Our latest research shows: kitchen-table populism wins. What does ‘Affordability’ mean to working-class voters? Blue-collar voters are (still) winnable for the Left so longs as professionals can start to develop some respect across the diploma divide. And a “Mom Populist” education agenda.

Plus, Trump is losing independent voters.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

Why the Democrats’ Path Back to Power Runs Through the Kitchen Table

, president of the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI), shares a byline with with CWCP director in The Nation. They summarize the latest RUBI-CWCP joint-survey:

In June, our respective organizations, the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI) and the Center for Working-Class Politics, surveyed 6,100 people, more than a thousand of them rural, about their reactions to political messaging. We asked them to compare two GOP opposition messages and 13 different kinds of messages either written by us or frequently heard on the campaign trail or in content by groups such as Indivisible, Showing Up for Racial Justice, and the Movement Voter Project. We have now compiled our findings in a new study, “Kitchen Table Messaging for the Populist Era.”

The results are clear. We found that people said they were substantially more likely to vote for Democrats who deploy populist economic messaging than for Democrats with messaging that criticizes Trump, warns about fascism and oligarchy, or exposes elites’ divide-and-conquer playbook. (Divide-and-conquer rhetoric scapegoats marginalized groups so that working people blame them—rather than elites—for their hard times.) The preference for kitchen-table populism held true with our respondents across the board and with key subgroups, including rural voters.

We surveyed 6,000 Americans. Here is the winning message for Democrats

And Erica and I are in the Guardian writing on the same new survey. We highlight the fact that the much-lauded “Race-Class Narrative” fails with working-class voters:

The weakest variant of the divide-and-conquer narrative is the one that tells voters they’ve been tricked into blaming scapegoats. These “race-class narrative” appeals, so popular in progressives circles, finished at the bottom of the field. Why? Because telling people they’ve been duped comes off more like a condescending sermon than an invitation. Unlike kitchen-table populist messages that meet voters where they’re at, the race-class narrative strays from voters’ concrete economic woes to expound a more abstract theory of political gamesmanship. These messages trailed our top kitchen-table populist pitches with every group, including non-white voters and Democrats.

Can Democrats win over the working class?

The Financial Times covers related research:

But, Abbott and Williams say, there’s an important wrinkle here: “While economic issues are a high priority for college-educated liberals, they focus chiefly on costs. Working-class people do, too, but they also focus on the other side of the ‘affordability’ equation: jobs, wages, and working conditions.

In other words, economic considerations are inseparable from questions of power and the sense of agency. Abbott and Williams’ two principal prescriptions for successful left-of-centre politics follow from this: (1) “Consistently embrace a populism that decries a rigged economy where hard work fails to yield a stable middle-class life”; (2) “Rigorously avoid reinforcing right populism’s narrative that liberal college grads look down on Americans without college degrees.

Doing the second, it seems to me, is as much about personnel as it is about policy. In other words, it might make a difference if the Democrats started recruiting candidates who aren’t products of the professional managerial class. Maybe it’s time they started looking in the labour movement for political talent like they used to decades ago?

Incidentally, that’s exactly what we argue they should be doing.

How to Bridge the Diploma Divide in the Progressive Movement

makes the case for recognizing the class divide on the Left in order to bridge it:

While both liberal college grads and working people prioritize economic issues like affordability and social security, college-educated voters place substantially more importance on culture and climate issues — many of which have become the main talking points of the establishment left.

For example, liberal college grads prioritize resisting authoritarianism by 33 points more than the working class, protecting LGBTQ+ rights by 21 points more, and protecting abortion access by 19 points more.

Instead of seeking to bridge this gap between working-class and college-educated Americans, many liberal leaders have chosen to take this division for granted, directing their attention towards securing the support of educated voters, and considering the working class as unreachable.

What ‘Affordability’ Really Means to Working-Class Voters

and Joan Williams in Bloomberg:

Dig deeper into the consensus around “affordable basics” and you find an important divergence. College grads’ key economic priorities all concern prices, whereas top working-class priorities also include raising wages, creating jobs and boosting economic opportunity. This reflects a K-shaped economy where the affordability crisis reflects not just high prices but low wages. “Nothing is affordable if you don’t have a good job,” observed Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance.

Increasing wages, we found, is a top 10 priority for Latino and White working-class respondents. It was also in the top 10 priorities for all Black voters, whether or not they have a bachelor’s degree. In other words, to reward a constituency Democrats need to retain (Black voters) and another they need to attract (working-class White and Latino voters), Democrats must focus not just on prices, but also on wages. This often gets lost in vague language of “affordability.”

Working-Class Voters Are Winnable for the Left. Here’s How.

Here’s CWCP’s own summarizing some of our latest research:

Working-class respondents favored securing the border by 28.3 points, lowering the crime rate by 21.8 points, and adding more police by 19.3 points.

On the other side, issues that college grads prioritize more than the working class, there are four issues with a wide spread. The college set prefers: LGBTQ+ rights by 32 points, immigration by 32 points, climate by 29 points, and abortion rights by 26 points.

These are called “wedge issues,” given their tactical utility to strategists on the Right. It’s not that these issues don’t matter — not even a slim majority of working-class voters wishes to persecute minorities, force women to have unwanted children, or further disrupt the climate. But they are simply not seen as immediate as the threats that come from not paying your rent, car payments, daycare, and medical bills — existential issues that those on the college track don’t experience so often or acutely.

Why Democrats Must Embrace a “Mom Populist” Education Agenda

has a long read on what Democrats might do to fix our education system. She interviewed a few of us here at CWCP:

Democrats’ deep faith in college as the vehicle for economic mobility has hampered the party’s ability to communicate with working-class voters. It has also distorted the party’s view of what constitutes a desirable candidate. “Democrats used to have this tradition of looking for candidates in union halls,” argued Guastella. “Now they want big fundraisers. If you went to an Ivy League school, you know someone who works on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley. That’s not true for blue-collar candidates.”

Among the center’s first major research projects was a survey called “Trump’s Kryptonite,” in which it tested the success of various kinds of candidates in running on economically populist messages. The candidates who fared best at attracting working-class voters held blue-collar jobs or worked in professions like nursing, in which they were “bossed,” said co-founder Jared Abbott. The hypothetical candidate who held the most appeal to these voters turned out to be a female middle school teacher. Corporate execs and lawyers fared the worst. “When you consider that just 2 to 3 percent of Congress comes from the working class despite having a majority in the population, there’s clearly a moral and ethical imperative to have more representation,” said Abbott.

Ultimately, Berkshire argues, Dems need to ditch the message that everyone ought to go to college and instead focus on making public education, including higher ed, affordable and high quality.

