A team of researchers led by Daniel Laurison ’99, associate professor of sociology and director of the Healthy, Equitable, and Responsive Research Democracy (HEARD) Initiative, published “The Political Disconnect: Working-Class And Low-Income People On What Politics Means To Them And How They Might Be Mobilized” on Swarthmore Works in January.
The report, based on six years of interviews with 232 low-income and working-class Pennsylvanians, seeks to explain the relatively low voter turnout among these groups in comparison to more privileged groups. It highlights that a sense of exclusion often keeps the working class away from the ballots. On Monday, March 30, Laurison sat down with The Phoenix to discuss his findings and key takeaways. A transcript of the interview, edited for clarity and brevity, is below.
Xinto Xu: Thank you for talking with me today. First of all, would you like to share a little bit about your research? What led you to pursue this topic?
Daniel Laurison: Sure. So, I went to grad school in large part to try to understand a question that I think a lot of sociologists and other people are interested in, which is why there isn’t more equality or more redistribution, given that we have a democracy. There are more low-income, working-class, poor, disadvantaged — whatever phrase you want to use — than there are wealthy people. I was and still am especially interested in political non-participation — the people who don’t vote and who don’t engage in politics — and the class nature of that. Lower-income people are less likely to vote than higher-income people, people with less education are less likely to vote than people with more education, etc., etc.
I started grad school in 2004, and I’ve looked at [this question] in a variety of ways since then. A lot of my work has used quantitative data and surveys. I wrote a book that came out in 2019 that was about the world of politics because I think part of why working-class and low-income people are less likely to vote is that the world of professional politics is socially distant from them in lots of ways because of other things that happen on the production side of politics. That book was called “Producing Politics.” But then the interviews that resulted in this report are sort of the complement to that. They are, you might say, the consumption side of politics, if the campaign professionals are the production side. We started doing interviews as a side project in the summers starting in 2018, and then in 2021 I got a Carnegie Fellowship that allowed me some time off from teaching. So, in 2021 and 2022, having spent a lot of time with students and community-based researchers doing these interviews, I finished and put out my book, and then a couple more years after that, with a few more interviews and a lot of data analysis, here we are. Academic work is slow.
XX: That’s amazing. So, would you say that you started the formation of this research a while before coming to work at Swarthmore?
DL: I got to Swarthmore [as a faculty member] in the fall of 2016. I’d started this broad research trajectory before coming to Swarthmore, and I’d written a proposal to do this kind of research before I got here, but we didn’t start doing these interviews until the summer of 2018.
XX: That’s really interesting to know, because before this interview, I thought your research might have been prompted by the 2016 or 2024 [elections]. But I still want to ask this: How do you see this research as relevant to our current time, especially under the Trump administration? And is there anything in particular that resonates with you today?
DL: I think there are a couple ways to think about it. One is that having political representation that’s skewed towards well-off people is a problem all the time. There are scholars who’ve been looking at and writing about this since the ’80s and ’90s — probably earlier, but at a certain point you stop looking too far back into history. So, it’s a problem for “representativeness.” It’s a problem for the health of democracy. It’s a problem for the kinds of policies you get. All of that is true. But I think it’s especially important in a time when, by many metrics, we’re moving (or have moved) away from being a full democracy to think about how people understand what democracy is, what politics is, and what politics can or can’t do.
One way we get back on a path toward more democracy in the U.S. is voting out the people who don’t believe in democracy. That’s one part of it, but another way to think about the issue — and part of what I’ve seen in doing these interviews — is that a lot of people just don’t think that electoral politics has anything to offer them, that politics is only about fighting among rich people. If you believe that, there’s no reason to be interested in saving a democracy. I think they have a lot of good reasons for believing that, although I don’t agree entirely. But if you believe that, you can also see why people will vote for somebody who they think is going to just tear it all down, or just make other elites angry, or doesn’t seem to play by the normal rules of the political social game in the U.S. I think all of that is part of why this is relevant right now.
XX: Speaking of voting for somebody who might dismantle the democratic institutions we have, I was looking at a chart in your research and noticed this interesting trend where, among Hispanic and Black low-income people, the turnout actually increased in 2020 before decreasing in 2024. What do you think led to this trend? [More specifically,] was it something that happened during Biden’s term, or do you think it reveals something more general in our political system?
