This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Democratic Party sees itself as a party of the working class. To the extent it has any shared self-identity at all, it is that. But the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class.
It doesn’t matter if you define the working class by income, by education or both — Democrats have been losing ground among these voters for years now. In 2024, Donald Trump won both voters making less than $50,000 a year and voters without a college degree. And the way Trump won these voters wasn’t just to rack up a giant majority among the white working class.
First in 2020, and then even more so in 2024, Trump made huge gains among working-class Hispanic voters, significant gains among Black voters. Republicans are building the multiracial working-class coalition the Democrats imagined themselves speaking for.
There are two theories of how Democrats lost the working class and what it might take to win them back. One theory says that Democrats were once economic populists, and they just need to be that again. The other theory says that the working class knows perfectly well that Republicans cut taxes for the rich and Democrats expand health care for the poor. But the working class feels unrepresented by Democrats in a broader way — left behind and looked down upon by a party that moves sharply left on culture, on climate, on guns, on immigration. A party that doesn’t talk like them — and doesn’t like the way they talk.
Jared Abbott is the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics. His group has done a huge amount of polling and research on what working-class voters believe and what they want to see in their politicians. Among their findings is what they call the Democratic penalty, which is a force that should scare the hell out of Democrats.
So I asked him on the show to describe what he’s found and what it would take for Democrats to once again be the party of the working class.
Ezra Klein: Jared Abbott, welcome to the show.
Jared Abbott: Thanks. Appreciate the invitation.
So I want to begin with a recent study you all did where you found something you called the Democratic penalty. What was the Democratic penalty, and how did you find it?
We were interested in this idea that Sherrod Brown couldn’t win in Ohio. It’s like: Oh, my God — if we’re economic populists, and the greatest economic populist holding on in a red state couldn’t continue holding on. What’s going on there?
We thought — and we had good reason to think — that it was probably a brand identity problem, and we just wanted to look at that in a more scientific way.
So we had these hypothetical candidates who we gave to Rust Belt voters in this survey. We had some of the candidates say they were Democratic candidates and some say that they were independents. They were all economic populists.
And the exact same candidates that had an I versus a D did 10 points better in Michigan, did 15 points better in Ohio. Interestingly, in Pennsylvania, we didn’t see much of a Democratic penalty — that’s something that we’re trying to think more about. But in the other three states — Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin — we see these massive penalties just because of the D next to their name.
So we were just trying to quantify: How bad, actually, is it just to have the albatross of the D around your neck? And it’s pretty bad, especially in those working-class–heavy Rust Belt states.
Was your study able to figure out what it is about the Democratic Party label that is dragging these candidates so far down?
Well, we did an open-ended blue-sky question about what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about the Democratic Party. Maybe you could work somebody up enough to get them to really freak out about the culture war stuff, but is that really top of mind?
And so we had these open-ended questions that we asked all the 3,000 people in the survey, and we found that there was a lot of that, of course — some people felt that Democrats were out of touch and focused on the wrong priorities and were woke idiots and all that stuff. There was a good amount of that. But it was completely dominated by concerns about the performance of the Democratic Party — having ideas that they don’t follow through on and not being a party that actually is the party of the working class.
That tells me, while there’s a huge mix of things going on, and while we can’t ignore the cultural resonance or lack thereof, the Democratic Party, in all kinds of different ways — not just in policies but in affectation and in style — a big part of the story here is also that people just don’t believe that the Democrats are going to deliver on the things that they talk about. And that’s a huge problem.
I was looking into Sherrod Brown’s campaign for a bunch of reasons, and I was looking into the attack ads that his opponent, Bernie Moreno, ran against him.
Archived clip of political ad: Brown backed Biden, voting to let transgender biological men participate in women’s sports, and supported allowing puberty blockers and sex-change surgeries for minor children.
That attack ad was pure culture war.
But it seemed to move voters enough that Brown had to put a counter-ad on the air.
Archived clip of political ad: What if I told you all of this was a lie, a complete lie — and Bernie Moreno knows it?
We can verify the claim that Brown voted to let transgender biological men participate in women’s sports is false.
I’m Sherrod Brown, and I approve this message.
How do you think about how, on the one hand, what you find in the study is a more diffuse sense that the Democratic Party is ineffective, it’s out of touch, it’s corrupt. But then, when you look at how Moreno — a car dealer owner who had to settle a bunch of wage-theft lawsuits — is actually running against Brown, it’s on the culture side.
Yes. I mean, I always go back to Tim Ryan in 2022. He was one of the strongest —
Also in Ohio, running against JD Vance.
And he didn’t just run like a kind of counter, like Sherrod Brown did — he went full bore. There was this one funny ad he had where he was throwing, I don’t know if it was basketballs or baseballs at these little TV screens, and one said: Defund the Police. And he’s like: I’m not doing that!
The point being that even when Democrats go against the culture war stuff, it doesn’t necessarily help them that much because the Democratic brand is so shot.
Is it an issue that Republicans are weaponizing the culture war against Democrats, and we need to allow our candidates in difficult contexts to understand their voters and what they need to do in order to relate to their own specific electorate? And if that means they need to take positions that progressives would get upset about? Then, yes, so be it. Because we need to win way more seats in order to stop the Republicans.
This is not a time for our side to mess around. We need to not just win a majority, but if we want to actually do anything that’s going to turn things around for working-class people, we need to have a supermajority, which is unimaginable right now.
The reality is that, yes: Are these candidates in swing districts going to have to work hard to push back against these caricatures, which are often based on actual things that Democrats — maybe not them, but other Democrats — have done? Yes, many of them are going to have to do that. And we need to give them the room to do that so that we can experiment with all kinds of different populisms out there and figure out which ones work and in which context, and it’s always going to be a case-by-case basis.
I do think it’s worth saying that both Ryan in 2022, and then definitely Brown, overperformed. If every Democrat in the country had run as far ahead of Kamala Harris as Sherrod Brown ran ahead of Kamala Harris, the election would have looked very differently, at least congressionally.