President Trump’s Marked Decline Among Independents

at Free Agent Politics reports that Trump is losing support among independent voters:

AP-NORC analyzed nearly 5000 “strict independents” (those who do not identify with or lean to one party or the other) from 21 different survey waves to examine how Trump has performed from the election period into April of this year. As seen in the chart below, highlighting his standing in five different waves, support for Trump among independents has declined 17 points,¹ from 43 percent during the pre-presidency period to 26 percent by the end of April 2026. In contrast, support among fellow Republicans has dropped marginally while already low support among Democrats has remained stable.

From a different angle, CWCP confirms the trend:

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The 1%, but not who you think. Alissa Ellman, rust-belt populist for Congress. Donald Trump’s working-class coalition is crumbling. Friendship is becoming a luxury product. And the USW urges: elect more workers.

Plus, Angie Nixon pulls off a big win in Florida with a surprisingly working-class base.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

Why working‑class people account for around 1% of lawmakers in the US – and only 2% in the average democracy around the world

You may have read that only 2% of Congress comes from the working class. That number comes from research done by Professor Nicholas Carnes, of Duke University.

He and his colleague, Noam Lupu, have a new report out. Their latest research expands the scope to look at state legislatures and the findings are even worse:

By our count, about half of all Americans in the labor force have working-class jobs. However, people who last had working-class jobs when they got into politics make up only about 1% of the average state legislature, regardless of their party affiliation. The same goes for Congress.

And the U.S. isn’t alone. Starting in 2016, we partnered with a team of researchers to collect data on 97 of the 103 democracies with more than 300,000 citizens. Like the U.S., the average global democracy draws just 2% of the members of its national legislature from people who last had working-class jobs.

The new report, “How to Elect More Working-Class Americans” is worth reading in full. In it, they argue against something we have seen more and more as progressives wrack up wins in deep-blue districts:

Many reformers—especially those in political parties and interest groups—will be tempted to classify favored candidates from white-collar professions as “working class,” essentially tinkering with the definition of the term to match a favored candidate’s current occupation. Reformers must resist the temptation to shoot first and then draw the target where their arrow has landed. Changing the definition of working class is no substitute for changing the system.

That’s exactly right. Carnes and Lupu go on to advocate for recruiting more working-class candidates and outline a number of institutional policies that could help make their entry into political life a little easier.

Meet Alissa Ellman, Rust Belt Populist

Ellman is the Democratic nominee in New York’s rural 24th Congressional District. A daughter of a working-class family she joined the Army as a teenager, worked for the VA, was fired under Trump, and is now running for Congress.

She’s sounding a lot of populist notes on the campaign trail, complete with some novel ideas:

“You’re talking about blue-collar working-class men who get up at four in the morning, go outside when it’s four feet of snow on the ground, shovel their driveway, go work outside all day throwing drywall up or pouring roads, hurting their hands, their backs, their knees. I think it makes them people we should really be focused on taking care of in this country. They are the backbone of society. I mean, you like flushing your toilet. You like turning on a light switch.

“They’re sick of their real-life work being less valued than, say, intellectual work. We should be moving that Social Security age down for those people. Do you think your body’s going to last till 65 when you’re picking up 350 pounds of drywall every day for 15 years?”

This is a direct a populist pitch to blue-collar men. We’ll see if it works in her +11 Republican district.

Why Does Everything Feel Like A Scam?

has a great primer on why prices have gotten out of control, the answer isn’t just “inflation.”

At this point, the problem goes beyond things simply becoming more expensive. I increasingly have no idea how much any of this is supposed to cost.

Inflation alone doesn’t really explain the experience of being a consumer right now, which increasingly involves paying more for something that is smaller, worse, harder to buy, harder to return, attached to three separate fees, priced differently depending on where you look and possibly being recommended to you by a person who does not actually exist.

Horvath provides a compelling, and rage-inducing, account of the steady destruction of the consumer market at the hands of “surveillance pricing,” “shrinkflation,” “skimpflation” and more. Of course, private equity is a big part of the story.

Horvath provides a good run down on the supply-side corruption but there is also a wage story to be told. Right now the top 20% of earners account for about 57% of all consumer spending. Consumer spending accounts for something like 70% of the American economy. High-earners have all the power.

One way of thinking about this is that we’ve traded an economy where consumption was widely spread among the vast majority of wage earners, for a society where the capital owners increasingly hawk their wares only to the top quintile of earners.

Feels a bit Weimar doesn’t it.

Donald Trump’s Coalition Is Coming Apart

Meanwhile, Jared Abbott and Joan Williams have been tracking a steady slide in Trump support:

Republicans heralded Donald Trump’s 2024 victory as the birth of a new majority: a multiracial, working-class coalition powered by newfound support among black and Latino voters, particularly men, who had finally abandoned the Democrats over inflation, the cost of living, and immigration. While that conclusion may have been warranted in November 2024, it is not anymore. Indeed, over the course of 2026, Trump’s new coalition has been coming apart at the seams.

Over the first half of this year, we surveyed Trump’s 2024 voters three times: 1,940 in February, with extra interviews among working-class black and Latino voters, nearly eight thousand in April and May, and 2,360 in a national survey in late June and early July. We found that the share of 2024 Trump voters who are not committed to voting Republican in 2028, what we call “Trump waverers,” has risen appreciably over the course of the year.

And as predicted, the “waverers” are concentrated among lower-income voters. Though the defections have spread to the white-collar set, with middle and upper income voters starting to question their loyalty.

Still, as Abbott and Williams warn, the “waverers” may be leaving Trump behind but where they end up is still an open question:

Status Defines Friendship for Too Many Americans

In our K-shaped economy those who make their money on assets, and not wages, have seen their lives improve relative to their wage-earning counterparts in all sorts of ways. One particularly depressing social example is friendship:

If isolation really is a societywide crisis, we need societywide solutions — and an understanding of who has been left out most acutely from what friendship promises.

In pursuit of that aim, the researchers Sam Pressler, a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, and Soren Duggan, a communications strategist and Army veteran with a background in human intelligence collection, produced a report this spring titled “Nobody to Call,” based on a series of 30 in-depth, qualitative interviews with men ranging from their mid-20s to their mid-40s without college degrees. They hoped to add texture to the conversation on loneliness by seeking out those who they believe are struggling the most. We’ve all experienced social atrophy, Mr. Pressler told me, but for men without degrees the bottom has fallen out.

