The Democratic Party faces a whole mess of problems today. But if its post-2024 shortcomings could be reduced to any single thing, it would be this: We’ve become more concerned with those who shower before work than after. Many of the Biden administration’s priorities—forgiving student debt, banning exports of cleaner natural gas, placating protesters chanting about the “patriarchy”—made us look like tribunes of the nation’s liberal elite. No matter the pains we took to verbalize our love for the working class, our actions spoke louder than our words.
Now, I don’t doubt that many Democrats are eager to win back the working-class voters we’ve lost over the last decade. But, as many of my colleagues and friends agreed at a recent conference organized by the Progressive Policy Institute in Denver—titled “New Directions for Democrats”—our party’s failure to focus on issues that directly affect working-class voters opened the door for MAGAism. To win those voters back, we will need to focus anew on the guys who return home from work drenched in sweat, and the women who stagger back from their hospital shifts burdened by exhaustion. That means changes in both our style and our substance.
Too often, we try to skirt the hard work that entails by focusing exclusively on President Donald Trump. I don’t care for him any more than the next guy—but the hard truth is that we’ll never make inroads by ranting against the “oligarchy” alone. Instead, we need to make clear what the Trump administration is doing to undermine the working-class American Dream. The specters of fascism, racism, xenophobia, and transphobia might draw crowds to rallies, but if we’re going to reconnect with working-class voters, we need to make their cause our primary concern. And begins by highlighting how Donald Trump is affecting their communities directly.
Take, as an example, the Low-Income Heating and Energy Assistance Program. Millions of working-class families have long depended on federal subsidies to cover the costs of home heating. Bills were rising even before Trump’s tariff madness—and now they’re set to rise even more. And yet the Trump administration has laid off huge portions of the staff assigned to disbursing those funds, and the White House has more recently proposed to end the program in next year’s budget. When strapped families find that it costs much more to heat their homes this coming winter, they should be made aware that Trump is to blame. Democrats shouldn’t muddle that message.
Or consider the Trump administration’s approach to Medicaid. Republicans like to frame the program as a grift for poor urban communities that consume billions through waste, fraud, and abuse. But many of the hospitals most vulnerable to the GOP’s cuts are located in the rural heartland—places where people must drive hours to find facilities capable of handling heart attacks or delivering babies. When those hospitals are shuttered in the years ahead, Republicans will try to claim that Democrats were to blame. The reality will be that Republicans cut rural hospitals off at the knees. Democrats need to make voters aware.
Finally, note the issues of housing and work apprenticeships. Again, Republicans would have voters believe that federal housing resources go to 1950s-style projects in rough urban neighborhoods, and that apprenticeships are giveaways to failing urban schools. But when Trump calls for a 40 percent cut in rental assistance, including to rural areas, and slashes apprenticeship programs like those that teach workers how to handle the hard work of caring for livestock, the effects will be felt in the reddest parts of the country. Unless Democrats consistently highlight those consequences, voters won’t know.
Here, in the end, is the problem: Democrats have spent years talking to the wrong voters and listening to groups that advocate on issues that simply don’t resonate in places like working-class Northeastern Ohio, where I grew up. Now, as then, people living in the heartland know when a politician is talking to other types of voters—and that’s what we’ve been doing. The Trump administration has gotten away with lying to working-class communities because Democrats haven’t done the hard work of explaining why MAGAism cuts against working-class interests. Unless we figure that out, we’re bound to remain lost.
Tim Ryan is a Senior Advisor at the Progressive Policy institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
The post Trump Policies Hurt Workers in America’s Heartland. Democrats Have To Say So appeared first on Newsweek.
