“It’s like a disconnection” – political skepticism among poor and working-class Black and Latine people

In this paper, we put existing empirical research on race, class, and political participation in conversation with preliminary voting data from November 2024 and in-depth interviews with 109 Black and 26 Latine poor and working-class Pennsylvanians. We argue that a key component of the 2024 election – and a concern for US democracy more broadly – is a belief among many lower-income Black and Latine people who are eligible to vote in the US that electoral politics is essentially a game played by people unlike themselves. Many of our interviewees told us about the lack of change they had seen in their communities, and believed that politicians did not care about Black, Latino/Hispanic, or poor and working-class people like themselves. Their views can help us understand the low rates of turnout in the 2024 election (and many previous elections) amongst low-income Black and Latine people.