College completion rates have risen over the decades for both men and women, but a growing proportion of those who aren’t graduating are men. As of 2021, men made up around 43 percent of four-year-college enrollees, down from approximately 57 percent in 1970. “As the college degree has increasingly become the great sorting function in American life,” Pressler and Duggan write, “men without degrees have increasingly found themselves sorted out.” We tend to talk about the loneliness crisis in terms of gender, but class, as derived from educational status, is the factor too touchy — or too invisible — to acknowledge.

The quotes from young men in that report are brutal. To make matters worse so much of the discussion about working-class men in the media ends up reproducing vicious caricatures, often in the service of flattering professional-class liberals’s sense of moral righteousness.

The social rot goes deep and no genuinely progressive social policy can be won in an enviornment of total social devastation.

Want a Government That Really Works? Elect More Workers

Roxanne Brown, international president of the United Steelworkers (USW), cites CWCP in her plea for electing more workers:

Union workers advocate more strongly for working people, both while campaigning and after election to public office, than non-union peers, according to a study released in March by Jacobin, the Center for Working Class Politics and Arizona State University’s Center for Work and Democracy.

Union members also use their leadership skills to build bridges in the government arena. They convert their experience in the trenches into credibility in the halls of power. And they win voters’ trust in ways that drive turnout at the polls, the researchers concluded.

As Ryan decided in running for the Indiana legislature, there’s only one way to ensure working people get the government we deserve.

We have to build it with our own hands.

Well put, and we are proud to have helped. To ensure that Brown and other union leaders continue to get CWCP insights that make a difference, please consider upgrading your subscription to this newsletter.

Why A Stunning Democratic Socialist Win in Florida is different

Angie Nixon, a self-described democratic socialist, won big in her bid to become the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Florida. That’s not news in itself given the success of progressives in Democratic primaries around the country, the real news is that she cleaned up with working-class voters:

Nixon, however, distinguished her victory from the slate of democratic socialists who have scored upset victories in Democratic primaries nationwide. While she ran on progressive policies such as universal child care and Medicare-for-all, she said she did not agree with the DSA on all issues and believed her campaign, not a national organization, allowed her to build a coalition that looked different from other democratic-socialist wins.

Not surprisingly, Nixon made it a point to reject the policy of defunding the police and spent a lot of her campaign translating progressive policy language into a more plainspoken populism.

Yet, even with her political smarts, and more favorable coalition, Nixon faces an immensely tough general election in red Florida.

A new national study, conducted by the Center for Working Class Politics (CWCP) and the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI), finds that straightforward ‘Kitchen Table Populism’ is the clear winner among Democratic messaging strategies, significantly outperforming both the mainstream liberal focus on Donald Trump and more progressive “divide-and-conquer” messages.

The survey, fielded by Verasight, polled 6,100 adult Americans in June, including more than 1,000 additional rural respondents. The novel survey tested economic populist messages against strong counter messages. This allowed researchers to see how durable each message was when presented with a popular, conservative counterargument.

To do this, each respondent saw a Republican message first (randomly assigned to focus on either government waste or immigration), then they were asked to rate Democratic messages drawn at random from a pool of 13 distinct appeals. The messages tested included five developed by the research team and eight others currently in active use by campaigns, advocacy groups, and influential messaging professionals.

Researchers found that what they call “Kitchen Table Populism” won across the board.

Every message in this category performed strongly and, in nearly every case, beat the Republican opposition message among persuadable voters — including undecided 2026 voters. The top-performing message in this category was net positive even among Republicans, and it outperformed a Republican opposition message among 2024 Trump voters who say they don’t plan to vote Republican in 2028, a group the researchers call “Trump waverers.”

The study also found that progressive “divide-and-conquer” messages — those designed to educate voters about right-wing scapegoating of minority groups — significantly underperformed populist messaging across every demographic tested, including among Democrats themselves. Meanwhile, more mainstream anti-Trump messages — focused on Trump as a corrupt rule-breaker responsible for economic hardship — also underperformed Kitchen Table Populism with every group studied, including voters who backed Kamala Harris.

The June survey builds on a preliminary experiment conducted in April with more than 9,000 respondents, which tested nearly 18,000 variations of populist messaging.

Full results, detailed methodology, and crosstabs are available in the complete report linked below.

Download Executive Summary
Download Full Report

Media Contacts:

Jared Abbott, Director, Center for Working Class Politics

jared@workingclasspolitics.org

Erica Etelson, Board President, Rural Urban Bridge Initiative

erica@ruralurbanbridge.org

A short one this week. Democrats are still struggling with working class voters. Are insurgent progressives the key? How far can the ‘Mamdani coalition’ go? And, Nate Powell comes up short.

Plus, a new research alert.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

Democrats have a working‑class voter problem that progressives like Abdul El‑Sayed are still struggling to solve

Nicholas Jacobs has an interesting new essay in The Conversation about why the working-class has slowly abandoned the Democrats:

Trade is the strongest argument. In 1988, roughly 74% of both Democrats and working-class voters groups favored limits on imports to protect American jobs.

By 2024, only 26% of Democrats favored limits, while 54% of working-class voters continued to do so.

Unlike most Democrats, many working-class communities do not see globalization in their interest. Running alongside the trade gap is a widening divide over values that no tariffs can fix. […] That gap is not primarily a story about rising working-class racial resentment. It’s about the Democratic Party’s rapid post-2008 shift toward a worldview that places far greater explanatory weight on structural barriers and far less on individual effort and personal responsibility. […] On cultural questions, the pattern persists: Working-class voters did not move right in reactionary revolt. Democrats moved left.

This essay gets a lot right though Jacobs uses self-identification as a measure of who counts for the working class. That gets him a much smaller group than more typical definitions yield—around 35%.

The Democratic Party Needs To Do More Than Represent Wealthy Progressives

I’m in the Guardian on a similar beat, laying out the latest research from Jared Abbott and Joan Williams:

The first thing to note about the gaps between the educated upper middle class and the working class is that the latter overwhelmingly prioritize economic issues, while the former lean toward cultural ones.

Of the top 12 political priorities listed by working-class respondents, 11 are economic concerns. The only non-economic issue prized by the working class was a desire to lower the crime rate. Meanwhile, educated upper-income respondents rated cultural and symbolic issues over economic concerns. Of their top 12 priorities, only six were economic. They also rate abstract ideals over concrete, material ones. Educated voters prioritized “resisting authoritarianism” above “protecting social security” and “ending racism” above “protecting Medicaid”.