The connection he had with Ohio, the campaign he ran — it was a strong campaign.
Absolutely.
It just wasn’t enough to get out of the gravitational pull of the Democratic Party.
Even Dan Osborn — the independent who overperformed even more than Sherrod Brown did — had to make a lot of the same decisions. He’s had platforms around immigration that would be completely anathema to progressives. He said: I’m with Trump on building the wall — he literally said that in his campaign ads.
In fact, why don’t we play that ad?
Archived clip of political ad: Across Nebraska, people are tired of a corrupt Washington controlled by corporations and billionaires.
Deb Fischer — they love her. Heck, they own her. And that’s exactly why they’re spending millions lying about me.
Social Security to illegals? Who would be for that? I’m where President Trump is on corruption, China, the border. If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I’m pretty handy.
So Osborn — arguably the most overperforming candidate in that whole election — runs with neither party and is very economically populist and also runs pretty far right on some other issues.
What did you make of that campaign? What are the lessons of it? What should people take from it?
I think it was extremely impressive and encouraging. And it shows that, to the extent possible, the folks who are opposed to Trump and the Republicans, be they Democrats or independents, need to be much more experimental in the way that they handle elections. Maybe not so much in swing states, where it’s going to be a hard sell to get Democrats to not run a candidate in Pennsylvania or something. But in Nebraska, they were able to get the Democrats to just sit it out and allow Osborn to be a real challenger against Fischer.
If we can find more deep red states like that, we can take on Republicans on their own turf. And I think that’s going to be a huge part of the path forward. Although it’s extremely hard to find candidates like Dan Osborn, who has a very specific profile.
Do you want to describe his profile and where he came from?
He was a guy who had never really been a Democrat or a Republican. He was sort of a mechanic, and he had been a union leader and had taken out his fellow Kellogg workers on strike a few years before he ran for office. And he’s just this very humble, plain-spoken guy who’s just really compelling as a tribune of the sort of — he embodies all of the economic populists and working-class ideas that he’s putting forth. That’s not an easy combination of features, but I think it’s not unreasonable.
And we’re seeing a new crop, Democrats mainly, like Nathan Sage in Iowa, and Graham Platner in Maine, who are all in a similar kind of space of strong economic populists who are completely focused on the cost of living and on the need to center working-class issues and call out economic elites for screwing us over for decades.
They’re also taking pragmatic positions, to greater or lesser degrees, on issues where their particular electorates are not with progressives. We need to allow them to do that experimentation or we’re not going to be competitive at all nationally. That’s obviously not just a problem for Democrats, but that’s a problem for the future of our democracy.
So when you look at that Osborn ad, he doesn’t just move right on policies — he actually aligns himself with Trump.
[Chuckles.] Yes.
And one reality in a lot of the places that Democrats want to win is that Trump is popular in those places.
Absolutely.
Politically, if you were just being strategic, does it change how you should talk about Donald Trump? Do they need to be in a different place than most Democrats are on him?
If I were on that campaign, I would have probably thought that was a smart thing to do. It’s part of the Democratic penalty issue: To the extent that you’re really just vilifying Trump all the time, then you’re kind of signaling you’re a Democrat. [Chuckles.] So they were trying to inoculate Osborn against those attacks because Trump is overwhelmingly popular among the people they’re trying to get to vote for Osborn.
Is that going to change now that Trump is in office, and all the stuff he’s done is pushing our democracy to the brink, and it’s historically a frightening period that we’re now living in?
Is he going to be able to do the same thing? I don’t know. Maybe it has changed now that Trump has had almost a year in office and done some of the damage that he’s done. But at least in 2024, yes, that was definitely rational.
So one lesson you could take from Osborn is that in states where the Democratic Party is 25 points underwater: Stop running Democrats. Try this independent play.
I guess my question about that — because it definitely makes sense — is whether or not that would work for any length of time. Because if it began to work, but then they’re voting in a more Democratically aligned way once they’re in office, does it just begin to be seen as a scam? It’s maybe something you can do in one or two places, but ultimately you need to figure out a way to rehabilitate the Democratic Party’s brand.
Yes. And either you’re successful in doing that, and then the Democratic Party brand somehow incorporates the things that made those independents distinctive, and then we’re in good shape — we’re now the party of the working-class again — or the independent candidates need to continue using that tension to differentiate themselves from the party going forward.
If I had to guess, I would say that the second outcome is probably more likely. But you’re absolutely right that after a certain amount of time, people are going to notice that, wait a minute, these guys are just Democrats — unless they legitimately break with Democrats —
Yes, unless they’re actually not.
Yes. And to some degree, they absolutely are going to have to do that. The strategy for doing that, that we as economic populists in my camp would want to see, is breaking with Democrats when it comes to not standing up for workers. But that’s not the only way in which they’re going to do it, obviously.
Is there a case for a worker-oriented third party? People always want to do a third party presidentially, which is very, very hard to do. But you could absolutely imagine some kind of third party that is just running candidates in a couple of congressional districts or Senate races, and if they get in, they begin to be a little voting bloc together.
Yes. Well, I’m a little bit traumatized from arcane debates on the left about this question that I’ve had for a long time. But nonetheless, I think that’s a very good possibility. Like, why can’t the Teamsters and the Steelworkers get together and have their own sort of mini-party structure that’s just about union stuff?
You already have the union caucus in the House, where, though they’re not superimportant in the politics of the chamber, they have a lot of ideological diversity on many different things, but they can come together around core worker issues. And if you had an organization like that being supported by some of the bigger industrial unions, which have a lot of Republican voters in them, then yes, I think that would be valid.
But I think we need some test cases first. You need to show that an Osborn can actually win, and you need to show that you can do something like this in more places. Once you do, I think it would make a lot of sense for those folks to try to do something like that, to not just have independent candidates but build an independent organization.
