The basic wager of economic populism is that the far right can only be stopped in the long term by enacting epoch-defining changes to our economic system — changes that give all working people a shot at a stable, middle-class life. If progressives hope to build the durable majoritarian coalitions needed to make that happen, they will have to deliver material improvements to working people’s lives, so ordinary Americans will once again feel that their lives are better than their parents’ were. All of which means thinking big. Very big.

But what if workers don’t actually want what progressives are offering? In a recent piece for the Conversation, Nicholas Jacobs argues the Democratic Party has moved so far left of working-class voters on economics that “on every major plank of the progressive economic agenda, Democrats are now substantially to the left of the workers they claim to champion.”

The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) retested Jacobs’s economic claim using a much wider evidence base and distilled the results into two heat maps below. Our analysis incorporates a range of economic items from eight high-quality surveys from 2024 and 2025: the American National Election Study (ANES), the Cooperative Election Survey (CES), the General Social Survey (GSS), Pew, AP-NORC VoteCast, and Gallup.