Insurgents Are Revitalizing the Democratic Party

Here is Katrina vanden Heuvel, and John Nichols for The Nation:

[Voters] are open to candidates—be they democratic socialists such as Pennsylvania House nominee Chris Rabb, or progressives like Minnesota Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan, or old-school economic populists like Troy Jackson in Maine and Sherrod Brown in Ohio—who break with status quo politics. That’s not surprising. Remember: Bernie Sanders represents a rural state and was the first non-Republican to win his Vermont Senate seat since the 1850s; and some of the most progressive members of Congress, such as Wisconsin’s Mark Pocan, represent urban, suburban, and rural districts. And look at the polling analyses from groups like the Center for Working-Class Politics, which remind us that “championing progressive economic policies can reverse the exodus of blue-collar voters from the party” and that “contrary to what many might expect, the working class has become both more progressive on economic issues and less conservative on social issues in recent decades.”

Unfortunately, that’s a bit of a stretch. Yes, our research has found that working-class voters have grown more progressive, but the crucial part left out here is that, especially when it comes to cultural issues, the educated higher-income voters have pulled away from the working class on these issues. And the latest research shows that major class gaps have yawned between the über-liberal professionals and blue-collar workers.

The urge to cheer for progressive upstarts is understandable, but it’s not helpful to insist that today’s progressives (including nearly all the candidates that The Nation features on this month’s cover) have the keys to winning back working-class voters.

Right now, they don’t.

The Mamdani Coalition Goes National

To see just how far the post-Sanders generation of candidates have moved from Bernie Sanders himself here is Michael Lange:

The great irony is that, ten years ago, Bernie Sanders was weakest where his movement heirs are strongest. Across urban centers, Hillary Clinton crushed Sanders, whose coalition, by contrast, was built on whiter, more rural counties and college towns. The self-described democratic socialist won West Virginia and Upstate New York but lost San Francisco and Brooklyn. And a decade later, this political geography has inverted. The Squad of Trump 1.0 (AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley) and the incoming DSA class of Trump 2.0 (Rabb, Valdez, Avila Chevalier, Kiros, Donavan McKinney) all hail from major cities. The urban middle class, once the establishment’s firewall, has become the vanguard of The Left.

Oddly, Lange’s larger argument seems to undersell how dangerous this shift has been. The trouble with the so-called “Mamdani Coalition” — defined by Lange as “younger, multi-racial, disproportionately renter, [and] college-educated” — is that it cannot be a winning coalition at the national level.

Michael Baumgartner To Face Democrat Carmela Conroy in 5th Congressional District 2024 rematch

Nate Powell, the independent populist candidate running in Washington’s 5th Congressional District, came up short:

A Marine Corps veteran and Spokane firefighter, Powell hoped to beat Baumgartner by ditching the Democratic Party label. He came up short of that goal Tuesday.

Powell appeared surprised when results came in Tuesday.

“We’re losing,” he said at a Spokane Firefighter Union building in the lower South Hill.

Powell agreed when a campaign aide added “by more than I expected.”

The political independent vowed to back the Democrat in the general election.

Powell was on a call fighting a forest fire on election day.

New Research with the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative

Working with our friends at RUBI we are preparing to publish new survey research on populism. For this, CWCP and RUBI oversampled rural voters to find what works far beyond the urban haunts where progressives typically compete.

To get first access, make sure to subscribe.

Factories are still closing. Manufacturing matters more than you think. The Blue-Collar Brigade has the stuff. And a union wireman beats the odds in red Florida.

Plus, climate progressivism won’t win workers.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

The Last Day of a Factory in Trump Country, As its Work Moves to China

The headline says it all. But if you need a little more details the factory in question was the Conn Selmer musical instrument plant located in Eastlake, Ohio. It was, until a few weeks ago, the largest U.S. manufacturer of brass orchestral instruments. A union factory that employed around 150 workers.

Managers had informed [Joe] Klima and other union leaders in January that Conn Selmer was closing its Eastlake plant. Some production would move to a nonunion factory in Elkhart, Indiana. The rest was going to China, where the company had begun building a $21 million manufacturing facility in 2024 in Jiangsu province, union leaders said they were told.

Klima and some of the other old-timers at Conn Selmer could remember a time when politicians assured manufacturing workers in the Midwest that free trade with China or Mexico would on balance improve their lives. But that era was over. On the left — and, more noticeably, on the right — it seemed like everyone now talked about reviving the nation’s industrial base.

“Together we will reclaim our nation’s destiny as the number one manufacturing superpower in the world,” Donald Trump said on the campaign trail in August 2024. “We will do it, and China won’t even be close. Nobody will be.”

It’s not just the loss of income that is a tragedy here, it’s the loss of dignity.

Despite these frustrations — despite the early mornings, aching limbs and sometimes grueling pace — there was something inside the plant that Hines had not experienced elsewhere. In a word, it was pride.

He saw it in his co-workers, who would stop and stare in appreciation at a finished French horn or sousaphone. He saw it in the schoolchildren who sometimes toured the factory, where instruments used in the Cleveland Orchestra and the Ohio State University Marching Band were made. “It’s truly amazing, what we do here,” Hines said.

To make matters worse, the parent company of Conn Selmer, Steinway Musical Instruments Inc., is owned by billionaire hedge-funder (and Trump mega-donor) John Paulson’s venture capital firm. Needless to say, the now laid-off workers, many of them Trump supporters, have become bitter and cynical as a result.

“I used to be a Democrat. Then I seen how they went.”

“And the Republicans?” Rosciszewski asked. “How did they go?”

“It’s all false promises,” said Annette Dombrowski, a 64-year-old janitor at the factory who also voted for Trump. “I’m done. I’m not voting ever again.”

Who can blame them? Who is even speaking to them? As our most recent report shows broad appeals to economic populism from Democratic candidates actually declined in the 2024 election cycle. Meanwhile, most liberals appear either resigned to industrial pessimism, believing that there is nothing we can do to resuscitate American manufacturing, or worse, actively hostile to any such attempts.

Some liberals, especially the well-paid ones with degrees from elite universities, will even say that the loss of this or that factory is just the price to pay for economic progress. Yet the continued, unrelenting, immiseration that follows in the wake of such mass layoffs hasn’t been good for anyone. Least of all the Democratic Party which may have lost its claim as the Party of the People for at least a generation when Bill Clinton signed NAFTA.

Bidenomics Was More Successful Than People Think

To drive home just how important industrial investment is politically, and just how incomprehensibly stupid Democrats are to neglect the issue, is in The Atlantic making the case that yes, manufacturing matters.

Looking at voting behavior in districts with heavy investments from Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act she finds:

Over the four presidential elections preceding 2024, voting patterns in these two sets of districts moved in lockstep, rising and falling together with the national tides. Then, they split. In 2024, we found that clean-energy manufacturing lifted Harris’s vote share by roughly 1.5 percentage points—a swing of 2.5 million votes across the 234 districts. For context, Trump won the national popular vote by just 2.3 million.