DL: I think it’s easy — and people do it very frequently — to look at some political outcome and tell a story that fits with your existing political beliefs or narratives. I want to be cautious about that. So, there was a slight increase in turnout in those two groups in 2020 versus 2016, which varies a bit depending on which chart you look at. You don’t see anywhere that there’s a big increase.
Overall, what is striking to me is actually that the gap between low-income people and high-income people within racial groups got bigger. It stayed about the same for Hispanic people but got bigger between the high-income and low-income groups for Black and white people. I’m not going to try to do arithmetic live, but something was mobilizing well-off people to turn out more in 2024 than in 2020, but not overall — especially not Black and Hispanic low-income people. So that’s one piece. It’s just the gap. The gap got bigger, and it got bigger in 2020 as well as in 2024.
Another thing I would point to is that there’s a cycle you frequently see — and this came up in interviews even done before 2020 — where people feel like they get promised change, they get promised things will get better, and then they don’t see anything concrete. That’s partly because of the way our federal government works: it splits power, and so it’s hard for any party without a trifecta to do anything unless they’re willing to just resort to executive order or by circumventing the way things normally work. It’s partly about communication. It’s partly about how we didn’t radically change poverty in those four years. It’s all of those things together.
Still, pretty much anybody with a political bee in their bonnet can find something in a really close election and say, “This is why it didn’t turn out the way it should have.” Something I like to point out is that all three of those elections were very, very close to even between voters for each party and the portion of people who stayed home. The number of people staying home was higher in 2016 than in the next two elections. But I don’t think there’s any single explanation, like, “if Biden had only done this,” or “if Harris had only done that,” etc.
I will say one other thing, though, about mobilizing strategy, [about] which — at least anecdotally — a number of stories came out after the 2024 election. There’s a story in the New York Times about Harris campaign workers in Philadelphia who felt that her campaign was putting way too much of its energy into mobilizing white people in the suburbs, and they basically set up a guerrilla campaign office out of [a fast-food chain] to do get-out-the-vote (GOTV) work and try to mobilize Black and Brown people in Philadelphia outside of what the campaign wanted them to do. That’s one possible piece of the story there. I think that kind of decision-making at the campaign level may be part of what happened. But also, from a statistical standpoint, if you look at the overall turnout in terms of who voted how, it’s not very different. It’s more different in terms of which people voted.
XX: Has this gap between the turnout of wealthier people and working-class people gotten bigger over time? In other words, would you say that in the past, more working-class people were willing to go out and vote?
DL: Looking at a chart that I had a student do recently, the overall evidence for the last 40 or 50 years is not a sharp increase or a sharp decrease. It sort of goes up and down a bit, but the gap does seem to have gotten bigger roughly since 2008 or so, which was a high point for turnout among low income people, largely. That was Obama’s first election, and a lot of Black people across all income groups turned out to vote for him. Low-income Black people actually turned out at higher rates than low-income white people that year. But since then, the gap has mostly been getting bigger.
XX: Another thing I noticed in your research was that a lot of your interviewees thought voting wouldn’t have made any difference for them. To what degree do you think this claim is true?
DL: I’ll say three things about that. Number one: it’s one of those things that’s to some extent a self-fulfilling prophecy. If everyone who wants bigger changes in one way or another doesn’t vote because they don’t see the parties representing the things they would like to see happen, doesn’t get involved in politics, and doesn’t try to shift where the parties are, then it’s hard for voting to make a difference.
That’s Part 1. Part 2, generally speaking, neither party is saying the things that they’ve said at other times in this country’s history. [For example,] “We want to transform this country so that no one is hungry or homeless” — they could try to do that, but that’s not a policy platform of any party. There are actually a few politicians in the Democratic Party who would say something like that, but as a party-wide platform, that’s not what [people] hear.
We talked to a lot of people who were not just low-income or working class, but really poor: living on $15,000 a year or less and barely struggling to get by on a really basic, food-and-shelter level. For those people, if that’s been your life for ten or twenty or 30 years, or if you come from generations of poverty and that hasn’t changed for you, you’re not wrong [to think that voting makes little difference]. I see where they’re coming from.
