Whatever Your Definition, Democrats Are Struggling With the Working Class

Much of the talking past each other that happens in debates around class dealignment is a product of differences in opinion about which groups should be included under the conceptual umbrella of “the working class.” This obscures an obvious fact that virtually everyone — including Maisano — is willing to concede: the group of manual, service, and clerical workers of all races whose marketable skills are relatively limited and who work under conditions of comparative routinization and supervision has been moving away from the Democrats and center-left parties around the world for decades, and continues to do so today.

As Maisano writes:

Routine manual and clerical wage workers with low education and low incomes were, for many decades, the bedrock of the Democratic Party and its center-left counterparts abroad. That is no longer the case. Across the rich capitalist countries, these voters have become a swing group, while a new constituency has taken their place at the core of the left-wing electorate: lower- to moderate-income but highly educated voters working in white-collar and professional settings.

Maisano argues that, despite the fact that the “traditional” working class has been moving away from center-left parties, if we understand the working class more broadly to account for the steady rise of sociocultural (semi)professionals — ranging from teachers and nurses to writers and musicians — as a share of the US population, we see that in fact the working class is not really moving away from the center left.

But is this true empirically? In short, no — at least not in the United States.

The graph below estimates the proportion of working-class Americans affiliated with the Democratic Party over time depending on whether the working class includes just the “traditional” working class of manual, service, and clerical workers (red line), or also incorporates sociocultural professionals and (semi)professionals (blue and green lines).

Not surprisingly, given the fact that professionals are a considerably more Democratic-leaning group than the other core working-class occupational groups, the magnitude of dealignment is reduced when professionals are included in the working class — particularly dealignment over the past fifteen years. But as the figure clearly shows, the basic trend is the same regardless of which groups you include in the working class.

The upshot is that class dealignment is real regardless of how you measure the working class. Whether dealignment is a serious political problem for progressives, however, is a different question.

Should Anything Be Done to Stop Working-Class Dealignment?

Maisano contends that because the traditional working class is declining as a share of the population, their electoral significance is diminishing, and that we can build a new progressive coalition without them (or with a lot fewer of them). Quoting other authors, he writes, “Social democracy’s traditional base in the blue-collar section of the working class, particularly those with lower levels of educational attainment, ‘is numerically and proportionally shrinking, particularly so among younger voters. In a very long-run structural perspective, there is only a subdued electoral future, therefore, in a Social Democracy primarily pinning its hopes on such voters.’”

While this may be true — only time will tell — it is cold comfort to the many victims of far-right governments, including in the United States, that were voted in on the support of a group that, while perhaps being less relevant in future decades, remains quite relevant today. Given the working-class-heavy demographics of the states Democrats need to win in order to capture the White House — like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona — and the US Senate (as I have calculated elsewhere), the electoral math makes it highly improbable that progressives will be able to form a durable, majoritarian coalition in the United States without winning back a substantial number of traditional working-class voters.

Thus, the survival of a progressive, economic populist agenda depends, whether we like it or not, on reversing the trend of working-class dealignment.

Yet even apart from the question of short- to medium-term electoral math, abandoning the increasingly Republican-voting “traditional” working class simply adds fuel to the far-right fire. As Andrew Levison has argued convincingly, if we cede working-class voters to Republicans, we will accelerate the rise of the far right by hastening the complete delinking of conservative communities from any kind of progressive counter-messaging. In deep red working-class and rural districts, the absence of moderate or progressive voices creates an echo chamber that reinforces extremist ideologies.

Even if these communities continue to vote Republican, the erosion of any alternative perspective makes it much harder to counter the extreme narratives that circulate online and in everyday social interactions. Allowing the far right to dominate these spaces not only further undermines progressives’ immediate electoral prospects, but also has profound sociological consequences, further entrenching extremist views and making future political realignment even more difficult.

Can Anything Be Done to Stop Working-Class Dealignment?

Just because something needs to be done to address working-class dealignment, however, doesn’t mean anything can be done. Indeed, Maisano argues that neither straightforward economic appeals to redress the underlying economic grievances that drove many voters to embrace the populist right, nor pragmatic triangulation around controversial social or cultural issues to neutralize the Right’s ability to weaponize those issues against the Left, is likely to help win back the working class.

Maisano suggests that most working-class voters who have moved rightward are simply too conservative on economic issues to be swayed by any progressive appeals. As evidence, he points to a finding from a study I cowrote from the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), which found that working-class Republicans were even more conservative toward raising the minimum wage to $20 per hour than middle- and upper-class Republicans (though both groups were strongly opposed and the difference between their views was slight).

