Since 2016, when Donald Trump shattered the Democrats' blue wall by winning over working-class voters across the Midwest, a cottage industry has emerged 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's veteran Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, sweeping red districts and railing against oligarchy and corporate greed.
Or it's Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who declared after the 2024 election: “Democrats must reclaim our identity as a party of the working class.”
Or the answer comes from a new generation of candidates (tattooed veterans, mechanics, waiters) whose biography is supposed to do the political work that politics hasn't done.
Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who has become the latest savior of the blue-collar left, put the theory at its most brazen.
“We are in a kind of class war,” he says. “And if the Democratic Party wants to have a future with workers, it needs to choose the side of workers.”
How do you define the working class? “Basically, everyone who doesn't make all their money with an immense amount of wealth.”
The theory is the same: somewhere there is a latent majority of the working class, united by shared economic grievances, waiting to be politically rallied to vote Democrat. The New Deal did it; Democrats can do it again.
I am a political scientist who has written extensively about rural and working-class communities. I think it's an open question whether these reform Democrats are really interested in understanding working class voters on their own terms. Because working class voters, as they tell us, are not simply waiting to be activated by the right program, the right messenger, the right phrase. “Fighting the oligarchy” probably won't do it.
Working class voters have a worldview. Over 50 years, it has become less compatible with the Democratic Party, not because working-class voters changed, but because Democrats changed.
Since the early 1950s, the American National Election Studies survey has asked respondents whether they consider themselves members of the working class. While a larger share of the electorate has earned a college degree and household incomes have increased, the share of Americans who consider themselves working class has remained remarkably stable: about 35% of voters over the past 70 years.
Working class identity is something more enduring and culturally grounded than a description of who is not a billionaire. It is a specific way of looking at the world.
There are conventional ways of defining the working class – such as lacking a college degree, belonging to a union, or earning a living through work rather than capital – but they often overlook 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 shares. By contrast, 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 Republicans than Democrats, and even then by narrow margins.
The data shows a politically homeless working class: alienated from Democrats, not captured by Republicans, caught in the middle with diminishing ties 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 economy, the theory goes, and the coalition would return.
Trade is where the argument is strongest. In 1988, about 74% of Democratic and working-class voters favored limiting 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 consider globalization to be in their interest. Alongside the trade gap is a growing divide over values that no tariff can fix.
In 1984, Democratic and working-class voters broadly agreed that treating people more equitably would mean fewer social problems. A divergence opened up after 2008 and accelerated after 2016, with Democrats now 28 points more likely than working-class voters to think we should care more about equality.
On cultural issues, the pattern persists: working-class voters did not act correctly in the reactionary revolt. Democrats moved left.
In 1986, similar levels of Democrats and working-class voters agreed with the statement: “This country would have far fewer problems if more emphasis were placed on traditional family ties.” By 2024 a gap of 25 points had emerged. A division also appeared on religion, abortion and immigration.
And even when working-class voters nominally agree with a Democratic policy goal, they don't trust the government to achieve it.
In 1958, working-class voters and Democrats were within five points of each other on whether the government wastes too much tax money. In 2024, that gap reached 27 points, not because working-class voters leaned toward anti-government extremism, but because traditional Democrats trusted the government dramatically more as an instrument of social change.
However, the Democratic policy proposal in response to any problem, invariably, is to expand the system.
On every major point of the progressive economic agenda, Democrats are now substantially to the left of the workers they claim to defend.
Working class voters have been telling pollsters for 60 years that the political system doesn't listen to them. They have built up distrust through specific experiences: deindustrialization that occurred under government supervision, trade deals that economists supported and workers paid for, a response to the 2008 financial crisis that saved banks and foreclosed on their homes, an opioid epidemic that regulators completely missed.
But the politics of economic grievances are a very small portion of what working class voters tell us. The data documents a comprehensive, decades-long divergence in how working-class voters and mainstream Democrats understand justice, government, personal responsibility, and social change.
Reducing that to class warfare bogs working-class voters down in a prefabricated progressive agenda instead of taking seriously what they are actually saying.
nicolas jacobassociate professor of American government at Colby College, is co-author of “Subverting the Republic” and “The rural voter.” This article was prepared in collaboration with the conversation.
