How to Win Over the Working Class: Economic Populism

1933

Sean Mason

July 29, 2025

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

The Democratic party has significant work to do if it hopes to bounce back from its 2024 electoral defeat. Making inroads with the working-class is the only way possible, and a new report from the Center for Working-Class Politics and Jacobin shows that economic populism is the best path to bring them back into the party.

The Democratic party lost big in 2024, badly enough to raise the question: where are the votes they need to win going to come from now, especially in purple states and districts? Major demographic groups, some of which were mainstays of the Democratic party in the past, swung to the GOP, especially Latino men and even a significant number of Black men.

By the time of the 2024 election, the Democratic Party had firmly committed to its strategy of appealing to suburban moderates at the cost of blue-collar voters. Back in 2016, Senator Chuck Schumer famously said: “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.”

Fast forward to 2025 and the Democratic party’s options for remaining competitive in swing districts seem more limited than ever. Is it too late for the party to turn back to the blue-collar voters it left behind years ago?

Our new report, which analyzes responses to 128 survey questions from gold standard academic surveys, finds that championing progressive economic policies can reverse the exodus of blue-collar voters from the party. It can also help us understand why those policies resonate most with working class voters.

Two key findings prove the potential of leaning more heavily into economic populism. First, contrary to what many might expect, the working-class has become both more progressive on economic issues and less conservative on social issues in recent decades. From abortion and gun control to gay rights and views on racial inequality, the working-class today is, if anything, more progressive than the working-class that helped elect Barack Obama in 2008.

What keeps this leftward shift from being a common part of narratives that describe the working-class, however, is that the upper and middle classes have moved left at an even faster rate over the same time period, making it seem like working-class voters have become more conservative over that time.

Second, relative to the middle and upper classes, economic populist policies resonate more with working-class voters, while socially progressive policies resonate less. While our first finding means that the working-class is still within reach of the Democratic party, the second makes clear that campaigns centered on economically progressive policies maximize their chances of winning working-class votes. Our report shows the overwhelming popularity of a host of economic populist policies. Increasing the minimum wage, increasing government spending on healthcare and social security, protecting jobs with import limits, and spending more on the poor are all examples of policies that we found resonate with an overwhelming majority of the working-class.

Our analysis challenges oft-repeated stereotypes about the supposed conservative drift of the working-class. For example, there are many who seem certain that the economic policies that helped propel Zohran Mamdani to victory in New York City’s recent Democratic mayoral primary would be disastrous outside of the city’s  liberal bubble.

That conventional wisdom doesn’t hold up in polling. For example, we found that about one out of every five working-class people who voted for Trump in 2020 also favored a four-policy package that included increasing income taxes on million dollar per year earners, federal spending on public schools, federal spending on social security, and the federal minimum wage. Even more surprising, support for a millionaire’s tax — part of Mamdani’s campaign but not his challenger Andrew Cuomo’s — was 44 percent among working-class 2020 Trump voters. This is only one example, but we’ve identified quite a few ways Democrats can appeal to working-class voters without sacrificing a strong economic program.

Our analysis shows that winning back working class votes from the GOP is still possible. And doing so does not require abandoning the bedrock principles of the Democratic Party by championing regressive social policies. It does, however, require leading with bread-and-butter economic policies that are overwhelmingly popular with working-class voters. The potential for the Democratic party to win back the support it needs to turn the tide on Trumpism is clear from our report. Let’s hope the Democrats pay attention.

Sean Mason is a data scientist and research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics. His research focuses on analyzing large datasets to understand the appeal of progressive economic policies across demographic groups.