Economic Populism Is Powerful, but Democrats’ Brand Is Toxic
Populist economic policies grounded in the value of work and commonsense notions of fairness may be able to win over constituencies that have abandoned Democrats in recent decades. There’s a problem though: the Democratic brand is trash.
Populist economic policies grounded in the value of work and in commonsense notions of fairness may have the potential to win over the constituencies that have abandoned Democrats over the past few decades. (Dustin Franz / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Heading into this shutdown, the Democratic Party has never been more unpopular. Republicans see Democrats as dishonest and corrupt, while their own base sees them as ineffectual and out of touch. Democratic leadership understands that it has a problem; it has picked the current shutdown fight in an attempt to show its grassroots, and the American public more broadly, that it can play political hardball on behalf of working-class Americans who will see their health care costs skyrocket in the coming months. But it’s a fight Democrats have so far avoided, grounded in a message that feels half-hearted and out of character from the current Democratic leadership.
The Democratic Party is playing a reactive role in the face of the Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle the remnants of the American regulatory and welfare state. But even though opposition is necessary in this moment, the party is in its current predicament because it has failed to offer a positive vision that might convince Americans to vote for Democrats rather than merely against Trump.
If Democrats ever want to win back power, they need a platform that goes beyond defending the status quo. They need a comprehensive message that speaks to the concerns of working-class voters, and they need candidates capable of delivering that message. That’s why the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), Rutgers University’s Labor Education Action Research Network (LEARN) program, and the Labor Institute designed a new survey to gauge the kind of politics that might be able to win back working-class voters in the crucial Rust Belt states that handed Congress and the presidency to the GOP in 2024.
In partnership with YouGov, we conducted a poll of three thousand residents in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The survey investigated a range of questions related to the appeal of economic populism, the degree to which the Democratic Party brand drags down otherwise strong economic populist candidates, and the specific economic policy priorities that Rust Belt voters care about most.
We found that populist economic policies grounded in the value of work and in commonsense notions of fairness may have the potential to win over the constituencies that have abandoned Democrats over the past few decades. Such an appeal has the potential to reach voters across partisan lines, and to repolarize the electorate by pitting billionaires and corporate greed against working-class Americans.
Economic Priorities
The economic policies that Rust Belt voters prioritized most were proposals that confronted corporate greed and political corruption while promising visible benefits for working families. Capping prescription drug prices, stopping corporate price gouging, banning members of Congress from trading stocks, eliminating taxes on Social Security income, and raising taxes on the super-wealthy and large corporations all ranked among the highest-performing ideas. Respondents viewed these policies as straightforward fixes to an unfair system rather than in partisan or ideological terms because they were easy to understand, tapped into commonsense notions of fairness, and offered direct relief from rising costs.
Policies focused on protecting and expanding access to good jobs also performed strongly. Respondents ranked a range of jobs-focused policies in the top ten, from ambitious progressive proposals to stop large corporations from involuntarily laying off workers and a federal jobs guarantee, to more mainstream policies such as offering small-business tax credits for job training and upgrading infrastructure through rail, ports, and energy investments. These ideas connected with voters’ aspirations for economic security and community well-being, and promised visible, durable benefits — the kinds of projects that create work, stabilize towns, and demonstrate that government can still deliver concrete improvements to people’s lives.
On the other hand, policies that have already been politicized through party politics were often prioritized highly by one partisan group but not by others, like tariffs on the Right or universal basic income (UBI) on the Left. Likewise, while raising taxes on the super-wealthy performed well overall, Democrats and independents ranked the policy among their very top priorities while Republicans ranked it near the bottom.
But the policies that appealed across party lines weren’t necessarily less ambitious or “progressive” than those that didn’t; instead, they were policies that appealed to an intuitive sense of economic fairness and that haven’t yet been clearly identified with a partisan agenda, like capping prescription drug prices and stopping companies from price gouging. For progressives, this breadth represents an opening: Rust Belt voters appear receptive to a wide range of economic-populist proposals, especially those centered on fairness, accountability, and tangible benefits for working families.
By contrast, obviously costly, abstract, or technocratic reforms — such as providing $1,000 monthly cash payments to all Americans, creating a US sovereign wealth fund, reducing corporate taxes to boost business investment, and cutting government regulation to create jobs — consistently underperformed, suggesting that voters remain skeptical of both trickle-down promises and untested large-scale experiments.
Democrats, Independents, and Realigning the Electorate?
The CWCP/Labor Institute/Rutgers survey found that Democrats who want to bring the working class back to the center of their party’s identity face a major uphill battle in overcoming the tarnished brand of their party, especially in heavily working-class areas of the country like the four Rust Belt states included in the survey. Here even candidates with strong pro-worker credentials, such as Sherrod Brown in Ohio, face what our survey terms a “Democratic penalty”: a measurable vote loss tied to the party label itself. In states like Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, that penalty ranges from ten to sixteen points, easily large enough to determine the outcome of competitive races. In other words, even the best populist messages — when delivered by Democrats — still carry baggage many voters refuse to overlook.
The Democrats’ negative brand image is intimately tied to the fact that for decades the party’s strategy has reinforced partisan polarization while doing little to realign the electorate around class. Class divisions have become submerged beneath party identity, and many voters who once strongly associated the Democratic Party with the working class no longer see themselves in the party. This dynamic has trapped the party in a self-defeating cycle: every time Democrats try to reclaim populism, they do so on a party line that large swaths of the working class already associate with weakness, elitism, and hypocrisy. Not surprisingly then, over 70 percent of respondents in the survey expressed a negative view of the Democratic Party.
Given the large penalty faced by many Democratic candidates simply due to the “D” next to their name, running independent populist campaigns — like that of Nebraska Senate hopeful Dan Osborne — may be an essential complement to internal Democratic reform. In districts where the Democratic label is toxic, independent candidates that foreground economic fairness and anti-corruption may be able to reach voters who have tuned out partisan appeals altogether. Our survey even found strong majority support for creating an Independent Workers Political Association, a vehicle that could back pro-worker candidates outside the traditional party structure. Enthusiasm for such an effort was strongest among working-class and noncollege voters, as well as among independents and younger people — precisely the constituencies Democrats struggle to mobilize.
Ultimately, however, a long-term class realignment in American politics cannot bypass the Democratic Party entirely. The scale of institutional power — ballot access, infrastructure, and the nature of our electoral system — remains concentrated within it. But transformation will require pressure from both inside and outside the tent.
If the party continues to define itself solely through opposition to the Republican Party and to eschew class-based messaging that can connect with their erstwhile working-class supporters, no amount of messaging will close the trust gap. If it can be forced — by internal insurgents and independent allies alike — to stand unambiguously with working people, the conditions for a durable realignment may one day emerge. Until then, populists will need to build credibility wherever they can find it, including beyond the party line.