The Electoral College vote came down to three states that Trump carried by less than two points: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. In Michigan, where every single district had at least one factory announced, the swing we identified was larger than Trump’s entire margin of victory. Without the manufacturing build-out, our estimates suggest, Harris would have lost that state by three times as much as she did. And we find that the effect scaled: Larger investments moved more votes than smaller ones did. And there was no backlash, not even in deep-red districts.

Now, just imagine if the candidate wasn’t Kamala Harris but a credible tribune of working-class politics.

You can, and should, read the whole paper here.

The New Fight Over Who Gets To Be ‘Working Class’

In what is becoming a genre, Politico has another article puzzling over the definition of “working class.” This quote from John Samuelson about sums it up:

“Republicans and Democrats just love a little blue collar slumming,” said Transport Workers Union International President John Samuelsen. “It absolutely comes with a presumption on the part of politicians that they can get one over on workers, they can somehow fool workers. Workers are not stupid, despite the fact a lot of politicians think they are.”

Right. That’s why the messenger matters about as much as the message.

The Blue Collar Brigade Has the Right Messengers

On that score, is in Jacobin magazine profiling a slate of union-backed, blue-collar candidates.

We at the CWCP have been exhorting candidates for years to focus like a laser on bread-and-butter economic issues. These candidates not only do that, but their economic platforms are genuinely ambitious. From raising taxes on billionaires and big corporations, to strengthening workers’ power on the job, to letting every American buy into the same trusted and high-quality coverage Medicare already provides, to creating millions of well-paid jobs to rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, the Brigade is running on economic programs big enough to convince working-class voters that someone is actually fighting for them.

Every one of these policies points to the same problem. “There was a time,” [Bob] Brooks explains, “when a blue-collar job could make you a decent living. It doesn’t anymore.” The Blue Collar Brigade is refreshing in its single-minded obsession with fixing that problem. Their shared goal is to ensure, as Brian Poindexter puts it, that “if you work hard, you should be able to afford to live with dignity, support your family, and plan for the future. That’s not asking for special treatment — it’s asking for a fair deal.”

In recent research I conducted with Joan C. Williams, we found that effective working-class messaging also requires speaking to core working-class values. The Blue Collar Brigade largely excels on this score. Poindexter ties pride and loyalty to country directly to jobs, for example. “If we believe in America, we should build it here,” he has said. “I believe in ‘Made in America’ in real, practical ways: in the jobs we create, the products we buy, and the communities we invest in.”

Bingo. It’s worth reading the whole thing. This is the kind of single-minded populist focus that we need. It’s not airy or abstract, it’s tied to the real world, the built enviornment, the economic needs, and social values, of working-class Americans.

Florida Senator, IBEW Brother: ‘The Voters Can Smell if You’re Authentic’

And if you needed any more proof that working-class candidates can make the difference:

Reporters and pundits declared his first win a major upset: a pro-worker, pro-union political newcomer prevailing in a deep-red district against a cattle rancher with rich and powerful backers. Even the chair of the state’s Democratic Party considered it a “shocking victory.”

The media called the race for Nathan when he was up by 408 votes, less than 1% of the ballots cast. A pub packed with his supporters erupted — family, friends and fellow union members jumping up and down, waving signs and chanting “Brian!”

“It was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced,” the Tampa Local 915 organizer said. “We knew it was going to be close. She [opponent Josie Tomkow] out-fundraised and outspent me. But when we saw the early returns, we thought, ‘OK, we’re actually in this.’ We did the work, and it was paying off.”

Nathan is, yet another, blue-collar, union-backed candidate that has again proven the case that we’ve been making for years. Paging the Blue-Collar Brigade, get this guy on your slate.

The Class Divide Haunting Climate Politics

has a great write-up, also in Jacobin, on recent research published by Jared Abbott and Joan Williams. Huber looks at the yawning class-based political attitude gaps around climate issues:

Another topic beloved by affluent liberals is the commitment to the Paris Agreement — a nonbinding climate agreement signed by 195 countries in 2015. Not only does the Right paint this as a globalist plan meant to impinge on US national interests, but the treaty itself also translates into an abstract politics of degree targets and emission-cut commitments. Unsurprisingly, there is a massive class gap over whether the US should stay in the treaty: liberal college grads oppose withdrawal at a level of 95 percent, but the working class only shows 39 percent opposition.

But there is hope yet:

The report also shows the working-class responds positively — increasing 17 points — to a “Build, Baby, Build” message that centers economic growth, job creation, and calls for reshoring manufacturing. It should be obvious why this framing resonates in communities destroyed by decades of free trade and deindustrialization.

Ding, ding, ding.

Progress, but not enough.

Finally, a note of caution. While it seems that this election cycle we have a strong class of blue-collar, union-backed candidates, the overall trend is a small one. And, as of the last cycle, heading in the wrong direction:

This needs to change. Efforts like ours are key changing it. Yes, this is a plea for support: if you haven’t already please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Troy Jackson rallies union allies in Maine. A Democratic candidate causes a headache for Dan Osborn in Nebraska. And Anton Jäger on the Hyperpolitics of the elite.

But first, two new CWCP-affiliated reports

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

CWCP: Democratic Campaign Rhetoric, 2020-2024

How Democratic congressional candidates’ messaging shifted across three election cycles, and what it meant electorally.

Our regular CWCP candidates report is out today. The report analyzes the class background and political appeals of over 600 candidates who ran in the 2024 election cycle. Plus, this year’s edition compares appeals over the last three major election cycles.

Report Website

The Left’s Coalition Crisis

Understanding the Massive Divide Between Working Class and College Educated Voters, and How to Bridge it

Jared Abbott and Joan Williams also have a new report out on the class divide on the Left and what might be done about it. Published this week, the analysis provides a thorough portrait of the various class-based attitude gaps that have become major obstacles for progressive politics.

Download Report

The Logger Who Could Unseat Susan Collins

The has a good write up on Troy Jackson’s campaign. Jackson is a labor-bred, labor-backed candidate, the kind we think has a strong chance of winning back crucial working-class votes:

As delegates to the Maine Democratic Party’s special Senate nominating convention on Saturday morning filed into a convention center in the former “lumber capital of the world,” a box truck sponsored by Teamsters Local 340 pulled up to the curb. It was flying “Troy Jackson for Senate” flags from the hood, and the trucker inside pumped his fist to egg on the attendees. Inside, a handful of union officials compared notes on fifth-generation logger and former state Senate president Troy Jackson’s improbable ascent from second runner-up in the primary for governor to emergency Senate nominee. Jake Teitelbaum—treasurer of the Maine Service Employees Association, a union that represents state employees—explained it to me: “Maybe some of the other candidates could mobilize money quickly, but Troy had the connection to labor. And we mobilize people.”

