Two Simple Lessons for Democrats to Win the Working Class
Two Simple Lessons for Democrats to Win the Working Class
Plus, is the Harris campaign on the right track to do so?
Yesterday, The Nation published a new essay by Jared Abbott, director of the Center for Working-Class Politics. In it, he provides two clear lessons for Democrats if they want to win back the working class.
Lesson 1: Attacking Trump as a threat to democracy won’t work.
First, informed by data from the CWCP’s latest report (available here), Abbott argues:
Whatever the actual threat of a second Trump presidency, most of the voters that Harris needs to win in key swing states aren’t that concerned. Trump may be a liar and a terrible human being, but so, in the eyes of many voters, are most politicians. Yeah, he says crazy and even dangerous things, they concede, but they don’t take his bluster that seriously.
What they do take seriously is the feeling that politicians don’t care about them and never deliver on their promises. Whatever empirical validity these claims may hold, they are an understandable reaction to decades of wage stagnation, a Democratic Party that has veered further and further away from its traditional working-class base, and years of post-Covid inflation.
Instead, if Democrats want to win back workers, the CWCP found that “the best approach was to take a strong economic populist stance” in order to “speak to American workers’ anger and frustration at being left behind while billionaires and their Washington cronies just get richer,” and to “promise to prioritize working-class families.”
Lesson 2: Identifying with workers over elites on Wall Street and in Washington can work.
Of course, appeals to working-class voters work best when delivered by working-class candidates and Harris doesn’t fit that bill. Still, Abbott argues that “coastal elites from Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump have successfully connected with working people using the language of economic populism.”
So, is the Harris campaign on the right track? Is she making the most of the most popular messages? The answer is, no. Abbott analyzed recent ads from the Harris campaign and found that:
Of the 25 Harris campaign TV ads posted on the Harris YouTube page between September 15 and October 15, Trump as a threat to democracy or his incompetence as a leader were the focus of eight—more than any other theme. By contrast, economic populism was centered in just three ads, and economic elites—apart from Donald Trump himself—were mentioned in just four.
The Democrats can win workers back, but to do so they need to lean into economic populist messages that resonate with working-class voters. Lately, the Harris campaign hasn’t done so. And whether or not she wins the election may be determined by that fact.
Abbott concludes:
It will, of course, take much more than messaging tweaks to build a lasting Democratic majority that can deliver the gains American workers have been promised for so long. But in the short term, there are some simple steps that Democrats can take to improve their odds against MAGA nation: Stop imagining that most swing voters can be moved by scary messages about Trump’s authoritarian proclivities and instead focus on connecting with working Americans around their sense of disillusionment that the economy is rigged against them and that politicians don’t care about them.