Since 2016, when Donald Trump shattered the Democrats’ blue wall by winning working-class voters across the Midwest, a cottage industry has sprung up on the left dedicated to answering a single question: How can Democrats win back the working class?
The answers come in different forms. Sometimes it is veteran Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — barnstorming red districts, railing against oligarchy and corporate greed.
Or it’s Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who after the 2024 election declared, “Democrats must reclaim our identity as the party of the working class.”
Or the answer comes from a new generation of candidates — tattooed veterans, mechanics, bartenders — whose biography is supposed to do the political work that policy has not.
Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who has become the left’s latest blue-collar savior, put the theory in its most unguarded form.
“We are in a form of class war,” he says. “And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people.”
How does he define the working class? “Essentially everybody who isn’t making all their money on an immense amount of wealth.”
The theory is all the same: Somewhere out there is a latent working-class majority, held together by shared economic grievances, waiting to be politically reassembled to vote for Democrats. The New Deal did it — Democrats can do it again.
I’m a political scientist who has written extensively about rural and working-class communities. I believe it is an open question whether these reformist Democrats are really interested in understanding working-class voters on their own terms. Because working-class voters, as they tell us themselves, are not simply waiting to be activated by the right program, the right messenger, the right phrase. “Fight the oligarchy” probably isn’t going to do it.
Working-class voters have a worldview. For 50 years, it has been growing less compatible with the Democratic Party’s — not because working-class voters changed, but because Democrats did.
Since the early 1950s, the American National Election Studies survey has asked respondents whether they think of themselves as members of the working class. While a larger proportion of the electorate has obtained a college degree and household incomes have risen, the share of Americans who consider themselves working class has remained remarkably stable: roughly 35% of voters for the past 70 years.
Working-class identity is something more durable and culturally grounded than a description of who isn’t a billionaire. It is a specific way of looking at the world.
There are conventional ways to define the working class — such as lacking a college degree, belonging to a union or earning a living through labor rather than capital — but they often miss how people understand their own place in society. In the 2024 survey, for example, 21% of those who identify as working class have a college degree, only 5% belong to a private-sector union, and 37% own stocks. Conversely, most Americans without a college degree do not identify as working class.
The share of working-class voters who identify as Democrats has been declining for nearly seven decades: A majority did so in 1958, but not since.
Working-class voters have not become Republicans. Only in 2020 and 2024 — the first time in the survey’s history — did more working-class voters identify as Republican than Democrat, and even then by narrow margins.
The data show a working class that is politically homeless: estranged from the Democrats, not captured by the Republicans, stuck in the middle with diminishing attachment to either party.
So what drove them out?
A segment of the progressive left has a ready answer: Democrats abandoned working-class voters economically — on trade, wages and industrial policy. Working-class voters responded rationally. Fix the economics, the theory goes, and the coalition would come back.
Trade is where the argument is strongest. In 1988, roughly 74% of both Democrats and working-class voters favored limits on imports to protect American jobs.
By 2024, only 26% of Democrats favored limits, while a majority — 54% — of working-class voters continued to do so.
Unlike most Democrats, many working-class communities do not see globalization as being in their interest. Running alongside the trade gap is a widening divide over values that no tariffs can fix.
In 1984, Democrats and working-class voters broadly agreed that treating people more equally would mean fewer social problems. A divergence opened after 2008 and accelerated after 2016, with Democrats now 28 points more likely than working-class voters to think we should worry more about equality.
On cultural questions, the pattern persists: Working-class voters did not move right in reactionary revolt. Democrats moved left.
In 1986, similar levels of Democrats and working-class voters agreed with the statement “This country would have many fewer problems if there were more emphasis on traditional family ties.” By 2024 a 25-point gap had emerged. A divide similarly appeared on religion, abortion and immigration.
And even where working-class voters nominally agree with a Democratic policy goal, they don’t trust government to deliver it.
In 1958, working-class voters and Democrats were within 5 points of each other on whether government wastes a lot of tax money. By 2024 that gap reached 27 points — not because working-class voters lurched toward antigovernment extremism, but because mainstream Democrats became dramatically more trusting of government as an instrument of social change.
Yet the Democratic policy proposal in response to any problem, invariably, is to expand the system.
On every major plank of the progressive economic agenda, Democrats are now substantially to the left of the workers they claim to champion.
Working-class voters have been telling pollsters for 60 years that the political system doesn’t hear them. They have accumulated distrust through specific experiences: deindustrialization that happened on government’s watch, trade deals that economists endorsed and workers paid for, a 2008 financial crisis response that saved the banks and foreclosed on their homes, an opioid epidemic that regulators missed entirely.
But economic grievance politics is a very small slice of what working-class voters are telling us. The data document a comprehensive, decades-long divergence in how working-class voters and mainstream Democrats understand fairness, government, personal responsibility and social change.
Reducing that to class war jams working-class voters into a prefabricated progressive agenda rather than taking seriously what they are actually saying.
Nicholas Jacobs, an associate professor of American government at Colby College, is a co-author of “Subverting the Republic” and “The Rural Voter.” This article was produced in partnership with the Conversation.
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