Democrats, next time try fighting for the working class

A week before the election, my dad was visiting and talked to me about his gut feeling that former President Donald Trump might win. He was clear about his choice to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. “But what are they doing?” he asked me, exasperated.

“They need to level with people about the economy,” he continued. “I know so many people who can’t afford a place to live any more. People do not want to hear, ‘Well, actually the economy is good.’”

Then suddenly he pivoted away from Harris to liberals more generally, and away from the economy into culture.

“You know, another thing: I’m tired of feeling like I’m going to get jumped on for saying something wrong, for using the wrong words,” my dad confided, becoming uncharacteristically emotional. “I don’t want to say things that will offend anyone. I want to be respectful. But I think Trump is reaching a lot of people like me who didn’t learn a special way to talk at college and feel constantly talked down to by people who have.”

At 71 years old, my dad is still working full time, helping to run a delicatessen at a local farmers’ market. He didn’t go to college. Raised Mennonite and socially conservative, he is nonetheless open-minded and curious. When his cousins came out as gay in the 1980s, he accepted them for who they are.

My father would never dehumanise and scapegoat transgender people, immigrants, or anyone else, but he understood a key ingredient of Trump’s rhetorical strategy: When Trump punches down at vulnerable groups of people, he presents himself as punching up at condescending cultural elites – the kind of elites strongly associated with the Democratic Party.

Like me, my father has now voted against Donald Trump three times in the all-important swing state of Pennsylvania. Like me, he was unhappy about all three Democratic nominees he felt obliged to vote for – and deeply disappointed by the party and its leadership.

He doesn’t feel like they give a damn about people like him. I’m disinclined to try to persuade him otherwise. Because it’s clear as day that if Democratic Party leaders could swap the party’s historic base of working-class voters for more affluent voters and still win elections, they would.

This is not hyperbole. This is what they have shown us and told us over and over again – in their policy priorities, messaging choices, and electoral campaigns. They say it out loud. In the summer of 2016, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer smugly claimed that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

The strategy failed spectacularly in 2016 and again in 2024.

And even when it appeared to work in 2018, 2020, and 2022, when Democrats won over sufficient numbers of suburban defectors, harnessing a momentous backlash against Trump, the risks were apparent.

In a little-noticed April 2018 post on the election analysis blog FiveThirtyEight, analyst Nathaniel Rakich showed how, at that time, “on average (and relative to partisan lean), Democrats [were] doing better in working-class areas than in suburban ones.”

Rakich showed that Democrats had roughly similar odds of winning over working-class voters as they did affluent voters and that they would likely see some positive results no matter which set of voters they invested resources into reaching.

But Rakich warned that such positive results could be self-reinforcing: If Democrats invested only in winning affluent suburban voters, those efforts would produce some results, and this would bolster Democrats’ resolve that they had chosen wisely. Schumer’s strategy would seem to be validated. But what about the working-class voters who weren’t prioritised?

Three years later, in March 2021, Republican Representative Jim Banks sent a strategy memo to House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, arguing that the Republican Party had become “the party supported by most working-class voters”. Banks advocated that the GOP should explicitly embrace this realignment to “permanently become the Party of the Working Class”.

Banks wasn’t using “working class” as a euphemism for white working class. The memo pointed to movement of lower-income Black and Latino voters to Trump from 2016 to 2020 at numbers that should have seriously alarmed Democrats.

A striking feature of the memo is the thinness of its proposed policy solutions to attract working-class voters. While it suggests calling out “economic elitism”, it identifies the villains supposedly responsible for working-class grievances as immigrants, China, and “woke college professors”. Big Tech is called out only because of its “egregious suppression of conservative speech”.

The GOP’s actual policy agenda – from weakening unions to deregulation to lowering taxes on the wealthy to further gutting of public education and more – is a disaster for working-class people.

But a head-to-head comparison of policy agendas is not how most voters make up their minds about which candidate to back. Most Americans are struggling, with a large majority living paycheck to paycheck. In such a context, Trump’s core competency is his intuitive read of popular discontent. His central message boils down to: “I will wreak havoc on the elites who have wreaked havoc on our country.”

