The Democratic Party Has a Working Class Problem

The Democratic Party brand is in crisis. A recent NBC poll reports the party’s favorability rating at a record low of 27 percent, marking a nadir that dates back to 1990. This polling follows the Democratic coalition fraying in November’s election as many working-class nonwhite voters defected from their ranks while the Republican coalition traded more white college-educated voters for nonwhites without college degrees. Despite Kamala Harris’ campaign and its allies outspending Republicans by nearly half a billion dollars, Democrats still lost the presidency, the Senate, the House, the popular vote, and every battleground state.

November’s election results came as little surprise to those Democrats who warned of the peril of either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris running in 2024. Now, in the wake of that bruising defeat, nearly 60 percent of Democrats surveyed in a CNN poll stated that the party must enact major changes or undergo complete reform. Many describe the party’s leadership as out of touch with the average American voter, and its messaging abysmal. Attempting to quell this internal discontent, Nancy Pelosi declared that the Democratic Party will likely change its talking points “in about six or seven months,” presumably referring to a boldly unoriginal plan to paint Republicans as the party of the ultra-wealthy and to rebrand the Democrats as, ostensibly, the party of the somewhat wealthy. But tweaking a few talking points won’t solve the disconnect between the party’s brand and working-class voters.

“For the first time in modern history,” declared Ken Martin, the newly elected Chair of the Democratic National Committee, “the perceptions that Americans have of the two major political parties switched. The majority of Americans now believe the Republican Party best represents the interests of the working class and the poor, and the Democratic Party is the party of the wealthy and the elites. It’s a damning indictment on our party brand.” Although it may be difficult to believe that working-class Americans think the Republican Party best represents their interests, there is evidence to support this shift in perception. In 1990, an ABC News/Washington Post survey found that 66 percent of respondents believed Democrats best represented the interests of lower-income Americans. Yet, today, many working-class voters of color no longer trust Democrats to represent their interests. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given long-term party trends.

Despite the American middle class shrinking over the past fifty years and college enrollment declining for a decade, Democrats focused on shoring up college-educated, higher-income voters of all stripes while shedding less-educated, less-affluent voters in their coalition. Touting this strategy, Senator Chuck Schumer boasted in 2016: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose…we will pick up two…college-educated Republicans.” Although Democrats appealed to voters of color, they attracted more upwardly mobile ones. As the party became increasingly composed of racially heterogeneous yet economically homogeneous higher-income Americans, its tribunes became blind to their class disconnect from lower-income voters.

While hyper-attuned to the optics of gender and race, Democrats became less attuned to class optics, as evidenced by their Gatsby-like extravaganzas at Martha’s Vineyard and lobbyist-encysted parties at ritzy Beverly Hills hotels, where Vanity Fair observed, “almost everyone looked rich.” And it’s not just Democratic politicians in this class bubble but their pundits as well. While telling lower-income Americans struggling to pay for gas and groceries that they’ve never had it so good, pundits Lawrence O’Donnell (Harvard ‘74), Joy Reid (Harvard ‘91), and Rachel Maddow (Stanford ‘94) have a combined net worth exceeding $65 million. The prominence of such Ivy League elites in the front rows of Democratic punditry would have been virtually unthinkable several decades ago.

A century ago, when the working class overwhelmingly made up the Democratic coalition, their advocates reflected the party’s humble constituency. One famous advocate, Will Rogers—a Native American trick roper born into poverty in Oklahoma—argued for the unemployed during the Great Depression. Rogers famously quipped, “I am not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Another advocate, Finley Peter Dunne, wrote a Chicago Evening Post column from the perspective of Mr. Dooley, a fictitious working-class bartender in Chicago’s South Side, who explained the day’s politics to poor Irish immigrants. Others included Pedro J. González, an itinerant Mexican telegraph operator who hosted one of America’s first Spanish radio broadcasts in the 1920s. González decried Republican President Herbert Hoover’s forced expulsion of an estimated half a million Mexican Americans in the early 1930s. Fast forward a century, and the Democrats’ foremost advocates are now high-income college elites who can’t connect with working-class voters for one simple reason: their vocabulary.

As Democrats increasingly drew their advocates from high-income college elites, their discourse became so academized and out-of-touch as to alienate the average American voter. Last month, Strategist James Carville complained that today’s Democratic appeals sound like “idiotic NPR jargon.” Elizabeth Grace Matthew similarly observed that Democrats do not use the plain, profanity-laden, politically incorrect speech of average Americans and speak in a sanitized academese disconnected from reality. The disconnect isn’t just their words but their very appeals, as exemplified last year by pundits touting stock performance as if trying to win the votes of Wall Street traders rather than working-class Americans unable to pay their bills.

The end result is that today’s Democratic Party can neither understand nor persuade the lower-income, less-educated voters essential for a big-tent coalition. People know when you’re talking down to them, and they also know when you’re only talking nicely to get them to come back. Democrats must recognize that a party whose base narrowly consists of better-educated, wealthier Americans won’t have consistent success at the ballot box. In a democracy, the party with the largest tent wins. That means appealing to voters who have never set foot on a college campus, don’t own stocks, shop at Walmart or Costco, and cast their ballots based on whether they can pay for gas and groceries. Abandon them, and you abandon the once-mighty base that made the Democratic Party a force to be reckoned with.