Should Working-Class Candidates Run as Democrats?
Working-class voters of all shades and ethnicities are moving closer together in their political perceptions as they defect from the Democratic Party. So why is that and what should be done?
That depends on whether or not the Democratic Party brand is hopelessly tarnished for the majority of working people.
Since 2012, and maybe before that, the Democrats have been losing their traditional base of lower-income workers. In each presidential election since, the percentage of those earning $50k or below has fallen for the Democrats. As Matthew Karp writes in the New Left Review,
Republican gains were largest at the very bottom, diminishing with every upward rung: twelve points from voters making under $25,000, ten points from those making between $25,000 and $50,000, seven points from those making between $50,000 and $75,000, and five points from those making between $75,000 and $100,000."
It’s not all that hard to understand why the working class is giving up on the Democrats. As Sherrod Brown discovered in Ohio, 30 years after NAFTA, he was still confronting the destruction it wrought:
And I go back to Democrats over the last 30 years — essentially since NAFTA. Democrats have historically been the party of workers, but I’ve seen that support erode from workers because Democrats haven’t focused on workers the way that we should over the last 30 years…. But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign about NAFTA.
I’ve seen that erosion of American jobs and I’ve seen the middle class shrink. People have to blame someone. And it’s been Democrats.
Rather than finding ways to prevent corporate greed from destroying millions upon millions of jobs, key Democrats said out loud what many had been privately thinking: Workers are turning on us because they are essentially racists. Thus began a process of blaming the very victims of massive job dislocation that the Democrats failed to mitigate for their base.
Working-class voters are walking away. Maybe we should be listening to them.
Hillary Clinton made that clear in 2016:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.
(My book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, conclusively shows that the white members of the working class have become decidedly more liberal, not illiberal, on divisive social issues over the last several decades.)
Senator Chuck Schumer then turned the loss of working-class voters into a virtue:
For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.
Not quite enough, it seems. The Democrats lost Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, plus Michigan, to Trump in 2016 and again in 2024.
Working-class voters of all shades and ethnicities are moving closer together in their political perceptions as they defect from the Democratic Party. According to Karp’s reporting:
White voters in the MAGA era have been remarkably consistent: 55 per cent backed Trump in 2016, 55 per cent in 2020, and now 56 per cent in 2024. In racial and ethnic terms, Trump’s decisive gains this year came among African Americans, where his support jumped from eight to 16 per cent, and Latinos, where it grew from 35 to 43 percent. A range of further analysis suggests that Trump also made large if uneven national advances among Asian and Native American voters.
Meanwhile, research by the Center for Working Class Politics has shown that strong populist messaging was the best way to reach working class voters in Pennsylvania. They were ignored by the Democrats, who instead chose the least effective message: Protecting democracy.
Furthermore, in a recent study they show that “among working-class voters, hypothetical candidates with elite or upper-class backgrounds performed significantly worse than candidates from humbler backgrounds.”
The very strong run for the U.S. Senate by former labor leader Dan Osborn in Nebraska is elevating the idea that more working-class people should run. In fact, he is setting up the Working-Class Heroes Fund to support such candidates.
Should these new working-class populists run as Democrats? That’s the question that is tripping up left-liberals, the highly educated progressives who feel strong affinities with those in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, especially the technicians who help determine policy. They share values, concepts, ideological frameworks, and overall perceptions of how power functions in American society. Together they share the belief that the Democratic Party can be reformed so that it once again becomes the party of the working-class.
I think we will find that working people are hungry for an act of defiance against a system that repeatedly rewards political and economic elites at their expense.
Just writing that sentence makes me cringe. I’ve heard it again and again over the last half-century. There’s never a good time to break. There always another reason not to. Third parties fail. They become spoilers like Ralph Nader. The rules are stacked against independents. It costs too much. It’s just an act of virtue signaling since you will lose. A fusion ballot line that fights hard in the primaries and then supports Democrats is a better way to influence the Party. Pressuring, rather than bolting from them, is the only way to gain influence in the real world of politics. And on and on and on. I’m sure you can add many of your own.
Meanwhile, working-class voters are walking away. Maybe we should be listening to them. Maybe we should be engaging in a forthright dialogue about how they perceive the Democrats and how they would like to move forward.
I think we will find that working people are hungry for an act of defiance against a system that repeatedly rewards political and economic elites at their expense. As Bernie Sanders has said so many times,
The American people are sick and tired of corporate greed. They are sick and tired of record levels of income and wealth inequality.
What do working people really want to see from working class candidates? Here is one question I hope to ask in a working-class survey that will be run in the near future:
Imagine that Jane Smith, a respected union electrician in the auto industry, wants to run for Congress in Michigan. Her platform centers on protecting and enhancing wages, benefits and job security for all working people against the ravages of corporate greed.
She is trying to decide whether to run as a Democrat, Republican, or Independent. What would you advise?
I wonder what working people will say. Actually, I wonder what you would say.
