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

LYNN, Mass. — Mark Callahan has voted Democratic in almost every presidential election he can remember. Until this year.

Callahan, 67, voted in favor President-elect Donald Trump because of concerns about rising costs of living and fears that Democratic leaders had no plan to fix the economy.

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

“Everything was too expensive. “What we had didn’t work,” Callahan said as he stood on a cracked sidewalk that lined a row of local takeout restaurants and grocery stores in the suburb’s downtown area.

As the dust settles from the 2024 election, the rightward trend of voters like Callahan in historically liberal states has exposed the Democratic Party’s broader problems with its once-trusted working-class voter base.

These challenges, felt most notably in the blue-wall states of Wisconsin and 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 to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern about Republican Richard Nixon. The last time the state voted for a Republican presidential candidate was in 1984 Ronald Reagan.

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

Yet it also experienced one of the deepest rightward shifts of any state in the country, driven largely by a surge in new Trump voters across working-class communities and a decline 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 communities to better understand which communities operate more conservatively.

Regardless of which method he used to define classes, the results were similar.

“There was a pattern in Massachusetts that was seen across the country,” said Dash Nelson, chief curator at the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. “The reality is that the pattern of Republican gains focused primarily on the working class, often in various working-class communities, continues.”

Communities with higher percentages of people in service jobs, lower median household incomes and less education generally saw larger increases in votes for Trump than wealthier office districts.

Lawrence, a former mill town with deep ties to the labor movement, saw the sharpest swing of any Massachusetts town, with a whopping 46% increase in Trump votes. It is 80% Latino. The city’s median household income is $53,977 – almost half of the state’s total average income about $100,000.

Springfield, a city in southwest Massachusetts, saw a 16% increase in favor of Trump. More than 25% of people in the city work in typical blue-collar service sector jobs, including hospitality jobs at the area’s MGM casino.

Lynn saw a more than 11% increase in support for Trump. About 15% of people in the city of 101,000 have a college degree, significantly fewer than the 48% of people statewide who have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Economic problems

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 on a Friday afternoon and did their final maintenance of the week, they admitted they were 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. “They just forgot about us.”

Gigliello, who lives in Revere, Massachusetts, said he hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since the 1990s, when he supported former President Bill Clinton. But Gigliello said he felt Democratic leaders in recent decades had focused too much on talking about social issues rather than addressing “bigger issues like the economy.”

It’s a refrain that Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who represents Lynn and its neighboring communities in northeastern Massachusetts, has heard again and again in recent years.

“It feels like Republicans are more focused on the pressing challenges that people are facing,” Moulton said, referring to issues like immigration and the economy.

In the immediate days following the election, Moulton told the New York Times that he believed Democrats had become too involved in issues of culture wars and identity politics. He received backlash from some in his party because he said he would be nervous if transgender female athletes played on the same team as his two daughters.

Moulton has argued that the reaction has proven his point.

“Many Democrats have adopted an incredibly condescending tone, treating anyone who disagrees with them not just as wrong but as bad people,” he said.

“We need to preach a lot less and listen a lot more.”

Republicans in the state have also taken note and are trying to capitalize on the concerns. Former Massachusetts GOP Chairwoman Jennifer Nassour said she is confident Republicans in the state legislature can build on the state’s recent rightward shift.

“We have to be cognizant of the fact that voters are looking for certain things, and identity politics is not it,” Nassour said. “It’s a big tent approach. And if we can continue on this path…there are really great opportunities for Republicans in 2026.”

Growing disillusionment

Massachusetts saw an increase in conservative-leaning Trump voters but also a decline in Democratic turnout in the 2024 election.

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

Markos, a former Democrat, said he no longer belongs to any party. He doesn’t think national politics has much influence on his life. When asked what he thought of Trump winning the election, Markos slapped his hand.

“It won’t change my life,” he said.

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

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

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