I just think it’s something that should emerge organically. I don’t see what benefit we get from just saying: We’re doing this now. Let’s hope people flock to our banner. I think it goes in the other direction.
I want to get at the broader question behind this conversation.
Democrats have been losing working-class voters steadily for some number of years now. It’s been a decline, decline, decline, and now you see Republicans winning among both noncollege and lower-income voters.
It didn’t use to be like that. This is a change. This gets called class dealignment — not my favorite term.
Very catchy. [Chuckles.]
[Chuckles.] Yes, very catchy. But talk me through class dealignment. What is it? What’s the story behind it?
The basic story is that in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, the vast majority of working-class people and Americans in general said what they think of the Democratic Party: That’s the party of working people.
My version of the story, anyway, is that Democrats started to move away from their focus on working-class issues in the 1970s and ’80s with the onset of deregulation.
Then eventually leading into the Clinton years, when he signs NAFTA, which has devastating effects on communities — in different parts of the country — leading to not just job loss but community devastation.
And the Democrats — there’s a great paper called “Compensate the Losers” that gets into this. Basically, what they said is: You guys got screwed? OK. But we’re going to do different kinds of redistribution that’s going to make you whole again. We’re not going to necessarily get you good jobs again, we’re not going to necessarily give you the social status that you used to have when you had high paying jobs that you felt good about and that were meaningful in your community, but we’re going to make sure that you have something like a decent education, we’re going to get you some kind of better health care — whatever.
And that wasn’t enough. It was not nearly enough to send the tide of stagnating wages and stagnating quality of life.
So working-class people generally — many of them started to feel betrayed by the Democratic Party. And it was in fits and starts, but then in 2016 the floodgates opened.
Obviously that was related to Trump. He was cribbing speeches from Richard Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. in 2016. If you listen to those speeches, then of course you’re going to hear all the crazy stuff — the xenophobic stuff and all the hate. But you’re also going to hear a lot of stuff that any union organizer would probably find to be right on in terms of the way that both parties have just completely ignored working people.
That really touched a chord. And it set off dealignment to a much greater extent in 2016, starting with primarily white working-class folks. But then it moved toward Latinos and some Black men in 2020, and then to a much greater extent — roughly half of Latinos voted for Trump in 2024 and a quarter of African American men.
So now this is a multiracial movement away from the Democratic —
Multiracial working-class coalition — the thing Democrats wanted to build.
[Laughs.] Exactly. The hugely ironic aspect of this is that the Republicans now have that multiracial working-class coalition that the Democrats promised was their permanent majority.
I want to push on a couple of pieces of this story that I always think are complicated.
So politics is always a choice. Democrats didn’t just lose working-class voters — they went somewhere, right?
For sure.
They went to Republicans.
During this whole period, Democrats are still the party that wants to raise taxes on rich people. Republicans are still the party that wants to cut them. Democrats are still the party trying to create universal health care — and under Obama, get a hell of a lot closer than we’ve ever been before. Republicans are still the party trying to repeal that, trying to cut Medicaid, which they just did in the Big Beautiful Bill.
Republicans are voting for these trade bills. George W. Bush is very pro-free trade. Republicans have proposed a lot of these bills. Republicans vote for NAFTA in the House and Senate in very, very high numbers.
There is this story that I hear — that the Democrats abandoned all of these economic policies. Biden is, I think, probably the most left president on economics of my lifetime. More aggressive on antitrust than any other president since I was born — on labor issues, on everything.
It is hard for me to tell the story where working-class voters are deciding on economic issues. They want a more populist pro-worker party and the party supporting unions, trying to tax rich people, trying to expand health care benefits, trying to protect Social Security, trying to protect Medicare — all the things we know that are hemorrhaging them year after year to the party doing the reverse on all those things.
How do you make that add up?
There are a couple of things. One is the nature of our two-party system. If you’re really pissed off with the party you’ve been voting for for a long time, I guess you could vote for Jill Stein or whatever — the Libertarians. But the vast majority of people are just going to go to the other side. And if they were in a parliamentary system or a multiparty system, maybe they would go somewhere else. But in this case a protest vote against the Democrats is a vote for Republicans. I think that’s a part of the story.
But I think the much more important part of the story is that economic grievances get picked up on by conservatives. And the way that these economic grievances get transformed into politics is often through culture.
Like, it was: economic elites versus the working class. But then they’re able to transform it into: It’s the liberals. And: It’s the cultural elites against the working class.
It’s basically the same kind of grievance, and it’s touching on the same underlying issues, but it gets transmuted into cultural grievances. And that was very much facilitated by the Democratic Party by not doing very much to try to actually relate to and be culturally competent in the way that they talk and think about working-class people. They are increasingly a party, during this period, of higher-income people, of well-educated people.
I’m sure you’ve probably played the Schumer clip about western Pennsylvania —
I just talked about it in the episode before this with Suzanne Mettler.
Archival clip of Chuck Schumer: For every blue collar Democrat we will lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.
That kind of stuff adds up. And Hillary Clinton’s saying “the basket of deplorables” —
Archived clip of Hillary Clinton: You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.
Of course, the context was more complicated, whatever — but that was the sound bite, and she said it.
All the major media institutions and academic institutions of the country used to be kind of nonpartisan. There’s a great book “Polarized by Degrees” by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins about the diploma divide and showing the ways in which media and culture came to be completely dominated by progressives. And a lot of working-class people have just felt really alienated by that.
All of these things are part of the same bundle. It gets wrapped up in animosity toward elites. And you can’t, it’s very difficult — academics have tried to do this in different kinds of ways — to separate the cultural and economic aspects of it. But I think the reality is that they’re all tied up together to create this toxic Democratic brand.
And then Trump comes along, and his affect is something that’s refreshing to a lot of people. He’s not [expletive] people. He’s using ordinary language. He’s cursing. He’s just sort of bombastic. And people are like: Well, at least that seems more authentic to me. On top of that, he’s saying he’s going to bring back manufacturing jobs, and he’s saying he feels our pain.
