Here’s How Economic Populism Can Win
To win competitive districts, left-wing candidates must challenge both economic oligarchy and cultural elitism.
Vehicles on the trim assembly line at the General Motors assembly plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Tuesday, April 9, 2024. (Emily Elconin/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Economic populism is finally getting its due — at least in election post mortems. Even the most milquetoast of liberals have identified the prime culprit of Kamala Harris’s defeat as her failure to center Americans’ economic anxieties and frustration. Indeed, Donald Trump’s brand of populism delivered him a surprisingly strong showing among working-class voters — particularly working-class Latinos.
As our work with the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) has shown, there is substantial evidence to support the argument that a stronger emphasis on economic populism could have helped the Democrats. We’ve found that candidates who focus on economic populism perform better — in both experimental tests and in real congressional elections — than candidates who do not. In fact, just before the election, our survey testing Harris messaging among Pennsylvania voters found that populist messaging was her most effective approach for winning working-class support.
Yet as a number of figures around the Democratic Party have noted, there are important reasons to question whether populism alone can truly solve the Democrats’ working-class woes.
John Halpin, for example, makes a convincing argument that economic populism “is a necessary if insufficient component for building a multiracial working-class coalition in the Democratic Party.” Ruy Teixeira goes further, calling economic populism the “Opiate of the Democrats.” He criticizes the “magical thinking” employed by some on the Left that seems to suggest that “simply changing the subject to economics will evaporate the Democrats’ many cultural liabilities.” “Culture matters — a lot,” Teixeira argues, and turning the populist dial up to eleven won’t drown out whatever cultural noise seems to be pissing off workers.
These critics have a point. Flying the banner of “more economic populism” enables the Left to focus on economic issues while steering clear of more divisive debates around culture. As we have argued, and postelection survey evidence has suggested, the Democrats’ poor reputation with working-class voters is due, in part, to the perception that they are culturally out of touch. Denying this obvious fact is folly. And if Democrats want to win more working-class voters, they have to address the problem head on.
Still, if some economic populists risk ignoring their cultural liabilities, liberal skeptics of populism risk a different mistake: advocating for a return to Clintonism. After all, the New Democrats’ worship of the “knowledge economy” and the old Blue Dog coalition’s embrace of NAFTA and the job loss that took place thereafter were a big part of why working-class Democrats left the party.
Democrats need to address the economic interests of the working class, which means confronting the millionaires and billionaires and the warped economy they’ve created, while also speaking to the values of most workers. And that means confronting liberal cultural elitism.
In other words, the problem is that economic populism alone simply isn’t populist enough.
Elite Culture and Its Discontents
One of the most important steps Democratic candidates can take is to recognize that populism necessarily requires a critique of cultural elites. As Teixeira notes, “To put it bluntly . . . working-class voters . . . harbor deep resentment toward elites who they feel are telling them how to live their lives, even what to think and say, and incidentally are living a great deal more comfortably than they are.” Or as Democratic Congressman Jared Golden – who scored an impressive victory in a Maine district that Trump won handily in 2024 – explains it, “A lot of the people who proclaim to speak for the party often talk about a lot of Americans in a kind of condescending way and I think will talk at them but not really hear them.”
We have to recognize that for many working-class voters anger at cultural elites is an expression of their anger at economic elites. In recent years, as the Democratic coalition has become not only more educated, but also much more affluent, the aesthetic and cultural preferences of liberal elites have become increasingly prominent. It’s not a stretch to say that the values and views of the liberal elite are now dominant in the media, the academy, the arts, and increasingly in politics.
For a populism of the Left to be believable, Democratic candidates must be willing and able to criticize the cultural elitism within the Democratic Party itself, and criticize the party for being controlled too long by coastal elites who don’t understand or care about working-class Americans. They should crack jokes at the expense of the tech billionaires Harris surrounded herself with during the campaign who care more about minimizing their tax bill than bringing back jobs, and elitist progressive professionals who care more about getting their kids into Harvard than reshoring manufacturing jobs. They should make fun of the highfalutin academic language that many people in and around the party often use. And yes, they should go on Joe Rogan.