That last point is important. We’ve long advocated for more working-class candidates, but we’ve also argued that those candidates ought to come out of the union movement. Jackson’s campaign offers a good demonstration why. While much of civil society has been ground into dust or otherwise dissolved through digital substitutes—and while the Democratic Party’s own organization has atrophied into nothing more than a few terabytes worth of pathetic, whimpering emails and texts begging you for cash— the labor movement is still here. Unions still have the capacity, and resources, to mobilize and communicate with working-class voters in a way almost no other organizations can. Thats a huge asset, one that working-class union candidates can wield.

Loser of Nebraska Democratic US Senate primary sues party to force replacement for Burbank

In a surprising move, William Forbes is suing the Democratic Party to run a candidate in the upcoming general election. Forbes, who lost his primary bid, claims that if a nominated candidate drops out, the party has to replace them:

“Nebraska law does not permit a candidate — or, more fundamentally, her political party — to abuse and distort the electoral process by running in a primary election with the deliberate purpose of exiting the race before the general election to strategically divert votes to a rival,” part of the lawsuit reads. “Nebraska law is clear: when a nominee withdraws between the primary and general elections, their political party has an obligation to replace them.”

Osborn, an independent, has greatly benefitted from the Democratic Party standing down in this election. If Forbes succeeds, it could threaten future Osborn-style candidates, those populist independents in deep-red areas where no Democrat stands a chance. And Forbes isn’t alone. In Montana, where the Democrats have also sat out the election in the hopes that an independent candidate might snatch the seat away from the GOP, the same fight is playing out.

Hyperpolitics in Command?

Anton Jäger, who was recently profiled in The Guardian, has a sharp essay at New Left Review regarding our Hyperpolitical age:

The globalization of wealth, while politics remained residually national, introduced comparable intra-elite contradictions in other countries. Though France and Germany fought much harder to protect their ‘national champions’ in high-end engineering (the last British carmaker was sold off long ago), their banks nonetheless found American subprime mortgages more enticing. In the US, the state–capital nexus was less dependent on kith and kin, being robustly institutionalized in the lobbying industry that channelled corporate inducements to appropriate Congressional Committee members. But here, too, the onset of ruthless mergers and acquisitions, asset-stripping and outsourcing, helped to weaken links between enterprise and place.

Yes, in the good years of globalization the GDP growth machine did go brrrr, but the built environment and social world all suffered as a result. It makes sense, then, that in an effort to restore some sense of social and political stability the working-class all over the world has rallied behind those who criticize globalism and promise to renew place-based industry.

Still, we may find ourselves trapped. Globalism has resulted in obscene levels of inequality that have immensely empowered the rich and radically increased their influence over democracy, making any challenge to their economic theories much more difficult. Worse, neoliberalism has destroyed the associational and organizational capacity of the popular classes. We’ve all been digitally individualized and live in an almost incomprehensibly fractured social world. As such, forming coherent, durable, democratic coalitions has become nearly impossible and political leaders, of the Right or Left, routinely fail to command popular legitimacy for more than a half-second after the polls close.

A key finding of this report is that college-educated liberals live in a class bubble where virtually everyone agrees with them on culture and climate issues—but working-class people don’t. This makes it very difficult for liberal college grads to see that their views reflect a particular class position, and that people who are situated elsewhere in the class hierarchy will typically hold different positions on issues that college-educated liberals care about deeply.

The researchers developed an original survey to explore the various attitude gaps between the broad working-class (defined as non-college educated, middle income workers) and the liberal upper-middle-class (Democratic-leaning college graduates with a household income in the top 25%).

The survey finds that there’s very little overlap between the priorities of the college-educated voters that make up the Democratic Party’s base, and the concerns of the working-class voters that Democrats must win to be competitive in swing states again. Working-class voters are alarmed about rising prices, declining job opportunities, and public safety. College-educated voters overwhelmingly prioritize democracy, social justice issues and the climate. To build a tent big enough to fit both groups of voters, the Democratic establishment and the Party’s left flank both need to start doing things differently, Abbott and Williams found.

“Progressives and moderates are constantly arguing about what the Democratic Party should do to court working class voters. Do we shift to the left or the center to win them back? We’re seeing this play out in the primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin right now. But, what we found is that they are both wrong,” said Abbott and Williams in a statement. “Democrats must center economic concerns again, on that we all seem to agree. But, centrists have argued that Democrats must also abandon deeply held beliefs on social issues to win back working-class voters. This is not only incorrect, according to our study, but this could also cost Democrats among their college-educated base for whom these social justice policies are a top priority. On the other hand, the Left’s economic agenda often gets lost under alienating messages around social justice. While our research found that Democrats need not abandon social issues to broaden their coalition, they do have to be open to compromises on both messaging and policy priorities in order to bring working class voters into the tent.”

When it comes to messaging on social issues, Williams and Abbott found that Democrats need to speak more consistently to working-class values. Their research revealed that these values could be categorized as ‘hard work,’ ‘family,’ ‘loyalty to community and country,’ and ‘physical security.’ The survey also specifically tested a range of social justice issues with the goal of increasing support among working class voters. Among the strongest issue-specific findings:

• Police Accountability: Working-class voters overwhelmingly believe that racism in policing is a problem, but physical security is a very high priority; some working-class people face real violence in their communities and many more working-class people worry about it. The survey found that a pledge to “put more well-trained officers in high-crime areas while enforcing strict rules so bad cops face consequences” garnered 82% working-class support.

• Immigration: Support for a path to citizenship rose from 48% to 70% when the policy was framed around immigrants who have lived in the United States for at least 10 years, held jobs, paid taxes, contributed to their communities, and kept out of trouble.

• Climate: Support for climate initiatives rose from 59% to 76% when the policy was framed around lowering energy costs, creating good blue-collar jobs, rebuilding American industry, and remaining competitive with China.

• Trans Youth in Sports: Only 20% of the working class supports trans girls on girls’ sports teams. Through changes in messaging that focused on working-class values, Abbott and Williams raised support to 43 percent. However, that’s still much lower than the overwhelming working-class support they found for allowing LGBTQ couples to adopt children and prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ in jobs and housing, both of which speak to working-class values of ‘family’ and ‘hard work.’ When it comes to building support for LGBTQ rights, the solution is not to ‘go to center,’ William and Abbott argue, but it is to shift the focus from girls’ sports to anti-discrimination guarantees.

