In 2020, exit polls and national databases showed Joe Biden neck and neck with Donald Trump among voters without a college degree. This year, however, a range of October surveys have found Trump leading Kamala Harris with the same group by double-digit margins: 11 points, according to a New York Times/Siena poll, or 10 points, according to both Pew and PBS/NPR/Marist.

Among working-class white voters, Harris’s deficits are even larger. A recent Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), Jacobin, and YouGov poll in Pennsylvania shows Harris trailing Trump among manual workers by 20 points, and by 15 points among voters who say they have experienced an unfair firing by their employer.

To understand how Harris and Democrats in general can connect more effectively with working-class voters, the CWCP designed a survey testing a range of key messaging approaches among 1,000 registered voters in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania.

The survey, fielded by YouGov between September 24 and October 2, 2024, had two primary goals: first, to test which of Harris’s own actual messaging styles performed best in Pennsylvania, and second, informed by the CWCP’s previous surveys — Commonsense Solidarity (2021),  Trump’s Kryptonite (2023), and Where Are All the Left Populists? (2024) — to test whether Harris’ messages could be improved, either by employing stronger populist rhetoric or placing more emphasis on progressive economic policy.

Here are some of the survey’s key findings:

• All populist and economic-centered messaging dramatically outperformed messages around Trump as a threat to democracy. These results held across partisanship and largely across class lines, measured by occupation, education, and income.

• Messaging around Trump as a threat to democracy underperformed all other Harris messages among virtually every group. While the strongest message we tested was supported by 58% of respondents, the “threat to democracy” message received just 49% support overall.

• Strong economic populist messaging that goes beyond Harris’s current populism-inspired rhetoric outperformed all other messaging among Pennsylvania voters. For instance, while strong populist messaging outperformed average Trump messaging by 3 points among independents, Harris’s current populist messaging underperformed by 2 points, and Trump as a threat to democracy underperformed average Trump messaging by 9 points.

• Strong populist messaging performed particularly well among working-class and independent voters — 57% of blue-collar workers supported the strong economic populist message, compared to just 45% who supported messaging focused on Trump as a threat to democracy. We see a similarly large gap of 54% to 42% among independents.
• Strong populist messaging did not lead to a trade-off between base voters and swing voters. This message received the highest support among African Americans, urban voters, and Democrats as a whole, and trailed no more than 2 points behind the preferred messages of women, higher-income, and highly educated respondents as well as service workers and professionals.

You can read the full report here.

View crosstabs.

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Authors: [email protected]

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