What The Hell America!

In early February, a group of Democrats came together under the aegis of the centrist think tank Third Way to debrief the party’s catastrophic loss in November and chart out a path forward. The gathering correctly identified some of the most important problems that are keeping Democrats from reaching working-class voters. But its conclusions fell woefully short on solutions that would help working-class communities recover from decades of relentless corporate attacks.

Third Way acolytes have helpfully cast a spotlight on a problem that was all too obvious throughout the presidential campaign: working-class voters feel the Democrats are increasingly out of step with ordinary Americans.

A postelection survey by YouGov and the centrist Progressive Policy Institute, for instance, showed that working-class Americans overwhelmingly viewed the Democratic Party as out of touch and not “on my side,” and trusted Donald Trump over Kamala Harris on immigration and the economy (“Renewing the Democratic Party”).

Perhaps even worse, working-class voters also reported trusting Trump as much as Harris on issues that should have been slam dunks for the Democrats: Social Security, health care, and threats to democracy.

Similarly, a Third Way postelection poll showed that a much larger percentage of working-class voters viewed Democrats as too liberal compared to those who viewed Republicans as too conservative, and many more viewed Harris as too liberal than those who viewed Trump as too conservative. These are real problems for Democratic candidates whose success depends on reaching more working-class voters — and in turn, for the party’s ability to win control of the presidency or US Senate.

To counteract the Democrats’ flagging support among the working class, Third Way’s February gathering put forward a series of policy and messaging prescriptions for the party that they claim can help Democrats turn things around. Some of these proposals are sensible and align well with the findings of my research through the Center for Working-Class Politics and others on the Democrats’ most important liabilities with working-class voters.

For instance, the gathering’s final report urged Democrats to recognize that working-class families are really struggling, despite what some macroeconomic indicators might suggest, and that working people have legitimate grievances with the way Democrats have handled the economy. In turn, the report urged Democrats to center every policy conversation around clear and easily understandable bread-and-butter economic issues that matter in the lives of all working people. These are welcome critiques of a Democratic Party whose 2024 standard-bearer chose to run away from rather than embrace this approach on the campaign trail.

Furthermore, the Third Way gathering’s takeaways highlighted the urgent need for Democrats to engage with working-class voters in an authentic, relatable, and nonjudgmental way, and for candidates to spend real time in working-class communities — especially outside of liberal strongholds. More encouragingly still, the Third Way’s strategy correctly highlights the critical importance of finding and recruiting more candidates with a working-class background who are more likely to appeal effectively to working-class voters.

Yet despite the Third Way’s helpful focus on the Democrats’ working-class problem and some of the necessary strategic pivots to right the working-class ship, the Third Way document falls flat in two critical areas that research suggests are essential for a long-term realignment strategy: attacking elites and proposing policies that will actually improve the lives of working-class Americans and their communities.

On the first score, the Third Way playbook doesn’t reject the idea of populism altogether. It councils a “thoughtful” approach that steers clear of wholesale attacks on economic elites: candidates should critique bad apples in the corporate world, “instead of attacking ‘corporations’ as a whole” (it’s not clear why they thought the scare quotes around the word corporation were necessary), and that Democrats should “critique corporate excess and corruption but avoid an anti-capitalist stance.”

While there is some truth to the concern that attacking economic elites can become alienating to voters if taken to the extreme — especially if couched in unfamiliar leftist jargon — overall, the evidence does not support “populism lite.” To the contrary, our analysis of 2024 Democratic performance in swing districts showed  that the candidates who used anti–economic elite rhetoric generously overperformed baseline expectations considerably more than candidates who avoided this rhetoric.

What’s more, our systematic examination of 2022 congressional candidates found that candidates’ use of anti–economic elite rhetoric had a positive effect on their general election vote share in predominantly working-class districts. Attacking economic elites is key to show working-class voters that progressives understand and viscerally feel their economic pain.

In turn, while the Third Way folks are correct that working-class Americans strongly support centrist economic policies aimed at spurring economic growth and limiting government spending, they also overwhelmingly favor a wide range of ambitious progressive economic policies, that, unlike the centrist policies outlined above, may actually do something to counteract decades of stagnation and economic decline among working-class Americans, ranging from trade policies to reinvigorate American manufacturing and higher minimum wages, to putting workers on corporate boards of directors and strengthening labor unions. A substantial majority even favor a federal jobs guarantee.

Likewise, Third Way analysts are right to point out that we need to be cognizant of working-class voters’ skepticism of new programs to expand large-scale government spending and deep general mistrust of government, but their solution is more of the same Clinton-era nonsolution that played a major role in precipitating working-class abandonment of the Democrats to begin with. In particular, they advocate “simple, tangible” policies such as “middle-class tax cuts, support [for] public education, and . . . spending cuts where needed.”

It’s difficult to imagine a less-inspiring policy bundle to show working-class Americans that Democrats have their backs. America’s working class is in an economic hole over forty years in the making: Democrats stand little chance of convincing workers to trust them again if they have no policy alternatives that match the scale of the setbacks they have faced in recent decades.

Unless a bench of genuine economic populists arises among the progressive ranks who can both speak to working-class voters’ understandable anger and resentment toward the Democrats and provide a real policy alternative that serves working people in the long run, Democrats are likely to continue apace in their decades-long break up with the working class.