So it doesn’t seem to me like as much of a mystery.
You’ve done a lot of work over the years on how different issue attitudes, different ideas, have changed for the working class and for other social classes in the country. Give me the high level of that. What’s happened over the past 20 years in people’s views?
Well, I think there’s a perception, among at least a lot of progressives, that the working class has gotten so conservative on cultural issues and so on — but that’s not true. Working-class people have gotten more progressive on virtually everything over the last 20 or 30 years. There are some exceptions to that starting to show, especially among Republican men, who are kind of moving away from some progressive positions around gender rights and family issues and L.G.B.T.Q. issues. But generally, yes, you’re seeing clear progressive movement among working-class people.
The issue is that middle-class people and professionals have just gone way farther in a progressive direction on social and cultural issues over the last few decades than working-class people have. So that’s creating this representation gap where Democrats feel they need to really cater to the more progressive positions of the middle class and of the upper middle class. And that creates this perception that somehow the working class is reactionary. But no, they’ve actually been moving in the same direction — just not to the same degree.
When it comes to economic issues, here’s actually a coalitional story that’s really positive potentially for Democrats. Which is that working-class people are quite progressive on many, many, many economic issues, particularly, like I said, the so-called predistributive issues around things like union rights —
Can you describe this predistributive–redistributive divide here for a minute?
Absolutely. So predistribution is things that affect your bargaining power or your place in the labor market. That’s things like your wage structure, things like your capacity to get benefits or better working conditions, things like pensions, and it’s things that provide jobs for people of different kinds.
And then, redistribution is like: OK, well, after the labor market process has occurred, we’re going to take some money from those who are doing really well and we’re going to give it to other people in the form of health care benefits, education, welfare or social insurance.
So a $15 minimum wage is predistributive.
Absolutely.
An earned-income tax credit is redistributive.
Exactly. And working-class people tend to like those predistributive policies a lot because they tap into values of respect and dignity and status.
It’s like: I actually care about having a job. You can say that if I lose my job to A.I. or to automation or whatever, then I’m going to get a universal basic income, even a high one. And then many people would say: That’s OK, but like, what am I going to do? I’ve lost my status in society. I don’t have a job. That’s where I found my respect, and that’s where I found my sense of meaning — or at least an important part of meaning in my life.
Predistribution taps into that: maintaining your social status, maintaining your means of providing for your family. Whereas redistribution is often perceived as something that is like a handout. It’s putting people in a vulnerable position in which they feel like they’re the victim of something rather than the agent of their own futures.
So what would a more full-throated economic platform oriented toward what you found among around working-class attitudes look like? Versus a full-throated, leftward economic platform that is more the college-educated, elite version of that?
I think the full-throated working-class-oriented platform would be something along the lines of strong support for enhanced worker protections and getting stronger union rights. It would be for increasing the minimum wage.
Maybe working-class people wouldn’t be as jazzed about, say, a $20 minimum wage as middle-class people might be, so maybe it’s also a matter of —
Because working-class people might be more likely to lose jobs?
Yes. And they might be more concerned about inflation.
It would be for potentially even programs that would guarantee a job for people who need one from the government. Although the way that you present that has huge impacts on the way in which people perceive it.
The way you do it would also have pretty big impacts on that.
Absolutely. Hugely. In addition to that, things that go beyond where Democrats have been in terms of exerting control. You know, nobody wants to attack small businesses, nobody wants to attack people who are creating good jobs in communities.
But there are big corporations that are really out of control. And instituting policies, or at least attempting to, that are going to try to reign in some of these excesses in terms of, say, involuntary layoffs of workers — to say: We are going to not give federal contracts to companies that don’t make a commitment to some kind of voluntary package if they’re going to lay off workers — like they do in, say, Germany. That would be really, really important and valuable for working people.
And it wouldn’t be something that necessarily cost the government a ton of money. It wouldn’t be something that would be perceived as, like: Oh, my God, we’re going to have this terrible problem with debt if this comes in, like maybe something like Medicare for all would. Which, by the way, is also pretty popular, but it’s also highly polarized.
I’ve done a huge amount of work on health care over the years, and which part of Medicare for all you’re describing matters. Like, if you start talking about abolishing private health insurance and start talking about raising middle class taxes — they couldn’t get single-payer done in Vermont.
Exactly. And then of course, there’s a whole bunch of more specific things related to the constituencies within districts. If you’re more of a rural district, then you’re going to be thinking about subsidies of different kinds to help smaller farmers succeed and have more leverage over the big agribusiness firms. You’re going to want to see different sorts of ways of incentivizing job creation of different kinds and job training programs, etc.
And then also you’re going to want to defend and expand the most popular and most organically American social insurance programs, like Social Security and Medicare, which are wildly popular among working-class people and everybody else. We can build on those, and we can use those as a foundation for a really robust progressive economic populism.
On the other hand, a more redistributive populism would be one that’s focused on universal basic income. Or some version of a Green New Deal, which is much more focused around spending lots of money on programs that working-class people may be skeptical are actually going to come back and benefit them in any way. Or on certain types of means-tested social insurance or things like that, which are much easier to vilify and to demonize by Republicans.
Let me get at something else you just touched on quickly. You said: Look, maybe if this were a different kind of system, like parliamentary, multiparty — well, those systems exist.
And in every other rich Western country I know of, they have different political parties, different political systems, their leaders made different decisions — Germany was better at protecting manufacturing jobs than we were by a lot — and they have all seen the same class dealignment. They have all seen that class dealignment go forward with the working class moving to the right. It’s not like the German Greens are on top.
And so in all these other systems where you had different political leaders, different political parties, different political systems, functionally the same thing happened. Why?
I mean, I think for a lot of the same reasons. There’s this great paper by Peter Hall and Georgina Evans called “Representation Gaps,” where they look at how, just like the Democrats, the center-left parties all throughout Europe moved away from a focus on working-class issues. And it leaves this gap of voters in all of these countries, including in the United States, who don’t really feel like they have a home on either side.
