Throughout the Trump era, Democrats have wrung their hands about how they can win over working-class voters.
Why not ask the Democrats who’ve actually done it?
That’s what Robin Johnson — a political consultant based in rural Illinois, and a part-time political science professor at Monmouth College — set out to do after Donald Trump first won the presidency, asking Democratic state legislators who won tough districts how they pulled it off.
But after Trump’s shocking second win in 2024 revived concern about Democrats’ working-class woes, the time seemed ripe to ask legislators about how they’ve managed to cope with the challenges of a new decade.
So, working with the center-left Progressive Policy Institute and co-authors Stuart Malec and Jolie Libert, Johnson interviewed 28 state legislators who won in heavily working-class areas in the seven main presidential battleground states.
They include Nevada state Assemblymember Max Carter, a retired union electrician; Michigan state Rep. Tullio Liberati, a construction small business owner; Arizona state Rep. Lorena Austin, a self-described “five-time college dropout” with sleeve tattoos; and Wisconsin state Rep. Karen DeSanto, a nonprofit executive and former professional circus clown.
The report, which Vox reviewed exclusively ahead of its publication, comes amid a factional debate within the party between rising left-wing and socialist candidates who have argued for more far-reaching policy proposals, and more moderate Democrats who have pushed for concessions to working-class cultural sensibilities. In the report, the authors said that lawmakers they focused on “could hardly be more different from the left-wing populists who’ve captivated the national media this summer.”
Generally, the legislators in the report focused on pocketbook issues, though in different ways — some embraced populist causes, while others positioned themselves as business-friendly. And they broadly agreed that cultural issues were Democrats’ biggest challenge in reaching the working class.
“It’s really interesting how common the themes and the challenges are from rural Georgia, right down to the border of Arizona, to Las Vegas, northern North Carolina, and then up in the ‘Blue Wall’ states,” Johnson told me.
I spoke to Johnson last week about his findings, and about what these state legislators’ experience has to tell us about the debate over the Democratic Party’s future. Our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, is below.
What’s changed in 10 years of interviewing legislators facing tough races
Walk me through where the idea for this project came from.
I’ve been working on this for 10 years. It started at a conversation at a little diner in Maquoketa, Iowa — a little “choke and puke,” as we call those places. I was with a former state senator from Iowa named Jeff Danielson, and it was right after Trump won. Most of the focus was on what happened at the congressional or presidential level, and we thought, why not take a look at state legislators competing in these tough districts?
I approached my friend and my congresswoman, Cheri Bustos, who I’ve known really well and helped on her campaigns, and said, would you be interested in working with us and sponsoring it? She said, absolutely, because her district, the 17th in Illinois, is rural working-class. And she was able to win these voters.
We talked to probably 75 current and former legislators for that first report. We did another one in 2021, focused on members of Congress and state legislators who win Trump districts. Then we did a third one last year, on Democrats in working-class districts in the heartland. Then she retired from Congress and I went to a PPI conference this past February, and PPI agreed to partner on this with a different focus, slightly — on the seven battleground states, on districts that are really close and have more working-class voters than the national average.
So, having done this several times before, what’s new in the latest version? What are people saying now that they weren’t, necessarily, in previous rounds of this?
In the past, when we focused on the Midwest, it was mostly all white, mostly men, some women. Now, we went to North Carolina and Georgia, and there were African American legislators, men and women. And we went to the West, and there were Latinos. But what was interesting to me was: Nobody brought up their identity in these interviews. I had to bring it up to one woman from Nevada, mentioning, “Well, you’re Native American.” “Yeah, but I don’t really talk about that much,” was the response.
That was one big takeaway: Nobody talked about identity. Their focus was totally on their constituents, their working-class constituents.
What were some of the common themes you saw in the responses?
There’s no secret sauce. They’re deeply rooted in their communities, they know the people that live there, they know the language, they work hard.
But they focus on economic issues. If somebody asks them about cultural issues, they’ll respond, but they try to get back to economic issues, because that’s what they’re hearing about from voters, mostly.