While Trump and Republicans are diametrically opposed to progressive economic policies, Trump excels at naming culprits. He’s adept at consistently tapping into generalised “anti-elite” anger and resentment, typically weaving it together with racial prejudice, xenophobia, misogyny, and – especially in 2024 – transphobia.

Ambiguous anti-elitism – again, focused primarily on cultural elites – is absolutely central to Trump’s narrative strategy. His populism is fake inasmuch as it lets economic power off the hook, “punching up” instead at cultural elite targets, like the news media, academia, Hollywood, and Democratic politicians.

It works partly because economic power can feel abstract; people tend to feel resigned to it, like they do to the weather. Social elitism, on the other hand, has a human face and condescension is experienced viscerally.

And let’s be honest, affluent liberals can be incredibly condescending. Vulnerable groups are targeted in part to tell a story that “Kamala Harris cares more about catering to this special group (that you harbour prejudice against) than she cares about hard-working people like you.”

Before you go throwing trans people or immigrants or anyone else under the bus (because MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said we should), consider the possibility that these attacks are weak sauce when compared with the popular appeal Democrats could have if they decided to consistently name more compelling villains.

Wall Street and greedy billionaires make for far more convincing culprits to most working-class voters than a trans kid who wants to play sports. Trump’s manoeuvre to misdirect resentment only works when Democrats refuse to tell a compelling story that makes sense of working-class voters’ real grievances.

The task of inspiring, persuading, and motivating working-class voters requires showing that you are in their corner. For people to believe that you are really in their corner, you have to consistently name and pick visible fights with powerful culprits, like Wall Street, Big Tech, and Big Pharma, as well as the politicians in your own party who are in their pocket.

Even as Biden broke from the prescriptions of neoliberalism in important ways early in his administration, we still see a lingering hesitancy among top Democrats to call out the culprits who have rigged our economy and political system and left America’s working class in the dust.

The reality is that the Biden/Harris administration didn’t deliver nearly enough to help working people, especially to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis. And they didn’t effectively narrate what they did accomplish – and what more they attempted to do – primarily because they prefer not to name or pick open fights with the powerful people who stood in the way.

Why are Democrats so resistant to naming powerful culprits and owning a popular economic narrative? The reasons go beyond familiar critiques of “Dems are just bad at messaging.” In short, the neoliberal era did a number on the fighting spirit of the party of the New Deal.

Today’s Democratic Party holds mixed and contradictory loyalties, as it hopes to hold onto both the multiracial working class that constitutes its historical base of strength and power, and the donor class that is its current source of funding. In an era of historic inequality, when most Americans believe the system has been rigged by the few against the many, there’s not a message that will inspire the multiracial working class without also turning off at least some of the party’s donor base.

Banks’s strategy memo told Democrats exactly how Trump and the GOP would win in 2024, and then they proceeded to do it.

So when can we read the strategy memo for how Democrats intend to stop the bleed of working-class voters and win them back?

We’ve had the framework in our hands for as long as we’ve had Trump. It’s easy to find. Google: “Bernie Sanders”.

By circling the wagons to defeat Sanders (twice), the Democratic Party establishment imagined it was making itself more palatable to highly prized affluent swing voters. But by beating down the bold vision, fighting spirit, and grassroots enthusiasm that this reform movement represents, party leaders effectively enabled two Trump terms and perhaps even the consolidation of a long-term authoritarian realignment of the electorate. Even The New York Times’ “moderate” columnist David Brooks finally gets it now.

It should now be abundantly clear that if Democrats do not learn to speak to and earn the trust of working-class people like my father – and people who are far more alienated than him – the party is toast. That means standing up visibly and vocally for working people and picking open fights with powerful culprits. Ultimately, it means confronting and reversing the central crisis underlying the “populist moment” we live in – runaway inequality – by delivering big for America’s working class.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.