Yet what Maisano does not mention is that working-class Republicans were more progressive than middle- and upper-class Republicans (and by a larger margin) with respect to support for a federal jobs guarantee and for a “large tax hike on the rich.” Moreover, forthcoming CWCP analysis indicates that as many as 20 percent of working-class 2020 Donald Trump voters held progressive views on a range of important economic issues — not to mention the working-class voters who stayed on the couch in 2020 or those who ended up flipping to Trump in 2024. Partisanship is very important, but that shouldn’t obscure the fact that class-based economic interests still cut across the partisan divide to a significant degree.

Maisano is also skeptical of the possibility that economic populist appeals more generally — beyond specific progressive economic policies — are likely to yield major electoral gains. As he says, the rise of sociocultural (semi)professionals over the past several decades means that “our societies have changed, and that attacking the power and privileges of our homegrown oligarchs isn’t enough to win elections. If it were, ‘Bernie Sanders would be sitting in the White House today planning his next summit with Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn.’”

Bracketing the specific cases of Sanders and Corbyn, Maisano’s broader implication that economic populism isn’t enough to win back workers is called into question by a substantial amount of evidence to the contrary.

Indeed, a recent meta-analysis of the effects of economic insecurity on support for populist political parties, especially those on the Right, by Gábor Scheiring and his coauthors that examined dozens of high-quality studies on the topic found unusually consistent evidence to “conclusively disperse any doubts about the causal role of economic insecurity in the populist backlash against globalization.”

The Scheiring team’s analysis not only shows that many of the roots of right-wing populism are economic in nature, but also includes several studies that offer direct causal evidence that providing meaningful economic solutions to address those underlying economic grievances weakens the support of authoritarian populist parties. As one of these studies, by Luigi Guiso and coauthors, concludes, “If one wants to defeat populism, one must first defeat economic insecurity.”

Further, there is experimental evidence from the United States and Europe suggesting that economic populist appeals can resonate with working-class voters. The same CWCP report I discussed above found that hypothetical candidates who championed strong economic populist messaging performed particularly well among working-class voters across the political spectrum. Similarly, an experimental study by Joshua Robison and his coauthors focused on voters in the UK and the United States found that working-class voters were more inclined to support candidates who made explicit class-based economic appeals.

Even if this is all true, however, Maisano’s argument implies that it’s basically irrelevant. He points to studies showing that Social Democratic parties in Europe haven’t actually lost many voters to far-right parties, but have declined instead due to aging and defections of younger members to even more left-wing parties. As a result, if Social Democratic parties didn’t lose workers to the Right in the first place, it would seem that trying to win them back from the far right is simply a misguided strategy based on a misdiagnosis of the problem.

Beyond the fact that the negative conclusions Maisano draws about the possibility of reaching working-class voters with economic populist appeals are contradicted by the evidence I presented above, Maisano also does not fully consider the importance of political context. Even if Social Democratic parties have not lost votes to far-right parties in much of Europe, the same obviously cannot be said for the Democratic Party in the United States, since we have a two-party system that essentially forces voters who are fed up with one major party to express their frustration by voting for the other major party. So the conclusions Maisano draws about working-class defections from Social Democratic parties based on research conducted in the multiparty European setting simply don’t apply to the US context, at least not in a straightforward way.

Can Candidates Win Back Workers by Running on Both Progressive Social and Economic Policies?

Maisano’s key political takeaway is that, given the decline in the share of traditional working-class voters and the difficulty of reaching those voters based on left-wing economic populist appeals, it makes most sense for progressives to focus on reaching more sociocultural (semi)professionals than to persist in futile tilting at blue-collar windmills. This means combining progressive economic appeals that enjoy broad support across both the traditional working class and sociocultural professionals with progressive social appeals that are viewed favorably by lower-income, highly educated service workers and professionals: “To me . . . the optimal electoral strategy for left-wing candidates and parties is to be consistently progressive on both economic and social issues, and to campaign forthrightly along both axes.”

Maisano is correct that the debate over whether center-left parties’ efforts to moderate on social issues are electorally beneficial or not is far from settled. Indeed, there is convincing evidence from Europe that in certain contexts, these efforts can actually backfire and boost support for far-right parties. And very recent studies in the United States have thrown into doubt a widely held belief among political scientists that candidates who take more “extreme” positions on issues suffer for doing so in general elections.

Yet in addition to the mixed evidence on this question in the political science and sociological literatures, there are additional reasons to be circumspect about a blanket statement encouraging progressive candidates to campaign on maximally progressive policies across the board.

