the results were similar.

“Massachusetts saw a pattern that happened all across the country,” said Dash Nelson, the head curator at the Leventhal Map & Education Center at Boston Public Library. “The reality is that the pattern of Republican gains being concentrated primarily in working class, oftentimes diverse working-class municipalities, holds up.”

Communities with a higher percentage of people in service occupations, lower median household incomes, and less education generally saw a larger uptick in votes for Trump than more wealthy, white-collar areas.

Lawrence, a former mill town with deep connections to the labor movement, saw the most defined shift out of any city in Massachusetts, with a whopping 46% rise in Trump votes. It is 80% Latino. The city’s median household income is $53,977 – nearly half the state’s overall median income of about $100,000.

Springfield, a city in southwestern Massachusetts, saw a 16% jump to Trump. More than 25% of people in the city work in typically blue-collar service occupations, including hospitality jobs at the MGM casino in the area.

Lynn saw a more than 11% increase in support for Trump. Roughly 15% of people in the 101,000-person city have a college degree, significantly less than the 48% of people across the whole state who hold a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Economic woes

Jim Gigliello, 48, and Curran Bennett, 28, said they were relieved when Trump won the election.

As the pair unloaded a dresser from the back of their pickup truck and finished out their last maintenance job of the week on a recent Friday afternoon, they admitted that they had been nervous about what would happen after the 2024 election.

“It just didn't seem like any of the politicians had anything that would benefit us,” said Curran, who lives in Malden, Massachusetts but often works in Lynn.

“The working-class people,” Gigliello added on. “They just forgot about us.”

Gigliello, who lives in Revere, Massachusetts, said he hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since the 1990s when he supported former President Bill Clinton. But for the last few decades, Gigliello said he felt like Democratic leaders had become too focused on talking about social issues, rather than dealing with “larger issues like the economy.”

It's a refrain Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who represents Lynn and its neighboring communities in Northeastern Massachusetts has heard again and again over the last several years.

“The feeling is that Republicans are focused more on the urgent challenges people face,” said Moulton, referring to issues like immigration and the economy.

In the immediate days after the election, Moulton told the New York Times that he believed Democrats had leaned too far into culture war and identity politics issues. He received backlash from some in his party for saying that he would be nervous about transgender women athletes playing on the same team as his two daughters.

Moulton has argued that response has proved his point.

“A lot of Democrats have taken on an incredibly condescending tone and treated everybody who disagrees with them … as not only wrong, but as bad people,” he said.

“We've got to do a lot less preaching and a lot more listening.”

Republicans in the state have also taken notice, and are trying to capitalize on concerns. Jennifer Nassour, the former chair of the Massachusetts GOP, said she’s hopeful that Republicans in the state legislature can build off the recent rightward shift in the state.

“We need to be cognizant of the fact that, you know, voters are looking for specific things and identity politics isn’t it,” Nassour said. “It's a big tent approach. And if we can continue on that path … there's really great opportunities for Republicans come 2026.”

Growing disillusionment

Massachusetts saw a rise in conservative-leaning Trump voters, but it also saw a drop in Democratic turnout in the 2024 election.

George Markos, 65, was among those who opted not to vote. Markos, the owner of Brothers Deli in Lynn, was visiting his home country of Greece during the election and did not cast an absentee ballot.

A former Democrat, Markos said he no longer belongs to either party. He doesn’t believe national politics make much of an impact on his life. When asked how he felt about Trump winning the election, Markos bat his hand.

“Won’t change my life,” he said.

Moulton believes building trust with voters like Markos who have become disillusioned with the party and politics in general is key to winning back working-class communities.

“There is a simmering distrust among many Americans of the Democratic Party,” he said. “Even if they like our policies better, they just don't trust us to take America's challenges seriously enough.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Democrats lost the white working-class to Trump in Massachusetts