How Biden, Harris and the Democrats Abandoned the Working Class

In a country where an already meager social safety net has been steadily gutted over the past four decades, and where those eligible for benefits are typically required to jump through myriad bureaucratic hoops, these actions were nothing short of extraordinary.

As a result, by mid-2021, the number of Americans living in poverty had decreased by an astonishing 45% since 2018, with the number of children in poverty reduced by 61%. ​“The country has never cut poverty so much in such a short period of time,” the New York Times reported in July 2021. With this newfound sense of economic security, tens of millions of workers were emboldened to quit their low-wage, precarious jobs and seek better-paying and more fulfilling employment, while hundreds of thousands of workers organized unions to bring democracy into their workplaces.

If all of these programs had continued, and if the federal government had instituted further reforms to widely expand access to healthcare, education, housing, and collective bargaining rights, the U.S. economy may have been transformed in ways not seen since the New Deal of the 1930s. But this newly expanded social safety net was designed to be temporary, meant to last just until there could be a return to pre-pandemic ​“normalcy” — in other words, the same ​“normal” conditions of massive economic inequality that had helped spur the rise of Trump in 2016.

Starting in late 2021 and continuing throughout Biden’s presidency, the Covid relief measures that had dramatically improved millions of people’s lives suddenly vanished as they hit their arbitrary expiration dates. Meanwhile, corporate America — which had been whining that ​“nobody wants to work anymore” — sought to bring an increasingly assertive working class back under control by driving up inflation through rampant price gouging while pushing the Federal Reserve to inflict ​“pain” on working people through repeated interest rate hikes.

The aftermath has been devastating. Since 2021, the number of Americans living in poverty increased by 67%, while the number living in food insecure households jumped 40%. The child poverty rate more than doubled from 2021 to 2022, the biggest year-to-year increase ever recorded. As rents rose faster than wages, the United States experienced a 12% increase in homelessness between 2022 and 2023. Since 2023, 31% of Medicaid recipients have been disenrolled from the program nationwide. At the same time, over five million children lost their healthcare coverage through either Medicaid or CHIP. By March of this year, the number of Americans living paycheck to paycheck reached a historic highpoint of 64%.

Amid this suffering, corporate profits as a share of national income have increased by 29% (the main contributor to inflation), while the combined wealth of U.S. billionaires — already the richest people in human history — has skyrocketed by more than 87% since the start of the pandemic.

Under these circumstances, being told again and again that the Biden-Harris administration has done more to help the working class than any other administration in history not only rings hollow to many — it comes across as condescending and insulting, generating exactly the kind of resentment that Trump’s fascist movement thrives on.

Rare opportunity squandered

When they narrowly won control of the White House and both chambers of Congress in late 2020, Democrats had a short window to enact the kinds of sweeping and immediately tangible economic reforms necessary to reverse the rising appeal of Trumpism — primarily by solidifying and expanding the pandemic-era social safety net.

Congressional Republicans offered full-scale opposition, and Democrats did not have a supermajority in the Senate to overcome the filibuster, which Biden stubbornly refused to abolish. Still, Democrats could pass major economic legislation without a single Republican vote through the budget reconciliation process. This was how, in March 2021, they managed to push through the American Rescue Plan — which included the historic (albeit temporary) expanded Child Tax Credit.

The package was also supposed to include a long-overdue increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, a major Democratic campaign promise. But the Senate parliamentarian — an unelected bureaucrat with no actual power — said that passing such a measure through budget reconciliation was improper.

Although Democrats could have simply overruled (or fired) the parliamentarian to ensure 32 million U.S. workers got a raise, as progressive lawmakers begged Biden to do, the president instead immediately gave up and instructed Senate Democrats to remove the minimum wage provision, which they did. By weakly submitting to arcane proceduralism to pass up this rare opportunity, Biden helped ensure the federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 to this day (as it has been since 2009) while reneging on a central pledge he and the Democratic Party had repeatedly made to working-class voters.

An even bigger disappointment came several months later. Through the Build Back Better Act (BBB), Biden planned to again use budget reconciliation, only this time to enact a more permanent and expansive set of economic reforms that would, in some ways, cement the Covid-era social safety net. Though it did not go as far as many progressives wanted, the proposed legislation nevertheless included life-changing provisions for millions of people such as paid family and medical leave, universal preschool, free community college, Medicare coverage for vision, dental, and hearing services, rental assistance, new public housing, and a continuation of the expanded Child Tax Credit. Key elements of the PRO Act were also reportedly set to be included in the package to make it dramatically easier for workers to form unions.

