Over recent decades, the Democratic and Republican parties have traded core constituencies. Working class voters, once securely in the Democratic fold, have gravitated to the Republican Party, while highly educated professionals, once reliably Republican, have shifted to the Democratic Party.
Yet the policies pursued by Republican office-holders clearly serve business elites rather than working people. This would seem to offer the Democratic Party an opportunity to regain working class support by championing pro-worker policies.
These might, for instance, include a higher minimum wage, the appointment of pro-union members of the National Labor Relations Board, and a ban on no-compete clauses in labor contracts. Or increased access to affordable health care and a reduction in the prices of widely used drugs. Expanded child tax credits and support for pre-K education would also benefit workers.
A pro-worker strategy would commit major resources to rebuilding infrastructure while investing in green energy and key high tech industries, such as semi-conductors, thus creating blue collar, predominately male jobs in Red states. The Democrats could support higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations while beefing up IRS enforcement against tax dodges and cracking down on offshore tax havens. Consumers would benefit from tougher enforcement of anti-trust and consumer protection laws. Taken together, these policies would offer a stark contrast with the anti-worker, pro-billionaire policies pursued during the first Trump Administration.
But here is the rub. Democrats have pursued all of these policies over the past four years, yet the Democratic share of the working class vote fell in 2024, just as it had in 2020 and 2016, while white working class identification with the Republican Party has been growing for decades. Most alarmingly, Democrats lost ground this time around among black and brown working class voters while remaining deeply unpopular among white workers.
This reality places Bernie Sander’s claim that the Democrats abandoned the working class in ironic perspective. The reality is that Joe Biden was far more pro-worker than either Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. Yet none of it swayed working class voters.
The problem was in part a failure of communication. While Biden touted his pro-worker policies at every opportunity, Democrats failed to embed specific policies or outcomes in a broader narrative about the rise of inequality, the hollowing out of American manufacturing, and the financialization of the economy. When 70% of Americans feel the country is headed in the wrong direction, it behooves those in power to offer a diagnosis of what is wrong, who is to blame, and how to fix matters. The Democrats have touted fixes without laying the groundwork by explaining how things got so bad.
To do so would have required a critique of the neoliberal order that Democrats, as much as Republicans, helped to build. Without such a narrative, Democrats were unable to explain the downward mobility experienced by many workers. Nor could they pin responsibility. Instead, they offered technocratic policy prescriptions without context.
Biden and mainstream Democrats embraced some of the policies offered by Bernie Sanders without the underlying anti-corporate rationale that Sanders has so insistently articulated. The reasons are obvious. While Democrats seek to win back working class voters, they also depend heavily upon corporate support. Indeed, many Democratic-leaning urban professionals are employed within those corporate sectors most supportive of the Democratic Party. Overly blunt efforts to rally working class support would threaten to erode the loyalty of the party’s professional and corporate constituencies.
In the absence of a clear Democratic message, Trump offered working class voters a coherent – if badly flawed – narrative attributing their problems to immigrants, foreign imports, globalists, bureaucrats, and a cultural elite. In doing so, he not only gave working class voters targets to blame for their economic grievances, he also exploited social and cultural divides over race, gender, and identity.
The Democratic Party has taken Trump’s bait by embracing a set of cultural and social litmus tests that drive away many working class voters. It is not just that the Democratic brand is now associated with a set of values and beliefs contrary to the sentiments of tradition-minded rural and working class people, but it is also that rural whites – especially males – feel targeted as scapegoats for social ills – such as racial or gender inequality – that they neither created nor have the power to eradicate. Instead, many rural whites feel unfairly shamed and looked down upon while their own struggles with opioid addition or the depopulation of rural communities are ignored by urban politicians.
Pro-worker policies are necessary but not sufficient for winning back working class voters. Democrats need to embed such policies in a clear, compelling narrative that helps workers make sense of the forces buffeting their lives. Democrats should also return to the notion of a big-tent party, one that tolerates ideological diversity while taking seriously the material and cultural needs of the rural working class.
Democrats should also frankly acknowledge that policies aimed at pleasing core urban professional supporters often have pernicious impacts on working class people. Broad-based student debt relief helps college-educated voters but does nothing for those who have never stepped foot on a college campus. When residents of well-off urban neighborhoods successful oppose the construction of high-density housing, this worsens the housing crisis and push up home prices. Low-wage immigrant labor keeps prices low on services used by upper-middle class consumers but poses competition for unskilled native born workers. The reality is that the professed commitments to social justice among what author Musa Al-Gharbi calls “symbolic capitalists” are often belied by the latter’s pursuit of narrow material gains.
The process of rebuilding a working class-based Democratic Party will be long and difficult. In many Red states, Democrats have been virtually vanquished. The chaos of the next four years and the damage that the Trump Administration’s proposed policies will do to rural and working class people will provide an opening, but Democrats must rethink their own messaging and strategy in order to take advantage of the opportunities that will arise. This will require a more coherent narrative about the gross inequalities that afflict the American economy, greater openness to cultural and ideological diversity within the party, and frank acknowledgement of conflicting class interests between the current Democratic base and the working class support that the party needs to attract in order to win.
The Internationalist 