For one thing, most of the studies Maisano cites to show that center-left moderation on social and cultural issues is not effective were focused on European parties during a time of historic decline in the supply of robust left-wing economic policies from center-left parties. It could still be the case that moderation on some issues is necessary to unlock the power of strong economic populist appeals, though this is an open question with little systematic empirical support one way or the other.

Maisano’s argument in favor of a wall-to-wall progressive strategy is also based on a questionable conclusion he draws about the salience of social issues to working-class voters. Citing evidence from the same study discussed above from the CWCP, Maisano claims that social issues are less salient to working-class voters than to middle and upper-class voters. As a result, he argues, “Candidates can win [working-class voters] . . . over even if they don’t necessarily agree with progressive social policy positions, so long as those candidates also speak effectively to working-class economic needs and interests.”

While it is true that the CWCP study indicated that working-class voters appeared modestly less polarized around social policies than their middle- and upper-class counterparts, it also indicated that working-class voters are nonetheless quite polarized around these issues, much more so than they are around economic policies.

And a broader analysis of working-class attitudes around social and economic issues by William Marble actually concluded that in the past several decades, “cultural issues have gained salience for the white working class, meaning their longstanding conservative cultural attitudes now translate into Republican support.” So it is unlikely that progressive economic appeals will get through to working-class voters simply because those voters may be slightly less polarized around specific social issues.

Most importantly, however, while the empirical effects of shifts in candidate and party positioning on economic and social issues require more research, I think it would be clear to most serious students and practitioners of US politics that the optimal strategy for progressive candidates involves much more than just campaigning as far left as possible on both fronts. While Maisano’s suggested approach may work in some settings — especially those where the proportion of sociocultural (semi)professionals is comparatively large — pursuing it in electoral contexts where the average voter holds conservative views on social issues would be suicidal. Depending on the state or district and the distribution of voters across class lines, a maximalist progressive strategy might be reasonable in one context but disastrous in another.

Unlike in most of Europe, where candidates typically compete in national or large multimember constituencies, candidates in the United States often face wildly different political contexts, and there can be no simple, one-size-fits-all approach. In some cases, staying silent or triangulating on social and cultural issues can damage progressives by hurting turnout among their core supporters and potentially weakening their overall electoral support. Yet in other contexts where the base-turnout approach has a relatively low ceiling, progressive candidates face much more difficult messaging challenges that require them to appeal to large groups of voters whose political attitudes diverge substantially from those of the candidate.

Of course, we should not assume that voters’ attitudes on all issues are fixed. Research shows that political leaders and activists can shape public opinion under certain circumstances. Similarly, a range of polling shows that Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party has been accompanied by substantial shifts toward greater conservatism on some social issues among Republican voters. Progressives can and should try to shape public opinion when it appears that voters may not have a complete or balanced picture of a given issue.

Politicians also have the power to increase the relative salience of issues. And since a recent study by William W. Franko and Christopher Witko found that the influence of economic policy preferences on political attitudes increases when politicians highlight the salience of economic issues, it is plausible that efforts by progressives to drive home the importance of economic populism — particularly in this moment of increasingly naked oligarchical rule — can increase the salience of these issues relative to controversial social issues and provide more fertile political ground for progressives among working-class voters.

That said, ignoring the specific dynamics of each electoral setting and making a blanket statement that it always makes sense to campaign as far left as possible on every issue oversimplifies the challenge. Such a rigid strategy closes off debate on the inevitably messy question of how to balance principle and politics in a given district — an approach that, rather than offering clarity, can further complicate the already difficult work of progressives in competitive districts.

Determining what red lines are and are not acceptable for candidates that progressives support is and will remain a fraught question, but it is one that cannot be wished away if we hope to build real political power for working people and stop the MAGA threat in the coming years.

The Road to a Post-MAGA Future Must Pass Through the Working Class

Looking ahead, the stakes are clear: progressives must craft nuanced strategies that directly address the decline in support among manual, service, and clerical workers or risk not only electoral defeat in key battlegrounds but also the further empowerment of far-right forces. Long-term demographic trends may be at the backs of those, like Maisano, who suggest that progressives should give up on the “traditional” multiracial working-class in favor of the rising class of uniformly progressive sociocultural (semi)professionals.

But today, we face an existential crisis of American democracy, and winning more support among the working-class voters who have steadily defected to the Republican Party remains the central political task progressives face. Success is far from inevitable, but a solid and growing body of empirical research suggests there is reason for hope.