Today it is not only billionaires who are screwing over working people, but also many liberal elites, who snub their nose at the values embraced by many working-class families. It’s important to keep in mind that many of the same elites who preach a constant revolutionizing of social norms have benefited quite handsomely from the rigged economy Democrats helped unleash during the Clinton years. In some ways, it’s much safer for Democrats to bash the cartoonishly villainous superrich (who donate to the Republican Party) than it is to go after the much larger caste of wealthy cultural elites within their own party who personify working-class voters’ feeling of Democratic condescension.
Democrats need to understand workers’ sense of outrage and resentment at seeing the top 20 percent of the country (not just the top 1 percent) “live their best lives” while everybody else wonders if their kids will ever have a shot at the American dream. And Democrats also need to rethink their approach to tackling cultural and social issues if they ever hope to reach more working-class voters. Progressives need to face the fact that working-class voters are just a lot more conservative than middle-class voters on many of these issues. Our analysis of 141 questions across the American National Election Study (ANES), General Social Survey (GSS), and Cooperative Election Study (CES) shows that while Americans without a four-year college degree are actually more progressive than middle-class voters on economic issues (like support for unions, tax and trade policies, etc.), they disagree with progressives on immigration policy and racial issues, and social issues from abortion to gun rights.
The only working class we have is the one that actually exists, not the one progressives wish existed. As a result, as Halpin bluntly but accurately puts it, we have to “stop telling working-class voters they have the wrong beliefs about immigration, climate, race, gender, democracy, and patriotism.” This does not mean punching down at vulnerable groups or sacrificing principled stances on key social issues at the altar of political expediency. Instead, it means thinking from an organizing perspective.
As any union organizer will tell you, it’s impossible to win majority support for a union drive by telling people their good-faith concerns about the potential downsides of unionization are irrational or misguided. Instead, you have to take workers’ questions seriously, treat them with respect, and try to gradually persuade them of the union’s merits while also learning from their perspectives and opinions.
Democrats will only succeed with working-class voters if they acknowledge voters’ concerns about the party’s stances on divisive social issues and craft a response that opens up a conversation with those voters rather than sending them running for the MAGA hills.
Populism Is Popular
While there is some danger of assuming that Democratic candidates could try to paper over all their liabilities with a broad populist paintbrush, right now the problem is the opposite: Democrats almost never tap into working-class grievances or outrage beyond an occasional generic “families are struggling to make ends meet” or a pithy recognition that drug prices are too high. For instance, in a speech to union workers in August, Tim Walz — the Democrats’ chosen embodiment of blue-collar America — talked about the importance of unions, called out Trump’s hostility to worker rights, and even managed a jab or two at corporate greed. But at no point did he recognize workers’ feelings of being left behind, of not being heard, of being taken for granted, or of getting screwed over for decades and seeing their communities crumble — let alone the central role that Democrats played in creating that suffering through free-trade policies and Wall Street deregulation.
Democrats like Walz say (at least some) of the words that should be included in an effective appeal to working-class people — “billionaires,” “greed,” “hard work,” and even “football” — but the result is a bloodless message that sounds closer to an AI-generated answer to the prompt “write a populist speech” than a visceral appeal to working-class anger and resentment. And that’s in the comparatively rare cases when Democrats are at their best!
The rest of the time they’re caught up with Silicon Valley–inspired appeals to the “opportunity economy” and tone deaf invocations of “joy.” Democratic senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut summed up the problem well in a postelection rant on X/Twitter: “We came to be the party of the Establishment, and people were able to look past Trump’s rough edges because he seemed, to them, like somebody who would fuck up the whole system.”
And the hesitancy to embrace populist appeals is apparent across much of the liberal intellectual scene. Halpin, Teixeira, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith, and others all argue that transformative progressive economic policies simply aren’t popular among the working class. Halpin argues that, according to public opinion surveys, “working-class voters express the most enthusiasm for a host of proposals that go well beyond traditional left-populist ideas.” As evidence, he cites a YouGov Blue–PPI survey that finds working-class voters express stronger support for “making it easier to start a business” (82 percent) and “reducing the budget” (81 percent) than they do for traditional economic populist policies like increasing corporate taxes (53 percent) and “taxpayer-funded healthcare insurance” (47 percent).