These folks are from a variety of backgrounds. Some are true working-class, they don’t have college degrees. One guy near Detroit runs a construction company, didn’t get a degree. Another woman we focused on from Arizona had tattoos all over and took 14 years to get her BA. Some are the traditional route — attorneys, some small business people.
But it’s a lot of different backgrounds, and we want to contrast that with the consultants who tried to make the perfect Frankenstein candidate out of [former Maine Senate candidate Graham] Platner. These people are out there — you don’t need to create it. They’re out there.
Cultural issues
On how politics has changed over the years, there’s a particularly vivid quote in the report from state Assemblymember Elaine Marzola from Nevada.
She tells you: “My campaign’s biggest adjustment in 2024 was shifting away from leading with social and cultural issues and instead focusing more directly on affordability and economic concerns.” And she adds, “While I remain progressive on many social issues, voters across backgrounds increasingly want leaders focused on affordability, education, and public safety rather than endless culture war debates.”
How widespread was that sentiment?
It’s very widespread. Their focus is on the issues that matter, that they’re picking up from their constituents. A lot of times they reported that some of the people in their campaigns told them they should talk more about abortion or other social issues — mainly abortion — and they refused to do it.
A lot of them talked about a major problem in the party being these litmus tests that groups have, that you can vote with them on nine out of 10 issues, but on the tenth issue, if you’re not with them, you’re an enemy.
If you’re going to have a true big-tent party, you’ve got to have some room for disagreements on some of these issues that reflect the local voters that people have in their districts. Several in Georgia told me pointedly that their leadership understood and would give them passes on votes that they knew they couldn’t be with them on. But in other cases, I heard a lot of pointed comments about these groups demanding 100 percent allegiance, that it’s all or nothing.
In a lot of districts down South, I heard from a couple gentlemen; it’s the Bible Belt. People go to church regularly. African Americans, the older generations of African Americans, are more middle-of-the-road, if not conservative on some of these cultural issues. So there’s got to be room for people to vote their districts on some of these cultural issues.
But on the economic issues, they’re there. They’re unified with the rest of the party.
Economic issues
Well, it’s interesting on economic issues, because there’s unity on focusing on affordability and pocketbook issues in some form. But you also describe how some people take a more populist approach, and others have a more business-friendly approach. Is there tension there?
We asked people, how would they describe themselves? And most of them describe themselves as moderate. But the range of issues you have at the state level may differ some compared to the federal issues. A true populist approach at the state level may not have the same meaning as a populist at the federal level.
In fact, some of the folks with business backgrounds were pretty aggressive in some of their policy ideas. I think [Assemblymember] Joe Dalia from Nevada is one, he actually combined with [Rep.] Ro Khanna on a policy idea, the congressman from Silicon Valley who’s definitely a progressive. Dalia’s background is in business entrepreneurship.
Is all politics local?
The dynamics are a little different in state legislative races, even tough competitive ones, because there’s just so much less national money, national interest, group interest, virality, all of the dynamics that are so important to national politics. These are truly local races. So do you think these lessons can apply to national politics?
These state legislators are easy to overlook. They’re close enough to the people that they’re in, they can knock doors more than like a member of Congress. You can’t really knock doors in a congressional race — you can do some and have volunteers do it, but these people are out doing it individually.
But they still get hit on national issues. Some of them didn’t do much TV — Georgia’s got smaller districts — but they’re on TV in Wisconsin. And they’ve got to raise money and then have the party help them out. They’re used to getting hit on national issues because the Republicans try to tie them to some of the more far-left ideas.
They also feel that the deep roots they have in the community help overcome that because they’re better known, they’re battle-tested in that regard. A lot of times, especially with social media, you think you’re going to come up with some neat little line to put on social media that’s going to carry you to a victory, or some pithy slogan or whatever. It’s really not. For these folks anyway, it just comes down to doing the hard work.
But this is the bench that the Democrats need. You want to pick some people down the road that have proven ability to win these tough districts — here they are.
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