Kamala Harris needs to win non-college-educated white voters fast. Here's how | Joan C Williams

Kamala Harris is doing a lot of things right that recent Democratic campaigns got wrong. She took a chance on Tim Walz - coach, solider, snow-shoveling helper - because she hoped to build bridges to the non-college grads who have abandoned Democrats in large numbers.

Nearly 60% of Bill Clinton's supporters were white people without degrees; only 27% of Joe Biden's were. Non-college white people are the largest voting bloc in the country, so if Democrats lose them overwhelmingly, they need the immense support and turnout among people of color to win. Instead, Democrats have lost ground among non-white voters. Their advantage among Latinos has fallen from 39 points in 2016 to 19 points today; that same New York Times/Siena poll found the vice-president down 12 points among African Americans compared with Biden in 2020.

Much of the erosion is among non-college grads of color. Democrats' support has fallen particularly sharply among Black voters without college degrees and is eight points lower among non-college-educated Latinos than among college grads. Some Black and Latino working-class voters, particularly men, increasingly are voting like the white working class.

To win back (enough) of these voters, the Harris campaign is using anti-elitist rhetoric that has been shown to appeal to working-class voters. This is a big change. Republicans have owned anti-elitist rhetoric in recent decades, using it to redirect anti-elitist anger away from economic elites towards cultural elites - the "Brahmin Left", as Thomas Piketty calls us (I'm one of them).

In 2020, only 20% of congressional TV ads by Democratic candidates running in competitive districts used anti-elitist rhetoric, but Walz does so all the time: "Like all regular people I grew up with in the heartland, JD [Vance] studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community." Harris reminds voters that she won $20m for California homeowners ripped off by banks during the Great Recession.

This isn't just rhetoric. For 30 years, Democrats combined vague praise of the "middle class" with neoliberal policies that embraced free trade, with little attention to its consequences for blue-collar jobs in the US. Biden ended that: Democrats finally recognized that middle-status Americans don't care about the increases in GDP if they don't benefit from the resulting economic growth. Gone is the unquestioned faith in unfettered markets we saw from Clinton through Barack Obama; hence Harris's proposal to lower grocery prices by prohibiting "price gouging" - a policy (such as restraints on trade) free-marketers love to hate.

The Harris campaign understands that class conflicts aren't only about economics. Culture wars work for Republicans because class is expressed through cultural differences, and Democrats unselfconsciously send out signals that non-college grads hear as elitist. Patriotism is a good example. Being American is an important part of the identity of 79% of Americans with high school degrees or less, but only 43% of college-educated progressive activists. Non-elites are proud of being Americans for the same reason elites aren't: everyone stresses the highest-status categories they belong to. That's why elites stress class: as members of a globalized elite, they rise above nationhood. That's also why non-elites cherish being American: it's one of the few high-status categories they inhabit.