Halpin goes on to assert that his findings “are consistent with other data over the past decade showing serious declines in working-class trust in government, diminished support for new social spending, and widespread concerns about government corruption, mismanagement, and overly burdensome regulatory regimes.” While some of this is true — especially perceptions of poor governance by Democrats and low trust in government — the evidence overall just doesn’t support Halpin’s claim that working-class Americans are fundamentally economic moderates, nor that their views on economic issues have drifted rightward through the years.
Yglesias too argues that “some sectors of the left harbor weird fantasies about the possibilities of politics grounded in “populist” economics.” He goes on to complain about a “hard left” that sees too many upsides to progressive economic policies and too few workers lining up behind those proposals. Other mainstream Democratic thinkers make similar points, arguing that the party has moved too far left on economics, leaving workers in the dust. But is this true?
In short, no. Our analysis of over-time trends in working-class support for progressive economic and redistributive policies — drawn from questions across the ANES, GSS, and CES — indicates little change in attitudes over the past decade. We see modest fluctuations in some cases — such as increased support for government spending on roads, health care, and welfare and a decline in opposition to spending on law enforcement between 2014 and 2022 — but no sign of a clear over-time trend either in favor of or opposition to progressive economic policies.
Our analysis of a host of questions from the 2021–22 waves of the ANES, GSS, and CES indicates strong working-class support for progressive economic policies, ranging from the 87.9 percent of working people who support lowering prescription drug prices to the 67.9 percent in favor of increasing taxes on the wealthy. The list goes on: 69.1 percent of working-class Americans favor import limits to protect US jobs, 64.8 percent prefer greater investments in state education spending, and 54.8 percent even have a positive view of a federal jobs guarantee. Likewise, substantial majorities of working-class Americans support policies to strengthen workers’ economic leverage, including 70.5 percent who support raising the minimum wage, 68.8 percent who favor putting workers on corporate boards of directors, and 54.8 percent who favor labor unions (a figure on the low side of other credible estimates).
While these figures do not provide us with a ready-made answer for what the ideal economic populist policy agenda would look like, they do suggest that working-class voters are far from the simple low-tax and small-government economic conservatives that many liberals imagine them to be. Even the fact that working-class Americans are opposed to greater regulation and report historically low levels of trust in government is not at odds with enthusiasm for a more robust progressive economic program. Indeed, excessive bureaucratic red tape can in fact be harmful to important planks of the progressive economic agenda — like expanding public transit and accessing housing — and skepticism of the government is natural when it has consistently failed to deliver meaningful material gains to working people over the past forty years.
The evidence that economic populism is popular is clear. Working-class Americans are open to a populist champion from the progressive side, but they will only trust one who doesn’t condescend to them or admonish them that the way they see the world is wrong. That means a candidate who doesn’t talk working-class common sense on one day only to turn around and pander to elite cultural radicalism on the next.
Social Populism: A Longer View
More broadly, however, regardless of current public sentiment around progressive economic policies, many moderates don’t seem to recognize that sooner or later Democrats will in fact have to deliver major improvements in the lives of working people — or else the era of the “abundance agenda” will simply be a repeat of Clinton/Obama-era failures to address stagnating living standards and mounting despair among working-class people. Even substantial policy reforms from the Affordable Care Act to the Inflation Reduction Act are simply not up to the task of renovating the Democrats’ image among working-class voters — no matter how technically impactful they might be. The neoliberal revolution sunk American workers into a deep hole that only a package at least on the scale of the New Deal reforms of 1933–37 can overcome. And even then, Democrats will only succeed in regaining the trust of the American working class if they devise a compelling grand narrative on the necessity of those reforms, and why they ought to trust Democrats to deliver them.
It should be obvious that much of our political dysfunction stems from our economic dysfunction. Decades of deindustrialization in the heartland — much of it presided over by centrist Democrats — has ensured that many young workers, especially those without college degrees, cannot get a good job. Addressing this crisis calls for big, bold, economic programs. And it cries out for a genuine explanation of what went wrong, a story for how America got so bad for workers and how it can get better. That story is necessarily a story about class — about who gets to decide what the economy looks like and in whose interests.
That story, in other words, is a populist story. It’s just that very few Democratic candidates are prepared to tell it.