That opens up the space for populists on the left or the right — but unfortunately for progressives, it’s almost always been much more successful on the right — to come in and take advantage of that feeling of alienation and political homelessness.
That implies to me something structural is going on that is upstream of the individual political choices that the parties are making. You can think of every country as a kind of political market. And it would make sense that in some political markets — particularly in a two-party political market — one of the parties would make some bad decisions about how to do market fit.
This is a very neoliberal way to make this argument.
[Klein and Abbott chuckle.]
It doesn’t make a ton of sense that, in all of these countries simultaneously, none of the parties — no party from center left to left — would realize: Oh, if we just stop being a party of professional, managerial class, cultural elites and start talking about pocketbook issues again, we’ll pick up all these voters and become popular in the way we were in much of the 20th century.
Somebody would have done it, and then the others would have followed along. Either something was pushing them all in this direction or they were all recomposing themselves in the same way.
I think when you see that much similarity across a strategy that is not working out very well, you have to assume there is some reason they’re all ending up in some version of the same strategy.
I think it’s because it was rational to do so, right? I mean, they were winning elections for a long time. Some of the center-left parties in Europe, just like the Democrats — even the Social Democratic Party of Germany — held on longer than I would have expected.
It’s not like the Democrats are this completely weak party. They almost won the last election. They did win 2020. They’re still a highly competitive party, and they’ve been doing that on this strategy of appealing more to higher educated and higher income voters, and those voters are a larger and larger segment of the population. They’re still a minority and a very significant minority — a smaller minority in a lot of the key swing states. But they thought they could appeal to this coalition, and they were winning elections on the basis of that.
It wasn’t crazy to think that you could just give all the working class — what they viewed as the working-class — reactionaries over to the right. And then you wouldn’t have to make all these dirty compromises that they felt like Democrats had been making before.
And I don’t think that’s crazy logic, because it brought them victory time after time.
Is it a logic or is it a sociology or a political economy or a culture?
It’s both.
You mentioned offhandedly, the Grossman and Hopkins book about the diploma divide — “Polarized by Degrees” — which is great.
One of the parts of it that you were referencing there is: You have this change happening in all these countries. The party on the left is becoming the more highly educated party. At the same time, highly educated people are in control of the media organizations. They’re running banks. They’re running nonprofits. And so you have a more unified elite culture.
There’s a party that becomes a party of the institutions, and the kinds of people who run institutions set the tone of that party. And slowly the right-wing parties — and particularly the populist-right parties, which are in most cases now eating the right-wing parties — become the anti-institutional party.
Oh, absolutely. And these are compounding factors. There’s a shockingly small percentage of Congresspeople who have a working-class background, and a shockingly small percentage of candidates have a working-class background of any kind.
And those things reinforce each other. The perception of the party as being elite and out of touch is reinforced by both of those things simultaneously compounding upon each other.
There’s also this question of affect. One thing human beings are very good at sussing out almost instantly is whether this person is like me in some fuzzy way. It’s how we dress, it’s how we talk and how we look — our haircut, who else we’re around.
You mentioned that the floodgates on this open up with Trump, who, despite being a billionaire who fires people on television, has a very different affect than Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.
And there is something here that I think is actually pretty tricky for Democrats. You talked about how few now have working-class backgrounds. And I find that people are much more comfortable talking about the issue positions — like: If we just need to talk more about capping prescription drug prices, we’re happy to do that — than this other piece, which is, I think, better understood as, fundamentally, representation: Do I see myself in you?
How do you think about that? What have your studies and surveys shown on that?
Yes. I think it’s hugely important. If people are able to be relatable in meaningful ways and talk in terms that working-class people understand and don’t find off-putting — talking about hard work, talking about family, talking about tradition, talking about patriotism. All these are things that Democrats just don’t like to talk about but are things that most Americans find central to their identity.
To the extent that Democrats are able to talk in those terms and are able to talk like a normal person in their district, it’s hugely important. And we do have some great examples of people who talk like that who are Democrats in the House right now, like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez or Gabe Vasquez or Jared Golden.
The policy stuff is a separate question, but their affect is one of using more profanity, using more self-deprecation, talking in a way that’s just straightforward. And if they went to a P.T.A. meeting at their school, they wouldn’t be viewed as a snooty middle-class parent. I think that’s hugely important.
Then you have somebody like an Elizabeth Warren, who has all this great stuff but doesn’t have that kind of affect.
I think it’s worth zooming in on Warren for a minute. As a college-educated liberal, I’m a big Elizabeth Warren fan and have been for a long time. And in the way we think about American politics, we group Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders together. They are the left wing of the Senate Democratic Party.
Yes.
And if you look over the years at how they performed in their respective states: Bernie Sanders for a very long time has overperformed the Democratic Party, and Warren underperformed the Democratic Party. She was very, very strong among college-educated liberals and weaker among working-class voters.
And I think this shows up a lot: You can have a form of left candidate who is very populist across a lot of measures but doesn’t read as working-class to these voters.
I think if you polled the Harvard faculty on their preferred economic policies, they are extremely far left — in fact, I suspect they’re to the left of the median working-class voter. But they would not do very well in elections in Ohio. There’s something to that.
Yes, I think you put your finger on it, in terms of this affectation.
There’s also a policy aspect to this, which is that it’s really important to remember that working-class people are in favor of a lot of progressive economic policies by overwhelming majorities, but they also care about things that Democrats — progressives, anyway — are more squishy on, like not having a giant deficit or debt. They care a lot about inflation — because working-class people got hit a lot harder by inflation than middle class people did. And they care about economic opportunity and about small businesses thriving.
Just putting out this giant platter of progressive economic policies that are going to signal to voters that you want to dramatically increase government spending in ways that many of them who are extremely skeptical about government in general and haven’t felt much positive coming out of government programs in their lives beyond maybe Social Security or Medicare — they are going to be skeptical of a lot of those programs.