I think what that perspective misses — and I don’t think it’s the fault of the people who have that perspective — is the way things can get much worse for people because of electoral politics. As of two days from now, a lot of people are going to get kicked off of their SNAP benefits because of changes in that program that are a direct result of who’s holding power at the federal level. That’s not a good change, but it’s a change that wouldn’t be happening if we had a different Congress, or a different Senate, etc. But that’s a terrible argument to make to people to try to get them to vote. “Things might get even worse” is a crappy argument. And Democrats are generally, in this country, more or less the party that’s more interested in the needs of the working class and poor people — with lots of caveats and asterisks and so on about what I would want them to do versus what the overall party tends to be interested in doing. But even when they have tried to make change, there’s a lot of limitations in the system that keep them from making as much change as they might all agree they want to do.
That’s one piece. And another piece is that we tend to do policy very indirectly, partly because of the way that the federal system just blocks big changes unless you have majorities in both [Congressional] houses and the presidency.
A few weeks ago they organized an event where a former Biden trade representative said, “We end up just doing least-common denominator policy, because that’s all we can do.” They talked about an effort that took multiple years to make hearing aids more accessible and cheaper for people. That’s a real improvement in the life of anybody who needs a hearing aid. But it’s so disconnected from any obvious voting consequence, bill that passed, etc.
The other example I give a lot actually applies to Chester. My partner works at the Foundation for Delaware County. They have a bunch of federally funded programs that they provide for low income families in Chester. One of them is providing doulas to people who are going to give birth. Chester has one of the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the country. These doulas make a real difference in both birth outcomes and qualities of people’s experience. They’re funded by one of the Biden bills that passed when Biden was in office. But I’m sure the doulas don’t know that. I think a lot of the people who manage them and work with them and assign them don’t know that. My partner knows that because she does the fundraising and knows where the money is coming from. But that’s a real positive impact in people’s lives that wasn’t there some number of years ago that happened because of politics, and it would be weird if the doulas wore T-shirts that said, “Funded by Joe Biden” or “Funded by the Democrats in Congress” or whatever like that. That would be icky. But because we do policy that way — a bill passed, a block grant goes to a state agency, that grant goes to a local agency, that agency funds something that’s genuinely positive — it’s really, really hard to see how the outcome of an election made someone’s life different.
And then I’ll just come back to the point I made at the beginning. Those doulas genuinely make people’s lives better, and we still don’t give them enough money to eat and live indoors reliably. Both of those things are true. It’s not enough change and it’s a real benefit. That’s how politics works right now.
XX: Based on what you just said — that changes are either happening too slowly or going unnoticed — would you say that our current bipartisan and Electoral College systems are failing to respond to the immediate needs of working class people?
DL: We have an electoral system that gives an enormous amount of weight in the Senate and the presidency to states that are majority white with a lot of land but not a lot of people. They get disproportionate weight. That’s part of what affects who gets elected and how close elections are. You could go up and down the electoral systems we have, and a lot of them were designed, as I understand it, to try to prevent what we see happening now, in terms of a president who’s not interested in norms and more interested in doing whatever he likes. Some of them constrain that a little bit, but they also constrain more significant, progressive changes.
But it’s also about who runs and who has access to running. It’s about what’s been considered politically possible. It’s about the use of racism to divide people and disconnect them from thinking about shared material interests. There’s so much that keeps more redistributive or progressive policies from happening in the U.S.
For the people that I interviewed, I think what actual change has happened is just one piece of it. I think an equal piece that needs to be addressed is that to a large extent, no one’s trying to involve [low-income and working class people] in politics. No one’s talking to them. No one’s bringing them in.
It’s very difficult to change the Constitution, to change the Electoral College. It’s not so difficult to do more community organizing, or to figure out ways to connect regular people to their representatives, or to make changes on the local and state level, depending on the politics and so on.
XX: Speaking of organizing the people, would you say that the MAGA movement appealed to some part of the working class and succeeded in mobilizing them for Trump’s two election victories?
DL: That’s complicated, and people have written a lot of good stuff about it. I think there’s an argument that usually gets framed as Trump having appealed to the working class or to the white working class, depending on who you listen to or and how thoughtful you are about racial politics. [One story people tell is that] Trump appealed to that group, and Trump is racist (and that part is unequivocally true) and therefore we know that the MAGA movement, or all Trump supporters are racist and xenophobic and transphobic, and they’re voting based on their hatred and antipathy toward people they see as other.
