Democrats Act Like Elections Are Complicated. They’re Not.

Yet another study confirms what we already know: economic populism is the only way for Democrats to win working-class voters.

A voter walking to the voting booth on February 11, 2020, in Bedford, New Hampshire. (Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty Images)

In American politics, working-class votes are a requirement for electoral success. Frustratingly, however, Democratic candidates who want to run campaigns that appeal to the working class often find themselves running against their own party, too.

A new report from the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) and Jacobin analyzes 128 questions from gold-standard academic surveys administered over the past few decades to understand the preferences and priorities of the working class and how they have evolved over time. Our findings underscore that Democrats can win back working-class voters by focusing on economic populist policies. It may seem obvious, but most Democratic candidates and strategists have failed to grasp this simple formula in recent years. Now the party ship is sinking, and it’s time to take this finding seriously.

Our research found that economically populist policies — like a higher federal minimum wage, limits on imports to protect US jobs, and expanding Medicare — appeal to working-class people on both sides of the aisle. We also went further, examining the appeal of specific policies to one particular group of working-class voters: those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020. We found that there is significant potential for Democratic candidates to win these voters back in upcoming elections, provided they stake out an economically progressive position.

This is hardly the first time that research, including previous research conducted by the CWCP and Jacobin, has uncovered strong signals that campaigning on economic populism increases a candidate’s chances of winning working-class voters. Democratic Party leaders and their hired strategists would like us to think that things aren’t that straightforward. Rather than embracing the massive potential of economic populism to reshape the American political landscape in their favor, they erect intraparty obstacles to candidates promoting it. They do this for a combination of ideological and structural reasons, not least because wealthy special interests are deeply embedded in the party’s machinery.

A recent prominent example of this is New York City’s mayoral primary, in which the Democratic political establishment and moneyed interests lined up behind disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo to oppose democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. Cuomo Super PACs, funded by real estate interests and others who feared Mamdani’s policies would cut into their profits, red-baited Mamdani throughout the campaign, portraying him as a fringe radical whose ideas are out of step with ordinary Americans. The race’s outcome undermined their theory that economic progressivism is a nonstarter: Cuomo lost decisively despite outspending Mamdani four to one.

Mamdani attributes his victory to his laser focus on economic messaging. As he told New York Magazine, “We have tried to listen more and lecture less, and it’s in those very conversations that I had with Democrats who voted for Donald Trump many months ago that I heard what it would take to bring them back to the Democratic Party — that it would be a relentless focus on an economic agenda.” He outlined, at a high level, what political priorities could win over Democrats who broke for Trump in the 2024 election, saying, “When I asked [them] why they did it [voted for Trump], what they told me again and again came back to rent and child care and groceries, and even the $2.90 that it costs for a MetroCard.”

The Democratic establishment that so strenuously opposed Mamdani is the same Democratic establishment that selected Kamala Harris as the party’s 2024 presidential candidate. It then steered her campaign away from anti–economic elite messaging toward a focus on Trump’s threats to democracy — a pivot that arguably played a major role in her defeat.

Of course, even the most centrist Democrats occasionally float progressive economic policies. Cuomo pledged to raise New York City’s minimum wage to $20 an hour, for example. But there are two key differences between run-of-the-mill Democratic Party economic messaging and full-throated economic populism. One is the degree to which candidates focus on their progressive economic demands and a corresponding view of society; establishment Democrats like Cuomo tend to do this sparingly. The other is the strength of the policies in terms of how far they go toward helping workers. Mamdani surpassed Cuomo with a promise to raise the minimum wage to $30 by 2030. (According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, a single adult with no children currently requires an hourly wage of $32.85 to meet basic needs in New York City.) Likewise, Mamdani’s platform included a tax on million-dollar-per-year earners, while Cuomo’s had no corresponding plank.

Since our report analyzes survey responses from across the country to a broad range of political issues, our results can help illuminate how a campaign like Mamdani’s might fare on the national stage. A millionaire tax didn’t seem unwelcome to New York City Democratic primary voters, but is it a crazy socialist idea that would immediately kill a campaign anywhere else? Our analysis suggests otherwise. We found that 44 percent of working-class people nationwide who voted for Trump in 2020 supported increasing income taxes on people making over $1 million per year.

A portion of our study sought to find out what percentage of working-class Trump voters in 2020 were in favor of robust economically populist packages. For a package that included higher taxes for millionaires, increased federal public school spending, increased federal spending on Social Security, and a hike in the federal minimum wage, we found 19.7 percent support. We then ran an analysis that cautiously assumed that the most socially conservative working-class Trump voters are too far gone to ever vote for a Democrat, and that no economically progressive messaging would ever win them over. Even in this scenario, we still found enough support for a progressive economic platform to have easily overcome Trump’s 2024 advantages in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Social security, public school spending, raising the minimum wage, and taxing the rich were all in the foreground of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Predictably, Democrat-aligned media outlets painted him as an out-of-touch old man with unrealistic political ideals, and party leadership schemed to block him from the presidential nomination in both cycles. The Democratic establishment thus prevented Sanders’s political approach from being tested on the national stage, impeding our ability to fully assess the power of economic populist messaging in national politics. Our research suggests it is enormous.

We shouldn’t expect the Democratic establishment to change how it operates, even when it is clear that business as usual risks more losses in winnable elections. Political messaging opposed to economic elites resonates with working-class voters the most, but corresponding policies almost always contradict the material interests of wealthy people — and Democratic Party insiders won’t bite the hand that feeds them.

With the pro-corporate, anti-populist Democratic establishment here to stay, the logical conclusion from our analysis is that politicians who want to win working-class voters shouldn’t just take an oppositional stance toward the economic status quo, but also toward their own party — at least to the extent that the party fails to embrace economic populism. We contend that the candidates with the best chance of winning are the ones with an orientation similar to that of Sanders: in the Democratic Party when necessary, but not of it, and fundamentally opposed to the party’s pro-elite elements.

It’s no longer a matter of debate that the Democratic Party needs to win back working-class voters from the GOP. There also shouldn’t be any debate about how to do it: in study after study, an economically focused platform is the clear winner. Our research reinforces this notion and may provide some useful insights to fine-tune an effective approach. But whatever the details, the basic idea is straightforward, even though the Democratic Party top brass would have us think otherwise.