In the Senate, conservative then-Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were reluctant to get behind the ambitious bill. But to ensure their votes, Biden had leverage in the form of a separate piece of legislation: the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Because it included corporate giveaways, Manchin and Sinema (along with many Republicans) championed the infrastructure bill and were eager to send it to the president’s desk as quickly as possible. Biden initially indicated that he would not sign the bill, which was soon passed in the Senate, until Manchin and Sinema aligned with the rest of the party by voting for BBB in budget reconciliation.

If Biden had stuck to this strategy to exert the necessary pressure on Manchin and Sinema — in other words, if he had aggressively fought for his own domestic economic agenda during this brief historic opening — perhaps BBB might have passed and millions of people could have experienced palpable improvements in their lives, as they did with the soon-to-expire Covid relief measures.

Instead, after Republicans accused him of ​“extortion,” the president instantly backtracked by promising he would not veto the bipartisan infrastructure bill if it got to his desk before BBB. Later, when the House progressive caucus vowed not to vote for the infrastructure bill until Manchin and Sinema first approved BBB, Biden urged them to back down. The infrastructure bill was soon passed in the House with only the six members of the left-wing Squad attempting to hold the line by voting ​“no.”

With Biden’s sole source of leverage now gone, Manchin unsurprisingly killed BBB by announcing that he would never vote for it under any circumstances. Several months later, in August 2022, Congress passed the Manchin-authored Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a significantly downsized spending package that didn’t include BBB’s headline provisions. Sen. Sanders called it ​“an extremely modest bill that does virtually nothing to address the enormous crises facing the working families of our country.”

After declaring the IRA to be a transformative law, Biden stopped mentioning Build Back Better from 2022 onwards. As the cost-of-living crisis escalated, the president talked about ​“deficit reduction” — the language of austerity — and focused on increasing military spending, expanding NATO and arming Israel’s genocidal war machine to the tune of at least $17.9 billion since October 7, 2023.

Giving up on democracy

The legislation passed during Biden’s first two years in office undoubtedly had many positive impacts and spurred new job growth, and several of his executive orders and appointees did great things for workers, consumers and borrowers. But in the face of extreme economic inequality, historic inflation, relentless political opposition, climate chaos, and the growth of fascism, it was nowhere near enough.

Biden also made an earnest effort to clear the low bar of being ​“the most pro-union president in U.S. history” (although railroad unionists have good reasons to disagree). Yet on his watch, the PRO Act wasn’t passed, the National Labor Relations Board remained chronically underfunded, and U.S. union density fell from 10.8% in 2020 to 10.0% in 2023 despite an uptick in organizing and strikes.

In the end, Biden fulfilled a promise he had made to his wealthy donors in 2019 that ​“nothing would fundamentally change” if he became president. Much of the U.S. public responded by blaming the president for deep economic discontent, with 45% of voters saying they’ve gotten worse off under the Biden administration — the most ever recorded in presidential exit polls.

That lack of fundamental change seemed to confirm to many in the working class that U.S. ​“democracy” — with its filibusters, parliamentarians, budget reconciliations, expiration dates, unaccountable judges, big money interests and nonstop wars — is incapable of delivering the goods. It also guaranteed that the same kinds of economic grievances Trump exploited to win in 2016 (mostly by demonizing immigrants and minorities, in classic fascist fashion) would still be there for him to successfully exploit again in 2024.

According to exit polls from last Tuesday, a slight majority of households making between $30,000 and $99,000 went for Trump, while Harris won a slim majority of households making $100,000 and above. (Harris notably won 57% of union members.) ​“Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the working class, as a class, didn’t do anything,” writes historian Tim Barker. ​“The vote is evidence of dealignment, not realignment: voters below $100,000 split basically down the middle.

Still, some Democratic Party insiders have preferred to blame working-class voters for Trump’s victory rather than entertain any notion that huge numbers of workers were abandoned by the Biden-Harris administration.

Of course, it is downright anti-democratic to suggest that millions of people who live paycheck to paycheck are simply irredeemable, ignorant ghouls while simultaneously refusing to criticize party leaders, rich donors, consultancy firms and allied pundits. Writing off the vast majority of the electorate is not only an unserious and self-defeating response to the ongoing rise of fascism, it is also what got us to this point in the first place.

“Many Americans are giving up on democracy,” Sanders warned this past August. ​“They are hurting. They look to the government, they vote, and nothing happens. The rich get richer; they get poorer. And they’re saying, ​‘Hey, all of the democracy and all this election stuff, it’s all a crock, it doesn’t matter.’ And they are willing to look at authoritarianism as a substitute.

Until there is a credible political alternative that the U.S. working class can unite behind to achieve economic security, dignity and justice, we can expect Trump and similar right-wing demagogues to continue to benefit by embracing a politics of division and hate. Acknowledging the reality that the Democratic Party and Biden-Harris administration squandered a historic opportunity to seriously upend an indefensible status quo is a necessary first step.