In addition to offering lessons to the Left on social justice issues, the report also critiques the Democratic establishment for its past failures on economic messaging. Specifically, Abbott and Williams call out the Inflation Reduction Act for dressing up a climate bill as something it was not. Today, only about a quarter of working-class respondents say the bill helped the U.S. economy or working-class people. Abbott and Williams counsel that, in the future, Democrats need to offer clear, tangible solutions that speak to working-class concerns about prices and declining job opportunities. Anything that’s seen as an attempt to manipulate voters will only increase the trust gap between working-class voters and Democrats, they argue in the report.

Williams and Abbott worked with a non-partisan firm to conduct the survey in February 2026. The poll interviewed nearly 5,800 Americans, with extra samples of working-class voters of color. They defined working-class voters as the middle 50 percent of Americans whose incomes range from roughly $40,000 to $100,000. Abbott and Williams have both conducted extensive research on the working class for several decades.

An exhaustive analysis, this report explores major class-based fault lines on culture, climate, crime, globalization, how best to navigate them and where and when to change tactics. Click below to download.

The Left's Coalition Crisis

The class debate in the Democratic Party rages on. The Troy Jackson train picks up steam. Bob Brooks picks up endorsements. And a new poll has Kaela Berg neck-and-neck with her potential Republican opponent.

But first: announcing two new CWCP reports.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

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The Left’s Coalition Crisis

Understanding the Massive Divide Between Working Class and College Educated Voters, and How to Bridge it

Jared Abbott and Joan Williams have a new report on the class divide on the Left and what might be done about it. Set for publication early next week, the analysis provides a thorough portrait of the various class-based attitude gaps that have become major obstacles for progressive politics.

CWCP: 2024 Campaign Candidates and Rhetoric Report

How Democratic congressional candidates’ messaging shifted across three election cycles, and what it meant electorally.

Our regular CWCP candidates report will also be published next week. This report analyzes the class background and political appeals of over 600 candidates who ran in the 2024 election cycle. Plus, this year’s report compares appeals over the last three major election cycles.

To get access to these reports as soon as they are published make sure to subscribe.

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The Democratic Class Debate

The Platner campaign implosion seems to have reignited a debate about class on the Left.

Eric Levitz argues in Vox that an expansive “two-class model” is hopelessly out of date (was it ever accurate?). He prefers using “non-college” as a definition for the working class. Vinnie Rontondo at The New Republic agrees. Meanwhile, claims that class is some kind of vibe. And argues that in America it’s futile to even try to define class.

We touched on some of these themes last week but they’re worth revisiting. For one thing, the main reason it’s important to focus on manual, blue-collar, and non-college-educated workers is because they are the majority of the country and they are moving away from their traditional political home on the Left. Anyone trying to wish away this problem with definitional jiujitsu should be ignored.

But there is a deeper case to be made here about why education plays such a big role in class debates today. The political sociologist Wolfgang Streeck explains it well here:

…the new class division can be understood as a result of divergent interests vis-à-vis globalisation: a definition of the new middle class as a group who are believed to, or actually do, profit from globalisation, who have an interest in open international markets for their human capital, and who do not want to be held responsible for satisfying the parochial demands of the losers of globalisation for material or cultural compensation. […]

The conflict between the old working class and its former allies, now feeling themselves to be cosmopolitans, is exacerbated by a particular asymmetry. In so-called post-industrial society’s economic division of labour and social class structure, it is typically the representatives of the new middle class who end up in possession, or, in any case, in control, of the means of cultural production and communication. This enables them to present and express their particular perspective as a general one—which is, of course, exactly what is meant by the production of ideology. As a result, in the ideal image of globalist politics the representation of the underclass in a democracy conceived as a system of institutions is replaced by the education of the underclass in democracy as a system of values. This reversal in the direction of political communication is additionally favoured by the fact that a large part of the new class works in the field of education, where they believe their task to be to dissuade the less learned by friendly encouragement or bad examination marks from holding erroneous opinions. The resulting culture wars, in which a newly standardised way of writing and speaking sometimes becomes a requirement for full moral citizenship, are conducted with a passion and emotion which is all the greater because the two hostile camps were previously allies, or at least thought they were.

— Wolfgang Streeck, Taking Back Control? (2024)

That’s a lot, but it offers a good summation of what is going on politically. The reason for the education cleavage is not merely because it makes latte sippers out of Dunkin’ drinkers (though that matters more than you might think), but because college education largely determines whether you will sink or swim in the era of neoliberal globalization. Non-college-educated workers have suffered immense wage suppression since the late 1990s, while college-educated workers have seen broad wage gains. Further, these outcomes are in large part tied to the destructive effects of hyper-globalization, which is why flashpoints around immigration, trade, and tariffs inspire such intense passions on both sides of the diploma divide.

Plus, as Streeck points out, the income-gap that has yawned between the degree-havers and the college-nevers has, in turn, resulted in a cultural gap between the two groups. Unfortunately, to resolve that gap ‘knowledge workers’ have—perhaps naively, perhaps unwittingly, and sometimes maliciously—taken it to be their duty to morally re-educate the plebs on what opinions they are allowed to hold on a whole host of issues.

Maine Democrat Troy Jackson has raised $1M for his Senate bid so far

Some good news from Maine for once. Troy Jackson has sewn up the primary nomination and he’s posted strong fundraising numbers:

Jackson, the presumptive Democratic nominee, raised $613,000 of that haul since Sunday following the selection of the 601 delegates who will determine Platner’s replacement this weekend. More than 90 percent of those delegates have pledged to back Jackson.

The fundraising number is a strong showing for Jackson, who only raised a bit over $1 million in his entire run for governor earlier this year. But he still has a lot of work to do to catch up to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is sitting on an $11 million war chest.

‘Bob’s one of us:’ Dozens of labor unions back Bob Brooks’ campaign

Bob Brooks wins a slew of union endorsements:

“Bob’s one of us,” said Jim Irwin, president of the Lehigh Valley Labor Council, in an interview with The Keystone. “He’s a union member, he’s our brother, and he’s going to win. He’s going to go out to DC, and he’s going to fight for working families.”

He was also endorsed by the North Eastern Pennsylvania Building & Construction Trades Council, the Lehigh Valley Building & Construction Trades Council, and the Philadelphia Building & Construction Trades Council, representing over 60 local trade unions in Pennsylvania’s 7th Congressional District.

“There are a lot of politicians in Washington who like to talk the talk about working people. Bob is actually one.”

New poll shows Republican Eric Pratt in close race with DFL congressional candidates

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Kaela Berg, the union flight attendant turned congressional candidate, is polling neck-and-neck with her potential Republican rival.

