There’s no dispute that general working-class support for Democrats has fluctuated from election cycle to election cycle. The one constant, though, is that “working-class” is almost always used in the media to suggest white, male workers. The representative Reagan Democrat was, literally, a white autoworker in Michigan. Even when the white prefix is used to indicate a specific research interest – as in Joan Williams’s White Working Class – there is still an unspoken assumption that this is the part of the working class that matters most. White workers were supposedly neglected in the 2016 campaigns, and so we ended up with Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton.

Last year, I spent time talking to workers involved in the Fight for $15 campaign. One of them, Deatric Edie, a then-forty-two-year-old mother of four in Florida, was working three jobs at fast food franchises, at hourly wages of $11, nearly $10, and $8.65, respectively. “My whole life is dedicated to working,” she said. The American labor force is teeming with workers like Edie, but when they get media attention, they are more often classified as “the working poor” than as simply the American working class.