Jared Abbott is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics and a contributor to Jacobin and Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.
The US left has had some success winning primaries in Democrat-held constituencies. But this can’t be a strategy for national success and the implementation of New Deal–style programs. For that, we’ll need a supermajority.
The working-class voters who delivered Donald Trump’s 2024 victory have steadily slipped away in 2026 according to new polling. But few of them are switching to the Democrats.
A slate of union-backed working-class Democratic candidates is running on an economic-populist platform in swing districts. If the Blue Collar Brigade proves successful, their strategy could set a precedent for winning working-class votes.
Peru has been home to the world’s most ambitious experiments in participatory democracy. American progressive and democratic socialist mayors should look to them for both inspiration and warning.
But progressives need to be careful about how they pitch their appeals to workers.
Working-class voters may be having second thoughts about MAGA, but they’re still abandoning the Democratic Party. Democrats’ reliance on college-educated suburbanites is arithmetically insufficient and politically unsustainable.
Working-class voters already back Medicare for All. Framed like Social Security — as a benefit earned from work, not a handout — it can reach two-thirds support.
In poll after poll, Americans across the political spectrum support a federal jobs guarantee. And yet it’s never mentioned in mainstream political discourse. New survey data makes the case even harder to ignore.
New survey data show that many of Donald Trump’s 2024 working-class voters are already wavering. But most aren’t turning to Democrats — they’re dropping out of politics altogether.
Thanks to decades of failing to seriously address the economic struggles of ordinary Americans, the Democratic Party brand has cratered in the Rust Belt and is increasingly flagging with working-class voters of all races.
The fight to defend democracy will succeed only if it is rooted in the everyday economic realities that drive people’s disillusionment with politics in the first place.
Most voters aren’t rejecting Democrats over the culture war. They’re rejecting them because they don’t deliver.
Labor organizing can’t succeed at scale without a supportive legal and political environment, created by majoritarian coalitions that can win reforms, confront corporate power, and prove to skeptical workers that progressive governance delivers.
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.
A new national poll shows democratic socialism has made enormous strides over the last decade. But to grow beyond blue strongholds, its champions will need to continue to anchor campaigns in bread-and-butter economics.
Zohran Mamdani’s astounding triumph shows the power of bread-and-butter economics and the bankruptcy of the Democratic establishment. But how many of its lessons can be applied nationally?
Polling shows Americans are ready to support independent populists running on economic platforms. But what they don’t want is anything associated with the Democratic Party’s brand.
Today advocacy groups and consultants influence political parties more than voters and members. In The Great Retreat, political scientist Didi Kuo shows that this has hollowed out democracy and facilitated the rise of the Right.
There’s no forging a durable working-class progressive coalition without winning back the blue-collar working class.
Third Way Democrats are right to obsess over the Democrats’ increasing troubles with working-class voters. But their solution is more of the Clintonian economic centrism that drove away working-class voters in the first place.