I spent much of 2024 warning the Democrats that they neglected the working class at their peril. No Democrat, I wrote again and again, could win the White House without a working-class majority, defined as a majority of all voters of all races who lacked a college degree. This was true going back 100 years, with one exception. The exception was Joe Biden, and that was under the highly unusual circumstance of a raging pandemic that the incumbent, Donald Trump, managed very badly. And even in that contest, Biden lost the working class only by a small margin of four percentage points. Exit polls showed Kamala Harris did much worse, losing the working class by 13 percentage points, as did AP VoteCast, a survey that included people who voted by mail.
I don’t think it’s too soon to start thinking about how Democrats can win back this core constituency, which represented 57 percent of the electorate in the last election. The Washington Monthly (where—full disclosure—I’m a contributing editor) in its latest issue puts forward 10 ideas to achieve this. My friend Eric Redman, author of The Dance of Legislation (a book that gets pressed into every newly hired congressional staffer’s hand) has just one idea, but it’s a good one.
Before I delve into these, allow me to express my amazement that usually sensible people like Jonathan Chait, Fareed Zakaria, and Dana Milbank think it’s past time Democrats cut the working class loose. “The notion that there is a populist economic formula to reversing the rightward drift of the working class has been tried,” Chait wrote January 13 for The Atlantic, “and, as clearly as these things can be proved by real-world experimentation, it has failed.” Democrats, wrote Zakaria January 17 in The Washington Post, “should lean into their new [college-graduate] base and shape a policy agenda around them, rather than pining for the working-class Whites whom they lost decades ago.”
Note how Zakaria sneakily changed the subject from working-class voters to working-class white voters, sidestepping the Democrats’ current problem, which is leakage in support among working class Latinos and, to a lesser extent, Blacks. Milbank, writing November 29 in the Post, more explicitly conflated “working class” with “working-class whites”:
Working-class voters, roughly defined as those who aren’t college-educated, haven’t been reliable Democratic voters since the New Deal coalition dissolved—decades ago. So why do political analysts keep concluding that the Democrats have, all of a sudden, lost the working man and woman?
Again, where Milbank wrote working-class voters, he meant working-class white voters, who constitute only 55 percent of the total. Once more, with feeling: Democrats (excepting Biden) never enter the White House without support from the multiethnic working class. And while 50 years ago “working class” was virtually synonymous with “white working class,” today it is not. It isn’t political analysts who are out of date; it’s Milbank.
It isn’t even true that white working-class voters were reliable Democrats during the New Deal coalition’s heyday, and stopped being so in the 1960s. That’s sloppy history. Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson lost the working class by an even wider margin than Harris—14 percentage points in 1952 and nearly 18 points in 1956—and he lost the white working class by even more (nearly 18 points in 1952 and nearly 20 points in 1956). John F. Kennedy lost the white working class by nearly two points in 1960, even as he won the overall working class by less than one point. Jimmy Carter nearly won white working-class voters in 1976 (48.9–51.1), by which time the New Deal coalition had been pronounced dead, and Bill Clinton won white working-class voters outright in 1992 (54.8–45.2) and 1996 (52.9–47.1). (My source here is Jane’s American National Election Studies.)
The Monthly’s proposals to win back the working class follow the economic populism that Chait disdains. Philip Longman proposes that the federal government mandate that all employer-sponsored health plans follow Medicare pricing for hospitals, doctors, and drugs. Good idea! Bill Scher proposes that employers be required to use E-Verify to confirm that all their employees are legally documented. I’m less keen on that one because it’s been tried and failed, but it may be worth discussing as part of a broader and more humane immigration bill, which is what Scher has in mind. Audrey Stienon proposes that states penalize health care companies that engage in anticompetitive behavior. Sure, why not. Paul Glastris, the magazine’s editor in chief, proposes education vouchers not for schools but for private tutors. Sign me up!
Redman’s idea is for Democrats to publicize more aggressively the Inflation Reduction Act, whose grants flow disproportionately to red states. This is something I’ve suggested as well, but right now is an especially opportune moment because Trump is trying to defund the IRA, and also the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. That is so obviously idiotic that the Trump White House later clarified that it only meant those parts of these laws that fund the “Green New Deal,” an entirely separate set of proposals never enacted into law. What the White House meant, apparently, was that it didn’t want to fund the climate-related provisions of the IRA. But that’s pretty idiotic too, because that funding also flows disproportionately to red states. Democrats should work overtime right now putting Republican legislators on the record about whether they support cutting off economic development funds to their own Republican districts.
Naturally, this is just a start, and it’s hard to think about the next election when we’re all still reeling from the last one. But the worse things get now, the better they’ll likely be for Democrats in 2026—provided they ignore advice from Chait, Zaharia, and Milbank about their party’s most important constituency, which remains the working class.
