For 50 years, working-class voters' worldview has been growing less compatible with the Democratic Party’s — not because the voters changed, but because the party did.
shattered the Democrats’ blue wall by winning working-class voters, the Maine Senate candidate who has become the left’s latest blue-collar savior, put the theory in its most unguarded form.
,” he says.
“And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people. ” The theory is all the same: Somewhere out there is a latent working-class majority, held together by shared economic grievances, waiting to be politically reassembled to vote for Democrats. The New Deal did it — Democrats can do it again..
I believe it is an open question whether these reformist Democrats are really interested in understanding working-class voters on their own terms. Because working-class voters, as they tell us themselves, are not simply waiting to be activated by the right program, the right messenger, the right phrase.
“Fight the oligarchy” probably isn’t going to do it. Working-class voters have a worldview. For 50 years, it has been growing less compatible with the Democratic Party’s — not because working-class voters changed, but because Democrats did.survey has asked respondents whether they think of themselves as members of the working class. While a larger proportion of the electorate, the share of Americans who consider themselves working class has remained remarkably stable: roughly 35% of voters for the past 70 years.
Working-class identity is something more durable and culturally grounded than a description of who isn’t a billionaire. It is a specific way of looking at the world. There are conventional ways to define the working class — such as lacking a college degree, belonging to a union or earning a living through labor rather than capital — but they often miss how people understand their own place in society.
In the, for example, 21% of those who identify as working class have a college degree, only 5% belong to a private-sector union, and 37% own stocks. Conversely, most Americans without a college degree do not identify as working class. The share of working-class voters who identify as Democrats has been declining for nearly seven decades: A majority did so in 1958, but not since. Working-class voters have not become Republicans.
Only in 2020 and 2024 — the first time in the survey’s history — did more working-class voters identify as Republican than Democrat, and even then by narrow margins. The data show a working class that is politically homeless: estranged from the Democrats, not captured by the Republicans, stuck in the middle with diminishing attachment to either party. — on trade, wages and industrial policy. Working-class voters responded rationally.
Fix the economics, the theory goes, and the coalition would come back. Trade is where the argument is strongest. In 1988, roughly 74% of both Democrats and working-class voters favored limits on imports to protect American jobs. In 1984, Democrats and working-class voters broadly agreed that treating people more equally would mean fewer social problems.
A divergence opened after 2008 and accelerated after 2016, with Democrats now 28 points more likely than working-class voters to think we should worry more about equality. On cultural questions, the pattern persists: Working-class voters did not move right in reactionary revolt. Democrats moved left. In 1986, similar levels of Democrats and working-class voters agreed with the statement “This country would have many fewer problems if there were more emphasis on traditional family ties.
” By 2024 a 25-point gap had emerged. A divide similarly appeared on religion, abortion and immigration. And even where working-class voters nominally agree with a Democratic policy goal, they don’t trust government to deliver it. In 1958, working-class voters and Democrats were within 5 points of each other on whether government wastes a lot of tax money.
By 2024 that gap reached 27 points — not because working-class voters lurched toward antigovernment extremism, but because mainstream Democrats became dramatically more trusting of government as an instrument of social change. On every major plank of the progressive economic agenda, Democrats are now substantially to the left of the workers they claim to champion. Working-class voters have been telling pollsters for 60 years that the political system doesn’t hear them.
They have accumulated distrust through specific experiences: But economic grievance politics is a very small slice of what working-class voters are telling us. The data document a comprehensive, decades-long divergence in how working-class voters and mainstream Democrats understand fairness, government, personal responsibility and social change. Reducing that to class war jams working-class voters into a prefabricated progressive agenda rather than taking seriously what they are actually saying. Rebuilding L.A.
: Game Theory: Is L.A. Rebuilding For Survivors - Or For The Olympics? Author and CBS News correspondent Jonathan Vigliotti attempts to answer some questions about rebuilding communities in his new book about the Palisades Fire — and names a motive for a quick rebuild: the Olympic games coming to Los Angeles in 2028. Today we discuss one of the pivotal events of the 1960s: the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
Though the gunman was caught at the scene, confessed at trial, and even bragged about the shooting, his motives have largely been forgotten. Modern LA earned its first smoggy nickname 450 years ago, as the “bay of smokes.
” At the La Brea tar pits, we take a short walk through a long history with curator Regan Dunn, who explains how and why the first Angelenos would have set fires that filled the broad bowl of LA and foretold the curse of smog.
Please follow us on Google to support usUnited States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News: You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Contributor: Why Trump is manufacturing a new crisis in CubaFor more than 60 years, the U.S. has tried to pressure Cuba’s leadership into breaking. The regime has endured.
Read more »
Contributor: The Forest Service is too important to be a political pawnSome proposed changes, including to firefighting functions, have been criticized as seemingly intended to dismantle this storied institution.
Read more »
Contributor: U.S. should help contain Ebola outbreak, not aggravate the crisisClosing the U.S. border to anyone potentially exposed to the virus, including American aid workers, is likely to undermine containment efforts.
Read more »
Contributor: No single person should have the power to launch nuclear weaponsTrump’s mad rhetoric and impulsive outbursts put every American and millions of foreign citizens in real danger.
Read more »