You also need to think about the types of progressive economic policies that really tap into a working-class voter’s sense of: We need good, stable jobs. We need to have a chance in a middle class lifestyle that our parents had and that we feel slipping away from us. And what are the ways in which government can help to provide opportunities that enable middle-class and working-class families to really thrive?
As opposed to framing it as: We need to have equality for all different people, and we need to spend all kinds of different money to address different sorts of inequities in society. Those are valid goals and very important from a progressive standpoint, but they don’t connect as well with working-class people. So I think it is partly affect, but it’s also partly the suite of policies you’re giving to working-class voters.
You’ll notice that a guy like Dan Osborn or Graham Platner — they’re not going out there and promoting the suite of trillions and trillions of dollars of the progressive wish list. They’re doing some of that —
They’re not Green New Deal candidates.
Absolutely not.
Which is to say nothing against the Green New Deal. But that gets to something else interesting that I’ve been thinking about a bit. It’s pretty clear that in 2028, if A.O.C. runs, which I think she’s certainly considering, she’s very likely to inherit the Bernie Sanders lane.
Yes.
And if you look at Sanders and A.O.C. polling, they look actually quite different. Sanders’s last poll I saw was something like +11 in his net favorabilities, and A.O.C. was –4 or –5. So they have a 15-point-ish gap between them. And their policies are not very different at this point. They’re very unified. They’re doing the anti-oligarchy tour together.
But what they have come to represent in American politics — Bernie Sanders with his mittens, A.O.C. at the Met Gala — reads very differently, completely separate from how unified they are on issues.
Without a doubt. Although she does have a majority — I don’t know exactly — but she has a huge amount of working-class people in her own district, so we shouldn’t understate —
I think these things overlap with an urban-rural divide that I think is really important.
Absolutely.
Sanders comes from a state that is heavily rural, and he codes around that. And he is, like, an old cranky white guy. These things all overlap with each other in weird ways.
But I think it’s also kind of interesting that Bernie has this positive perception among a lot of working-class people — which again, we shouldn’t overstate — because he’s taken a lot of positions that are very unpopular among a lot of people who are Republicans or independents.
That said, I think it’s always interesting that he has this popularity despite the fact that he’s such a wonk. He’s always talking about specific numbers and about facts and figures and stuff. And he doesn’t do any of the stuff that I would say would make a lot of sense — talking about anecdotes and just really trying to relate to people on an emotional level. He’s very much like a machine.
And yet he’s very popular just because he’s very authentic. And I think that’s something that’s really hard to capture.
I think there’s also a dimension with Bernie that is somewhat unique to him, which is that he’s an antiparty politician.
Absolutely.
He has traditionally not been a member of the Democratic Party. He caucuses with them but has made a point of running as an independent. And the narrative people have of him — I have always thought this is very overblown, but nevertheless — is that the Democratic Party organized to screw him.
So going back to the conversation we were having about the Democratic penalty and Dan Osborn running as an independent: There is a way in which Bernie Sanders was functionally doing that in a much more left-wing guise before it was cool.
And he maintains, I think, some separation from the broader parties. He is continuously seen as an insurgent challenging and trying to change the Democratic Party — as opposed to a part of it.
Absolutely. And we need a lot more people who are doing that. Joe Manchin was doing that, right? [Chuckles.]
There’s no reason you couldn’t have a progressive version of that within the Democratic Party. You don’t have to be a Blue Dog and also say: I’m running as a Democrat, and also, I’m very upset with what the Democratic Party has become and what they’ve represented.
We need more people like that who are out there tapping into this populist anger — not just economic but also anger at both parties. And I think you can do that as a Democrat to some degree. Because we have all these examples of people doing it and connecting effectively with people in their districts. And I think we need to see a lot more of that if we’re going to do anything to address the Democratic penalty in a lot of these competitive districts.
There are a lot of ways of running against the Democratic Party. I think people only imagine that the choices are traveling along a line from democratic socialists to Joe Manchin, or farther than Joe Manchin. There’s only moderating, moving left or moving right.
Right.
So first, there’s no one line. There’s a left–right line on economics, on cultural issues, on the system itself.
Bernie Sanders is an anti-system figure in a way that other people who share his belief in Medicare for All and share his beliefs on taxation are often not anti-system figures. Bernie Sanders radiates a dislike, a contempt for capitalism and the way it functions and the American government and the way it functions. He really believes it’s corrupt — while some people just don’t.
You see, in Iowa, Rob Sand is running for governor, and he’s running as a Democrat who just doesn’t like parties — doesn’t really think we should have parties. He’s a moderate, and he’s running against the Democratic brand in a very different way than Bernie Sanders does. You mentioned Jared Golden in Maine, who is pro-tariffs.
You can run against the Democratic Party from the left. You can run against it from the right. You can run against it as corrupt. You can run against parties as out of touch. There are a million ways to do it.
But Joe Biden, who had moved quite to the left, was a fundamentally pro-system politician. And Kamala Harris, coming after him, was also a very pro-system politician, even as her voting record was very, very liberal.
I think people mix all this up as one thing, but there are many things, and you can choose to be pointing in different directions on them at the same time.
Without a doubt. And this idea of being an authentic working-class person who reads as working class also doesn’t necessarily tap into this sort of genuinely populist anti-system mentality.
Tim Walz is an interesting example of that. He’s this guy who seems created in a lab to be the liberals’ version of a working-class dude. And he kind of is. He’s got the plaid shirts like me, and he was a coach, and he’s plain-spoken. And he’s a great politician and everything, but listening to his speeches, he doesn’t have that fire — that sort of anger, that Bernie-level: This system is just out of control. It’s corrupt. It needs a fundamental reckoning.
And until we have more Democrats who have that kind of feeling about the system, then I don’t think many people are going to take seriously that they really care about making fundamental or really significant changes to the status quo.
