Democrats are facing a dilemma and Michigan’s Senate primary perfectly illustrated it. Abdul El-Sayed, the charismatic progressive, defeated Rep. Haley Stevens, the establishment-backed moderate. The energy was unquestionably with El-Sayed. But a Washington Post analysis finds his support was concentrated in the state’s most educated counties and college towns; Stevens did better in many rural and lower-income areas. The dilemma: The left has the passion, but the middle still has the votes Democrats need to win in general elections.
The progressive answer is that Democrats can solve this by becoming more economically populist — attacking billionaires, expanding benefits and thus appealing to the working class. But these ideas don’t appeal to the actual working class. Among Democrats, a Pew survey shows 41 percent of college graduates say they like politicians who call themselves democratic socialists, compared with only 26 percent of those without degrees. Upper-income Democrats are also much more favorable toward democratic socialists than lower-income Democrats, 40 percent to 24 percent.
Democrats have spent years dreaming of a working-class restoration. President Joe Biden mounted the largest effort to court them with economics in decades. His administration poured hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure, factories, clean energy and semiconductors, much of it flowing to Republican counties. Yet in the next election, 2024, Donald Trump won voters without college degrees and those earning less than $50,000, while making gains among working-class Hispanic and Black voters. Over the last 30 years, the Democrats have moved left on economics — Obama was to the left of Clinton and Biden was to the left of Obama — and in that same period, the working class has steadily abandoned the party.
The lesson is not that economics don’t matter. But the Democratic Party’s problem is not that it is seen as too centrist on economics. Democrats routinely lead Republicans on issues like health care and, even now, the cost of living. Their liabilities are cultural and social issues — crime, immigration, the border and the “woke” agenda. One example: According to a poll by the Argument, among voters who disapproved of Trump but still leaned toward voting Republican, the GOP led on trust over crime 47 percent to 1 percent.
When Democrats come under pressure, they find it much easier to move left on economics than toward the center on culture. If they speak plainly and say that the border must be controlled, repeat offenders punished, standards of merit defended or that biological sex matters, they risk revolts from activists, advocacy groups and highly educated staffers. So instead, Democrats offer a larger subsidy, a new benefit or a fiercer attack on billionaires while leaving untouched the cultural attitudes that alienate many voters.
The evidence suggests this is backward. One study tested Democratic shifts across 29 policy issues and found that the largest electoral gains tended to come from moving toward the middle on social and cultural questions. Another report found that working-class voters placed far more emphasis than liberal college graduates on securing the border, reducing crime and adding police. Liberal college graduates placed far more emphasis on resisting authoritarianism, protecting trans rights and abortion access, and fighting climate change.
The divide widened not because working-class voters simply lurched to the right, but rather because college-educated Democrats moved left further and faster. According to an analysis by American politics scholar Nicholas Jacobs, in 2000, only about 8 percent of both Democrats and working-class voters favored increasing immigration. By 2020, 48 percent of Democrats did, compared with 24 percent of working-class voters. A three-point gap over abortion in 1980 became a 30-point gap by 2024. Large gaps also opened up over religion, family and trust in government not to waste taxpayer dollars.
Trump understands the political force of this estrangement. Listen to what he rails against in his campaign rallies: transgender athletes, DEI bureaucracies, elite universities, crime and an out-of-control border. He knows that these issues hit voters in their gut.
The answer is not for Democrats to imitate Trump, abandon minorities or become reactionary. It is to stop imagining that Medicare-for-all and wealth taxes will restore the New Deal coalition. That world and that coalition are gone. The good news is that the party already has a formidable modern coalition: college-educated voters, women, minorities, younger Americans and many working- and middle-class voters in metropolitan America. These voters want not a socialist revolution but effective liberal government that delivers — affordable housing, good schools, accessible health care, safe streets, a controlled border, legal immigration and economic growth. And perhaps this will help Democrats make inroads with the rest of the working class again too.
Democrats need to show culturally moderate voters that liberalism can distinguish compassion from permissiveness, openness from disorder and equality from ideological conformity. Michigan showed where the party’s energy lies for its base, the fraction of Americans who vote in primaries. The test is whether Democrats can turn that energy into a politics of common sense that appeals to the rest of the country.
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