Then there’s another story, which is that working-class people, economically precarious people, or people in left-behind or rural places are frustrated. Their needs aren’t getting addressed. Trump appealed to them, and they’re just expressing their frustration with, well, people don’t say their frustration with capitalism, but their frustration with not getting their needs met, not having the opportunity for their kids to have a stable career, etc, etc.
I think those two stories are both false. The people who tell this story about Trump’s support resulting from working-class precarity often say, therefore, that for Democrats to win, what they need to do is stop talking about trans people, stop caring about Black people, stop caring about immigrants, and, throw all those groups — according to what the insiders often say — under the bus. And people who say it’s all racism just often say, “Therefore, there’s no winning or reasoning with or engaging all of those bad people who voted for Trump, so we should just lean into the things we believe in and screw those people,” basically.
I think both of those stories have grains of truth in them. They get cast as mutually exclusive, but they’re not mutually exclusive for a couple of reasons. One is that the people who voted for Trump in 2016 — do we think they were less racist four or eight years earlier? That’s not our theory of racism in the U.S., is it? Do we think they were less transphobic or less xenophobic? Did they just somehow forget they hated all those groups [in the previous elections]? That’s not it, right?
It’s also [important to note that] income does not predict voting for Trump very well. Having less education does, but income doesn’t. But a lot of people who don’t have a college degree in this country, even if they’re financially okay, at least on paper, are aware that the opportunities for people without college degrees are shrinking and shrinking, and that’s a problem.
I think the resolution to the two different stories is, first of all, that there are really different groups among people who vote for any given candidate, and they do it for different reasons. They also see different things when they think about the candidates than you or I might see. For everyone in my social media feed, pretty much everyone I know in person, when you think about Donald Trump, you think racist, xenophobic, etc, etc. And it’s true, but that’s not the top thing that lots of other people think, including some people I interviewed. They think he doesn’t follow rules, or that he went to a lot of communities where no politician had ever gone before — [some] white, working class, rural community, that he’s a businessman … It’s not that they couldn’t possibly know that the other stuff exists. But it’s not front of mind. Similarly, if you talk to different people about Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, some people’s top-of-mind thing will be the Biden administration’s genocide in Gaza, some will be a Black woman Democrat who was going to do a lot better than Donald Trump, right? And so some people vote because of one thing, and some people vote because of the other thing.
XX: That makes sense. I read in your introduction that you were refuting two beliefs, one of them being that working class nonvoters were not voting [primarily] because there are logistic difficulties in the voting process, the other being that they were not voting due to their being apolitical or even apathetic people. Are these two beliefs the common perception in academia or in your field?
DL: That’s a great question. Those don’t exactly map on to what I’ve often described as the two main theories of non voting in U.S. political science academia, but they sort of roughly do. The two main theories are, one — that there’s something about having resources in and of itself that allows you to participate, or makes it more likely that you’ll participate. So that’s a set of works by scholars in various orders — Sidney Verba, Henry Brady, and Kay Schlozman. They point to people with less education, less income, people who don’t own houses, etc. being less likely to vote. Descriptively that’s true, but their approach sort of treats that as if those things, in and of themselves, make you less likely to vote. I don’t think that’s quite right. There’s another scholar, Meredith Rolf, who argues that basically it’s the networks you’re in. People who are more educated are more likely to be in a network with somebody who’s involved in politics, so it’s not actually the education in and of itself that makes you more likely to vote. It’s what it does for your social position. I would go further than that, but I think that’s broadly right. It’s not that having more money or a more flexible job doesn’t matter [for voter turnout] at all, but it has not been the case — across time, across places, and across democracies — that people with the most resources vote at higher rates than people with less resources. I just don’t think it’s automatic or necessary.
The other main sort of strain of work, which I’m careful about, because I think it’s really important and good work, focuses on logistical barriers. Until the Civil Rights Movement, we had poll taxes in the south and manipulative literacy tests and all kinds of really high barriers to voting that made it very difficult, basically impossible, for Black people to vote. Then we got rid of those mostly, and now they’re bringing some of them back or they’re trying to … It is true that there are longer lines on average in majority Black places, and that is probably part of what contributes to racial gap in voting — which isn’t the same as a class gap, but they overlap.