Kamala Harris talked about there being a couple of corporations that generally play by the rules, but some are doing price gouging — like pharmaceutical companies — and we need to cut down on that. That’s what we call populist lite.
The strong populism, which we try to test, is: Corporations have been screwing over workers for decades. American workers are the backbone of this society, and we need to do everything we can to focus like a laser on making their quality of life better and for giving them the American dream that they deserve. We need to stop these rapacious corporations from running roughshod over our politics and our economics.
That kind of messaging that taps into that sense of complete disillusionment with political and economic elites in this country really resonates with working-class people, and I think more Democrats should be doing it.
We’re talking in New York City right now. What have you thought of Zohran Mamdani?
Well, I think he’s an exciting candidate for New York City. I’ve been on the left for a long time, and I think he represents a maturation of the U.S. left — or at least the New York City left — in that just a couple of years ago, you wouldn’t really imagine a democratic socialist candidate like him being so focused on bread-and-butter economic issues. He might have gotten critiqued for not focusing enough on all the other issues that people in his base would have cared about.
To that extent, I think it’s positive growth and it shows at least the charisma that he has and the ability to be super-relatable. Those aspects of his campaign are things that Democrats can learn from.
Of course, there are other areas in terms of the context-specific nature of his own political views and the types of economic policies he’s focusing on that you wouldn’t want to generalize beyond places where it would be appropriate to do so.
And the extent that people say: Oh, well, Mamdani won in New York, and so that shows that you can go to whichever other place in the country and have whatever views you have, however progressive they may be, on social and cultural issues, and whatever positions you’ve ever taken is not going to be an issue — of course, that’s not true.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how generalizable his media campaign is. Because the thing about New York City is it is soaked in media. It is very digital. It is very easy for candidates to go viral here because they also get attention from outside.
So the signal that the algorithms are getting is that everybody is interested in Zohran Mamdani. I mean, the number of people who are watching Zohran Mamdani videos is often, if you add a couple of them up, just significantly more than the number of people who are in New York City.
So there is a dimension where New York City has a tendency to have very media-savvy mayors. Eric Adams — say what you will about him — the guy is a showman. [Laughs.] And I think it was a little bit less true for Bill de Blasio, but it was true for Rudy Giuliani. Donald Trump, who comes out of New York City, is a showman.
And so if you look at the people New York City produces, they are great at attention. And it’s not possible to get that much attention in the same way in rural districts in Ohio or in Oklahoma. So you have to do other things, and you have to rely more on paid media.
It’s not to say that these things have no relevancy — they actually have a lot of relevancy for a national campaign. Presidential candidates are working in that attentional space, too.
Yes, without a doubt. But of course he’s going to get vilified like crazy in every swing district, and so his face and everything he said is going to be on TV as the face of everything that’s wrong with the Democratic Party. So we’re going to have to deal with that, as well.
Well, I think that’s a place where the Democratic Party is going to have to get better at being a big tent and knowing how to describe itself as a party that has many different types of candidates and people in it, in a way it has a lot of trouble doing right now.
Absolutely.
And that goes in both directions. It goes for Zohran Mamdani on the left, and then it goes for allowing candidates to moderate in places like Nebraska or Kansas or Ohio in a different direction.
The parties did not use to be nearly as nationally unified as they are now. This is a historical aberration from where we’ve been, and I think this is going to become more important: Can you actually treat that as a strength — not something you’re always explaining away?
Absolutely. Just like you said, that’s going to have to go in both directions.
The degree to which progressives in the coalition are willing to say: OK, we have folks here who we don’t agree with on everything, but we recognize that they’re helping to build our bench. And many of them are also great economic populists, so we have things that are commonalities with them. Some of them are not, and that’s OK, too. We need to have the broadest bench we can possibly have.
Then on the other hand, the more Blue Dog or centrist Democrats of different kinds need to be amenable to the fact that the Democratic Party, especially in urban areas, is just very different than it is in the rest of the country. So, yes. Absolutely.
Do you think the problem of the Democratic Party’s bench is that it feeds on itself? The weaker the Democratic Party gets among working-class voters, the weaker it gets in rural areas, the weaker it gets among voters without a college education — it just becomes harder for the Democratic Party to find candidates in those groups. Because there are just fewer of them. And they’re more unusual when you do find them.
It has often felt to me that the Democratic Party should spend a lot more money on recruitment and talent discovery than it seems to.
Absolutely.
But I also know that one of the ways that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which runs House recruitment, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — they look a lot for which candidates can fund their campaigns.
Yes. That’s why you don’t have so many working-class candidates. [Chuckles.]
When you begin with a question of where you are going to get the money for the candidacy, then that’s obviously going to point you toward more moneyed candidates.
But this is a deeper problem than just candidate recruitment — which by the way, I completely agree. There are some states where, say, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. or sometimes even Democrats have candidate training programs directly targeted toward working-class candidates.
New Jersey is a great example of that. The unions there have a huge amount of working-class and union candidates — like hundreds of them, all around the state — because they’ve had this super-concentrated effort to get union and working-class people into office and running for office. There’s no reason you can’t have programs like that in other states. And having working-class candidates is not the be-all and end-all. But it’s an important part of the story.
I think the deeper issue is just the presence of organization in rural and small town areas. There’s just nothing there. My dad’s family comes from a small town in rural Indiana, and there’s literally no infrastructure of any kind for progressive candidates to emerge, because there are no unions anymore. There are no organizations like civic associations that people can join.
And so I actually think that’s a big part of the story: Let’s take some of these billions of dollars that the Democrats spend on paid media every time, and let’s put 10 percent of it into building year-round grass roots organizations in red and purple states — not even the Democratic Party itself, but just civic associations that are doing good work to try to solve community problems. And that’s where some of these candidates can bubble up.
That’s not a short-term project, obviously. But the hollowing out of civic institutions and of the presence of any kind of associational mechanism that could identify and shepherd those sorts of people toward running for office is, I think, a gigantic problem.
