Eleven percent. That’s the magic number: the share of working-class Donald Trump voters that Democrats have a reasonable shot at persuading, according to the latest report from the Center for Working-Class Politics, or CWCP. The report amounts to one of the most comprehensive snapshots of working-class public opinion available — and the clearest evidence yet for the potential of a worker-centered politics.
If the Democrats want to vanquish MAGA, then they need to win back the 11%. Even garnering the support of half of them could deliver the party from the political wilderness. Doing so isn’t that complicated. It requires crafting a program that speaks to workers’ economic interests and social attitudes. Of course, that might be easier said than done.
The CWCP analyzed 128 public-opinion questions from three comprehensive surveys: the American National Election Studies survey, the General Social Survey, and the Cooperative Election Study. We looked at questions concerning immigration, civil rights, social norms, environmental policy, and two types of economic policy: predistribution (altering the division of the social income through bargaining power and higher wages) and redistribution (doing the same through taxes and welfare).
We sorted the responses by social class, so that we could compare the attitudes of working-class Americans — those with less than a college education and who fall in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution — with those of people above those education and income thresholds. We also looked at responses dating back to 1960 and through 2022, allowing us to compare attitudes across the decades. Then we isolated working-class Trump voters to compare their attitudes with those of the rest.
The resulting report confirms that working-class voters, even blue-collar Trump voters, aren’t a “basket of deplorables,” as Hillary Clinton once described them. They aren’t in thrall to a demagogue or hopelessly lost in the fog of MAGA conspiracies. Rather, working-class voters largely support a range of progressive economic policies and hold more progressive views than middle- and upper-class voters on a number of bread-and-butter questions (especially those concerning jobs).
For instance, a majority of working-class voters support raising the minimum wage, boosting spending on Social Security and Medicare, limiting imports to protect domestic jobs, cutting the cost of prescription drugs, increasing federal investments in infrastructure and public schools, making it easier to join a union, putting workers on company boards, implementing a millionaires’ tax, and even the notion of a job guarantee.
Even more remarkable: working-class views on civil and LGBT rights and immigration have shifted to the Left over the past two decades — a fact easily missed by those in the liberal media who assume that anyone who works with his hands is a frothing reactionary. For instance, a whopping 61% of working-class respondents favor a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and 74% oppose family-separating deportations. Similarly, more than 80% of working-class respondents support legal protections against discrimination for gays and lesbians and favor background checks for gun owners.
Put another way: working-class voters are largely economic egalitarians, worried about inequality and in favor of the government leveling the playing field between capital and labor, the asset-rich and the asset-less. These voters have also steadily drifted to the Left on a range of cultural issues. So what accounts for the fact that these voters have abandoned the Democratic Party? Our research provides some clues.
First, while working-class voters are populists and egalitarians, they aren’t liberal welfarists. That is, while they favor a policy mix aimed at improving wages and bargaining power and protecting them against the effects of globalization, they are quite skeptical of new government regulations, welfare spending, and expensive social proposals. They prefer combating inequality at the level of wages and workplace power over cash transfers.
Democrats have long assumed that all progressive economic policy is roughly the same, thus straying from the kind of economic populism that appeals to blue-collar voters. Today, the Democratic brand is much more closely associated with redistributive cash transfers and social services than with a program focused squarely on work, wages, jobs, pensions, and trade. The reputation is well earned, given that only 18% of Democratic congressional candidates in 2022 prioritized jobs-focused rhetoric, as previous research by the CWCP found.
Second, although working-class voters have indeed shifted to the Left on many cultural issues, they’ve been far outpaced in that direction by the educated, professional-class voters who now form the party’s base. The latter, it’s fair to say, have become ultra-liberal in recent years. As a result, a wide attitude gap has opened up between the two camps. This has generated a significant amount of class tension. And overcoming it won’t be easy. But the challenge is surmountable.
In broad strokes, what’s needed is a fairly simple formula. If Democrats want to win back workers, they can start by loudly advocating for a worker-focused program — more moderate on cultural issues but decidedly populist on economic ones. They ought to promise to raise the minimum wage, protect industrial jobs from free trade, increase infrastructure spending, better fund public schooling, expand Social Security, strengthen Medicare, and guarantee full employment.
Partly, this will require some redistributive taxation of the richest Americans, and Democrats shouldn’t be shy about saying so; the working class would be with them. But the predistributive element must remain at the forefront.
On social and cultural questions, meanwhile, Democrats have no need to chase the Trumpian Right. But they ought to pull back from social commitments that put them starkly at odds with working-class voters. For example, progressives don’t need to ape Trump’s cruel deportation policies, nor should they drop their commitment to finding a genuine path to citizenship. But they do need to recognize the need for greater border security and a more restrictive immigration regime.
Which brings us back to the 11%. We found that in 2020, that percentage of working-class Trump supporters fit in this populist sweet spot: economically egalitarian and culturally tolerant but moderate. With the right approach and candidate, they are persuadable. But are the Democrats amenable? That’s the big question.
As the party’s core support has climbed a few rungs up the class ladder, the interests, values, and attitudes of Democratic Party mouthpieces increasingly reflect this group. Not only do many top Democrats have no clue what working-class voters actually want, but they have fewer of them in their districts, and almost none in their offices, whom they might ask. Worse, even when the occasional liberal turns to the working class, there are strong headwinds preventing the message from becoming dominant in the party. Consider that so much of the Democratic Party’s image is not shaped by party communiqués, but through the institutions where liberals reign supreme: the media, the arts, the academy, think tanks, nonprofits, and philanthropic foundations. In these places, cultural liberalism is the currency of the realm, and liberal elites aren’t prepared to cashier their power.
What incentive do culturally progressive but economically inegalitarian liberals have to give up their seats in favor of working-class representatives? Not many. But if party elites have any desire of regaining a majority and pursuing a progressive policy agenda, they had better start listening to blue-collar voters. The quickest path back to power for the Democrats is to embrace a genuine social populism, against their donors wishes, and against the inclinations of many of their professionals. Indeed, doing so is the only shot they have of winning a working-class majority.
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Author: Dustin Guastella
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