Democrats Are Still Struggling With Working-Class Voters

A short one this week. Democrats are still struggling with working class voters. Are insurgent progressives the key? How far can the ‘Mamdani coalition’ go? And, Nate Powell comes up short.

Plus, a new research alert.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

Nicholas Jacobs has an interesting new essay in The Conversation about why the working-class has slowly abandoned the Democrats:

Trade is the strongest argument. In 1988, roughly 74% of both Democrats and working-class voters groups favored limits on imports to protect American jobs.

By 2024, only 26% of Democrats favored limits, while 54% of working-class voters continued to do so.

Unlike most Democrats, many working-class communities do not see globalization in their interest. Running alongside the trade gap is a widening divide over values that no tariffs can fix. […] That gap is not primarily a story about rising working-class racial resentment. It’s about the Democratic Party’s rapid post-2008 shift toward a worldview that places far greater explanatory weight on structural barriers and far less on individual effort and personal responsibility. […] On cultural questions, the pattern persists: Working-class voters did not move right in reactionary revolt. Democrats moved left.

This essay gets a lot right though Jacobs uses self-identification as a measure of who counts for the working class. That gets him a much smaller group than more typical definitions yield—around 35%.

I’m in the Guardian on a similar beat, laying out the latest research from Jared Abbott and Joan Williams:

The first thing to note about the gaps between the educated upper middle class and the working class is that the latter overwhelmingly prioritize economic issues, while the former lean toward cultural ones.

Of the top 12 political priorities listed by working-class respondents, 11 are economic concerns. The only non-economic issue prized by the working class was a desire to lower the crime rate. Meanwhile, educated upper-income respondents rated cultural and symbolic issues over economic concerns. Of their top 12 priorities, only six were economic. They also rate abstract ideals over concrete, material ones. Educated voters prioritized “resisting authoritarianism” above “protecting social security” and “ending racism” above “protecting Medicaid”.

Here is Katrina vanden Heuvel, and John Nichols for The Nation:

[Voters] are open to candidates—be they democratic socialists such as Pennsylvania House nominee Chris Rabb, or progressives like Minnesota Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan, or old-school economic populists like Troy Jackson in Maine and Sherrod Brown in Ohio—who break with status quo politics. That’s not surprising. Remember: Bernie Sanders represents a rural state and was the first non-Republican to win his Vermont Senate seat since the 1850s; and some of the most progressive members of Congress, such as Wisconsin’s Mark Pocan, represent urban, suburban, and rural districts. And look at the polling analyses from groups like the Center for Working-Class Politics, which remind us that “championing progressive economic policies can reverse the exodus of blue-collar voters from the party” and that “contrary to what many might expect, the working class has become both more progressive on economic issues and less conservative on social issues in recent decades.”

Unfortunately, that’s a bit of a stretch. Yes, our research has found that working-class voters have grown more progressive, but the crucial part left out here is that, especially when it comes to cultural issues, the educated higher-income voters have pulled away from the working class on these issues. And the latest research shows that major class gaps have yawned between the über-liberal professionals and blue-collar workers.

The urge to cheer for progressive upstarts is understandable, but it’s not helpful to insist that today’s progressives (including nearly all the candidates that The Nation features on this month’s cover) have the keys to winning back working-class voters.

Right now, they don’t.

To see just how far the post-Sanders generation of candidates have moved from Bernie Sanders himself here is Michael Lange:

The great irony is that, ten years ago, Bernie Sanders was weakest where his movement heirs are strongest. Across urban centers, Hillary Clinton crushed Sanders, whose coalition, by contrast, was built on whiter, more rural counties and college towns. The self-described democratic socialist won West Virginia and Upstate New York but lost San Francisco and Brooklyn. And a decade later, this political geography has inverted. The Squad of Trump 1.0 (AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley) and the incoming DSA class of Trump 2.0 (Rabb, Valdez, Avila Chevalier, Kiros, Donavan McKinney) all hail from major cities. The urban middle class, once the establishment’s firewall, has become the vanguard of The Left.

Oddly, Lange’s larger argument seems to undersell how dangerous this shift has been. The trouble with the so-called “Mamdani Coalition” — defined by Lange as “younger, multi-racial, disproportionately renter, [and] college-educated” — is that it cannot be a winning coalition at the national level.

Nate Powell, the independent populist candidate running in Washington’s 5th Congressional District, came up short:

A Marine Corps veteran and Spokane firefighter, Powell hoped to beat Baumgartner by ditching the Democratic Party label. He came up short of that goal Tuesday.

Powell appeared surprised when results came in Tuesday.

“We’re losing,” he said at a Spokane Firefighter Union building in the lower South Hill.

Powell agreed when a campaign aide added “by more than I expected.”

The political independent vowed to back the Democrat in the general election.

Powell was on a call fighting a forest fire on election day.

Working with our friends at RUBI we are preparing to publish new survey research on populism. For this, CWCP and RUBI oversampled rural voters to find what works far beyond the urban haunts where progressives typically compete.

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