We just need to invest — well, we’re hardly investing anything in that — and the Democratic Party needs to do that. Unions need to do that. It’s a longer-term project. Otherwise, we’re ceding the vast geographic majority of the country to conservatives and their associations. We don’t need to do that. That’s not inevitable.
That problem, and the problem of authentic and strong candidate recruitment, I think, go hand in hand.
As American politics has nationalized, individual candidates are held much more to account for their entire party than used to be the case. So if you were running as a Democrat or as a Republican in 1994, it was easier to run as a very different kind of Democrat or a very different kind of Republican than now, where people say: Yeah, I know you, Sherrod Brown — I’ve known you forever. But I know what the Democratic Party is, too. And you vote for Chuck Schumer as majority leader.
Or the flip: You might run a moderate Larry Hogan, who was governor of Maryland and a popular politician there. But he loses because people know that if he goes to the Senate as a Republican, he will vote for John Thune, and that will empower the Republican Party.
People are making a very, very rational calculation there, that the D or R next to someone’s name, particularly if we’re talking about the House or Senate, is more important than their name — by a lot.
But getting the parties to a point where people feel represented by them, lowering for the Democrats that Democratic penalty in Rust Belt states, is really, really, really important. Because people are weighing the party so heavily in their voting decisions now, the party itself is a brand they kind of like in the places where you actually need to win.
One question — I think it’s an open one that I don’t really have a great answer to — is: What is the most effective means of changing that brand? Because it’s certainly not going to come from the party leaders saying different stuff. Nobody really listens to them anyway.
I think it’s going to come through these politicians on the ground trying, district by district, to tell a different story about the Democratic Party until we can find a point at which more working-class people in a more diverse array of contexts are willing to take Democrats seriously.
That means that Democrats need to start winning seats in some of these much more difficult contexts, and they need to start learning how to be more effective at messaging. Is it moderating? Well, sometimes. But it’s also sometimes just taking a progressive position — but talking about it in a way that’s resonant with people.
So it’s like: OK, well, we want to have a reasonable position on immigration. It doesn’t mean we need to go to Trumpland on this and be dehumanizing and treat immigrants with disdain and all the things that they’re doing.
But it means we need to say: People who are playing by the rules — who have been here in the United States and contributing to our economy, and they’re a meaningful part of our society — if they’re not criminals, they should have a pathway to citizenship.
That’s a viewpoint that the vast majority of Americans agree with. And it’s not a conservative position — it’s a progressive position. And so, is that moderation? Well, maybe compared to open borders or something, but it’s still a robustly progressive position. And I think there are a lot of things like that Democrats could do that would both be amenable to people in their coalition who they need to keep on board. And also enable them to message more effectively among people who are very skeptical of Democrats currently.
I think people have gotten way too pessimistic about changing party reputations. We have watched it happen over and over and over again in the past couple of decades.
Bill Clinton substantially changed the reputation — whether you think that was for better or for worse — of the Democratic Party. Donald Trump substantially changed the reputation of the Republican Party — changed who votes for it. Barack Obama changed the Democratic Party, in his era at least.
But what’s the common denominator in all those cases?
Party leadership.
Right. But it’s not going to come from the current party leadership. [Chuckles.]
So that’s what I was about to say. A thing that is a bit distinctive about the Democratic Party in the past couple of years is: I think, in a strange way, it’s been leaderless.
Absolutely.
Biden ran as a consensus candidate in a very strange year — the pandemic year — and it was just sort of that everybody could agree on him in the Democratic Party. He built this big coalition with the Bernie side of the party, and he was a very coalitional candidate in a way that really decided not to try to reshape what the Democratic Party was. He was trying to bring all the factions in and keep them on board. And by then, he was already very weakened as a communicator and party leader.
And then, 2024 is such a strange year, with his dropping out and then the nomination being passed to Kamala Harris, with no primary at all. There’s no time for a party leader to exert control over what the story of the Democratic Party is — where it is going left, where it’s going right, where it’s just changing its position.
So you’ve had the Democratic Party, I would say, even as it has been very ambitious on policy, it has been in a state of communicative drift at the national level since 2016.
So then, what the next party leader does in 2028 is going to really matter. And what kind of leader the Democrats pick — is it somebody who is understood as trying to change the party? Somebody understood as representing its current mainstream? — that will really decide what the future of that looks like, at least in the immediate term.
Yes. But that’s probably going to depend to some degree on the test cases from 2026. It’s partly why it’s really important to get a lot of these folks out there who are, I think, the more promising candidates to provide these models that we could try to push for in 2028.
I don’t want to speculate about 2028 — I have no idea. But somebody like these candidates who we’re talking about — who are from a Rust Belt state or from a more of a red state and who have this very, very relatable attitude and who are really driving home economic populism and have attitudes that are out of step with the way Democrats would traditionally talk — that’s the kind of candidate that we need. Whether or not we’ll get one, who knows?
I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
To be nerdy, I’ll say a couple that are along the lines of what we’re talking about today.
One is very similar to the point I was just making, this book by Theda Skocpol and Lainey Newman called “Rust Belt Union Blues,” which talks about the hollowing out of associational life in the Rust Belt and the ways that has affected the move to the right in those areas.
Another one is this beautiful book that’s a few years old now called “We’re Still Here” by Jennifer Silva, which looks at working-class life in northeast Pennsylvania and shows the utter disillusionment that working-class people have with all institutions and the depth of the problem that we have in trying to rebuild trust in institutions.
And then, I guess for something different: I just read a fantastic, tour-de-force history of 500 years of Latin American and U.S. political and economic development by the historian Greg Grandin. It’s called “America, América.” Highly recommend it if you want to get a sense of the ways in which Latin America actually shaped the United States in surprising respects.
Jared Abbott, thank you very much.
Thank you, Ezra. I appreciate it.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Transcript editing by Andrea Gutierrez.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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