Last week, Financial Times columnist Edward Luce published a sharply observed piece on the plight of “America’s shipwrecked working class.” Luce pointed out the gap between the Biden administration’s pro-union, pro-worker rhetoric and some of its major recent policy decisions, including student debt relief and imposing a rail labor agreement that workers rejected. “As a result,” Luce argues, “working classes of all colors have been steadily drifting towards the Republicans. More Americans with household income below $50,000 voted Republican than Democratic last month.” Luce’s analysis echoes claims from some Democrats that their party is too woke to appeal to working people, and from some Republicans that the GOP is, in the words of self-styled “populist” Republican Josh Hawley, “a working-class party now.”

There is no doubt that a significant portion of the Republican base is working-class — particularly among white workers — and that the GOP has made recent inroads among working-class Latino men in particular. It is also true that the data Luce draws on for his claim, the 2022 Fox News Voter Analysis, shows the GOP with a slight edge (49 to 48 percent) over the Democrats among voters with household incomes below $50,000 nationally. That is cause for concern, not just for the Democrats, but for the broad left in this country too.

Still, there is an analytical and political danger in overinterpreting headline data like this. A closer look at the data we have so far from the 2022 midterm elections, including the data that Luce draws upon, reveals a more complicated picture about how the American working class is voting than many of the postelection narratives suggest.