It is true that if somebody gets turned away from the polls for not having an ID, they’re less likely to vote the next time. So, the barriers matter, the barriers are bad. It’s also true that if you reduce barriers, you don’t reliably reduce gaps in turnout, depending on which barriers and on how you reduce them. I think it’s absolutely worth thinking about barriers, trying to reduce them, and fighting efforts to raise them. I just don’t think it’s the only thing. For a lot of the people I talked to, it wasn’t the thing at all, or at least that’s not how they talked or thought about it. And I believe them. A number of people said, “I could just go — I know where to vote. I could go right down the street. I’m just not going to vote for any of those guys.” Or “I just don’t think it’s worth my time”—but it wasn’t that their time was so squeezed that they couldn’t if they wanted to.
Then the apathy, and that’s something you tend to see more in everyday conversations than in academic discussions. In a narrow sense, it’s true. Many people I talked to said they don’t care that much about politics. But they’re not apathetic in the sense that they don’t care about their community and all the things that make me care about politics. They care about lots of those things. They just don’t make a connection between the things they care about and what politics might do.
XX: During your conversations with all these interviewees, did anything surprise you — things you hadn’t expected based on your previous academic background?
DL: I came to this with a theory that comes from a French guy, Bourdieu. One of the things that I get from him is that we need to think about politics as a cultural sphere, a social activity, just like any other. That means people come to think of themselves through the experiences of their life, and through what that cultural sphere or social activity is like — as either “the kind of person who does this” or “not the kind of person who does this.” That’s something I was expecting, and I asked questions designed to get at that. If people didn’t feel that way, I would have heard that too, but I did hear that from a lot of people.
What I wasn’t expecting, but heard from so many people, was this sort of explicit view that politics is a game rich people play. I’m not exactly surprised by it, but I wasn’t looking for it, and it was students on the research team who really pointed it out.
We initially coded it as “cynicism,” and then we changed the name of the code in the software we’re using because, A, that was too broad, and B, it implied a judgment that I didn’t want to make. But there were a lot of people who really had this sense that politics is corrupt and dirty and just about rich people trying to get what they need. “It doesn’t affect my life directly, because it’s not about me” — not in a culturally distant way, but rather in a straight-up economic way; “it’s not about those people not caring about us or our needs.” So that was striking to me as a theme that was really strong.
XX: By the end of your research, you and your team offered several suggestions to improve participation in the voting process, especially among working-class voters. These suggestions were made within the framework of the current electoral system. Do you think this framework still works well for the country, and do those suggestions still apply today?
DL: I think democracy is a really good idea. It’s hard to know what’s going to happen next to this country — we have ICE agents now at airports. There’s no reason for them to be there. It’s an expansion, an authoritarian move by the president. It’s disturbing — not to mention all the things they’re doing to immigrants or perceived immigrants across the country that are much worse than just being in an airport, but it’s all part of the same sort of authoritarian fascist move. I know a lot of people — a lot of Swarthmore students (and I was raised in a family with this orientation as well) — who think we could just tear it all down and start over, and that would be great. I don’t know of a lot of historical examples where that’s actually been great. So I think democracy is a good thing. I think if we could keep it, we should keep it. I’ve heard a number of really smart people with better senses of history than I have talking about how there’s been a certain number of epochs in the U.S., where we go from a peak of awfulness of some sort, to an opening, to really where things get transformed, and then we often go back the other way.
We’ve had a number of moments of really transforming things and reducing inequality substantially — passing laws and programs that really make things better for working class people — though then they often get pulled back. But a really bad time sometimes opens the way for a bigger move in the other direction. The one thing I would say really clearly is that I believe in democracy, I believe in voting. Voting is not the only thing that gets us there — it’s one piece of the puzzle, but it’s not everything. Other parts are social movements that make demands outside of the electoral process. Other parts are organizing to get different people on ballots. Other parts are community organizing around particular issues that might not affect electoral outcomes at all, but are important in other ways. So, voting is not the whole story. But my philosophy is that I think democracy is a good idea, and that’s what I focus on. I think democracy could do better for people if more people felt it was worth their time, and that’s my interest, intellectually, politically, and socially.
