Winning Back the Working Class: To What, Exactly?

I recently attended a webinar sponsored by the Working Families Party, entitled Winning Back the Working Class. Everyone attending seemed to share the view that the working class has drifted away from the Democratic Party and that Democrats must change their messaging in order to win these voters back and prevail against MAGA Republicans.

The presenters provided sophisticated polling analyses, looking closely at the issues that matter most to working-class voters and what turns them off about the Democratic Party. The bottom line was that the Democrats needed to put forward a strong, progressive economic-populist agenda.

While I share the desire to derail MAGA in the coming elections, I find the “winning back” framework problematic. For starters, why do Democrats need to be convinced that a progressive economic platform should be adopted? A party that was truly in tune with the working class should arrive there on its own. And clearly it has not. Why?

In this case, the obvious answer may be the right one: the Democratic Party establishment does not believe in progressive populism. It is not comfortable, for example, with forcefully attacking job insecurity by guaranteeing a job at a living wage for everyone who wants to work and cannot find employment in the private sector. It does not want to provide universal health insurance or dramatically facilitate union organizing in order to empower working people.

Ideologically, Democratic leaders are more comfortable with a liberal version of trickle-down economics—one that lets corporations play the central role in the economy. It expects rising prosperity to flow from government policies that enhance private investment and profits. Getting rich is shared value and woven into the party’s culture as thousands of consultants, pollsters, and operatives compete for a share of the billions of dollars spent during each election cycle.

At best, the populist economic messaging is just a tactic for gaining votes. Working-class voters know it and look elsewhere.

Given that the Democratic Party is not fundamentally a working-class party, how will the adoption of more populist messaging change its character? It won’t—and, again, working-class voters know it.

In fairness to these progressive analysts, they understand that much more is needed. They want Democrats to recruit and run more working-class candidates, which would demonstrate a deeper commitment to working-class concerns. Over time, more working-class candidates could help transform the party into something closer to a working-class party and help solve the “winning back” problem. But everyone knows it won’t happen anytime soon.

The Working Families Party has been recruiting and supporting progressive candidates in Democratic Party primaries for many years. The party sees its mission, as best I can tell, as transforming the Democratic Party by advancing a working-class agenda within the Democratic Party and in state legislatures. It has been effective in states such as New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey, helping secure increases in the minimum wage, paid family leave legislation, and higher taxes on millionaires.

But something important is missing from its reliance on polling-and-messaging. If the Working Families Party were a working-class party, then its working-class base—not pollsters—would be developing its platform through some kind of bottom-up, face-to-face process. One can imagine dozens of grassroots meetings during which working people discuss and debate the issues they want their party to fight for. Polling can certainly play a role in testing issues with a wider electorate and bringing new concerns to the base for discussion. But the workers in the Working Families Party should be shaping the agenda.

Perhaps I am being naive or nostalgic, but isn’t that what progressive populist parties should do?

There is also the question of where the “winning back” should occur. Transforming the Democratic Party is only possible where the party actually exists. In vast areas of the country, it has withered away, making “winning back” impossible.

I took a quick look at nine Great Plains and central states: Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Idaho.

• In 1990, these states still retained elements of a progressive-populist tradition, and 10 of their 18 U.S. senators were Democrats. Today, none are.

• Of the roughly 1,400 state legislative seats in those states, Democrats do not even field candidates in approximately 40 percent of them.

• Nationally, there are about 130 U.S. House districts where Democrats routinely lose by 25 percentage points or more.

In these places, there is no party to win the working class back to.

One option is simply to concede roughly half the country to MAGA forces. But it would be a grave mistake to abandon the tens of millions of working-class voters who live outside blue and purple areas. Many of them may have voted red in the last election, attracted by populist rhetoric designed to attract them, but at the end of the day, they’re not going to be satisfied by what the Republicans deliver. Where do they go?

That leaves another option: build a new party of working people that concentrates on the red areas where Democrats have abandoned the field. Such an effort could begin with candidates like Dan Osborn, who has stepped into the working-class political vacuum in deep-red Nebraska. He ran well ahead of Kamala Harris in 2024 and is currently polling competitively against Pete Ricketts. There is room for many more candidates like him in these one-party states.

Building something new is a heavy lift, to be sure, and it will take time. But the discussion about why and how to do it must begin now. We need to remove the blinders that prevent us from seeing that an alternative to the Democratic Party must be built—a new party, of and by working people, is needed to fill this vast political vacuum.

The call to “win back the working class to the Democrats” needs to be turned inside out. The working class deserves its own political organization, independent of the Democratic Party, in order to win back its rightful place in our political system. Only then can working people speak in their own voice about how to build an economy that serves people rather than wealth—one that attacks runaway inequality and job insecurity.

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The questions raised in this essay are explored in much greater depth in my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need One of Our Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power.

The book examines why so many working people have abandoned the Democratic Party, why independents are now the largest political bloc in many states, what voters in the heartland actually want from politics, and whether a new working-class political organization can be built without acting as a spoiler.

Drawing on new polling and historical research, it argues that working people can build independent political power even in places where the Democratic Party has ceased to function as a competitive second party.

If these arguments resonate with you, I hope you’ll take a look at the book.