The poll, conducted by Harper Polling from June 18 to June 21, surveyed 415 likely general election voters in the district and had a margin of error of ±4.81 percentage points. The Pratt campaign commissioned the poll and provided it to Alpha News this week.

According to the campaign, respondents were asked about their preferences in hypothetical general election matchups between Pratt and the three leading DFL candidates.

In a general election matchup between Pratt and [Democratic-Farmer-Labor] DFL state Rep. Kaela Berg, the two were tied at 43%.

Berg has a tough road ahead she’s trailing in primary polls and, as is the case for most working-class candidates, she’s far behind her primary rivals in fundraising:

• Matt Klein (DFL) — Q2 fundraising: $331k — Cash on hand: $519k

• Matt Little (DFL) — Q2 fundraising: $175k — Cash on hand: $254k

• Kaela Berg (DFL) — Q2 fundraising: $109k — Cash on hand: $56k

Are Democrats too concerned with image over ideas? Do blue-collar candidates have any value? It seems almost everyone is trying to draw big lessons from the Platner campaign fallout. Some fair, some foul.

Plus, in a wide-ranging interview.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

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What Graham Platner’s strategists used to know

at Searchlight, a centrist political strategy outfit, argues that populists are too obsessed with class, and that what matters more is perfectly calculating the issues to meet the electorate.

His essay gets some things right but he makes one monster claim that completely misses:

Who knows if Chris Murphy will run for president? If he runs, wins the Democratic nomination, and loses in the general election, it won’t be because he’s a lawyer from Connecticut. It will be because he failed to take on the heterodox set of issues necessary to win over the sort of swing voters who previously supported Trump. His lack of an authentic blue-collar identity will not be a liability or an asset.

He goes on to argue that: “Blue-collar identity politics might sound good to the sort of cosmopolitan folks who pontificate about politics online. It just isn’t sufficient to win over voters who decide elections.”

Of course it isn’t “sufficient” to win elections, who ever claimed it was? That’s a cheap shot. But his broader point here is that class just doesn’t matter. It’s all about the policy mix.

Krauss, cites Dan Osborn, comparing his campaign favorably to the ill-fated Platner. By doing so, he cuts the legs out from under his own argument. Because it’s not that Platner seemed too working-class while Osborn appears less so, nor that Platner came off as too populist, while Osborn seems moderate. It’s the opposite.

It was Platner’s Brahmin upbinging and expensive education that imparted to him the very worldview Krauss criticizes. It’s not by accident that Platner embraced nearly every progressive slogan that whistled by his campaign office. Forget the aesthetics, a lot of Platner’s populism — complete with All Cops Are Bastards bumper stickers —was the populism of the professional class, the social class he was born into. It makes some sense, then, that he appealed to those voters.

Osborn, of course, has no such trouble because he’s never been socially indoctrinated into the world of Brahmin liberalism.

Krauss argues that Osborn’s appeal lies in his “heterodox” views, but this also misses the mark. Osborn’s worldview is consistently populist, which is exactly what puts him out of step with down-the-line professional-class progressives. Populism isn’t just about bashing billionaires. It’s also a reaction against the failures of globalization. That explains Osborn’s positions on tariffs (in favor) and immigration (not so much). While Krauss reads Osborn’s “balance the budget” position as a concession to fiscal conservatives, it’s more honestly read as a demand for popular sovereignty. Osborn is entirely right to criticize the debt state and the cash that flows from taxpayers’ pockets to all sorts of unsavory and undeserving special interests. FDR made the same appeals. As did AMLO, the popular (and populist) former president of Mexico.

Moreover, it’s not so-called “heterodox” views that make Osborn credible — it’s his social position. When he says he’s not beholden to the techno-financial-political complex, voters have every reason to believe him. The point of running blue-collar populists isn’t that they merely look the part, but that they are far more likely to get the issues right for the right reasons.

Democrats push image over ideas. It’s a losing strategy.

Here’s another argument about how everyone got Platner wrong because they were dreaming of his beard and baritone voice. This time it’s in USA Today:

Democrats prioritize candidate profiles over policy. “Every cycle, there is a different hot candidate profile that everybody’s trying to be,” Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha told The Washington Post in 2025. The piece, headlined “Meet the Rugged Guys of the 2026 midterms,” detailed progressive strategists’ effort to engineer wins in the coming November elections.

Modeling their approach on John Fetterman’s Senate win in Pennsylvania, strategists at Fight Agency have tried to replicate that formula in other races. Their major win in 2025 was with Zohran Mamdani in New York — less “rugged” than the archetype, but still an “everyman” campaign.

Let’s leave aside the fact that John Fetterman and Zohran Mamdani aren’t comparable politicians on any meaningful level. The main argument here, much like Krauss’s, is that some significant chunk of the Democratic Party is running around recruiting tough guys to run for Congress. This just isn’t happening. The few candidates Potas names as examples of this (Osborn, Brian Poindexter, and Platner) are all outsiders whom establishment Democrats distrust. Plus, all of them were inspired to run as a consequence of their populist convictions, not because they wanted to showcase their tattoos or beards.

Ultimately, Potas makes the same mistake Krauss does when he argues, “Democrats don’t have a candidate problem. They have a substance problem.” Sure. Sounds good. Except the candidates are the very people who make substantive political appeals.

The problem is that liberal candidates who come from elite backgrounds have consistently failed to articulate a political vision that resonates with working-class voters. You can’t make Pete Buttigieg into a populist by handing him a bullhorn any more than Kamala Harris can become one by putting on a Carhartt. The candidates themselves matter, not because they wear flannel or curse, but because working-class candidates organically express a working-class worldview.

Platner Was Toxic. But Democrats Could Learn From His Politics.

On the other side, in the New York Times gets a lot right in his Platner postmortem. Unlike other mainstream liberals, Cohn recognizes the role populism must play in any successful strategy. Further, he recognizes how difficult it is for establishment insiders to become populists:

What’s telling, though, is that very few mainstream liberals like Mr. Murphy or Gavin Newsom have actually succeeded at seizing this potential middle ground — populist and anti-corporate but not democratic socialist or focused on identity politics — even when they’ve identified it as an opportunity.

The reason varies, but one overarching issue is that mainstream liberals struggle to run as populists or anti-system candidates. Mr. Trump’s brand of populism made it much harder for them: He co-opted the traditional Democratic message on trade, promised not to cut entitlement programs, and put Democrats in the position of defending the establishment. Against the backdrop of Mr. Trump, most mainstream liberals just aren’t populist.

Again, it’s not just a matter of poll-testing messages and rhetoric. Voters don’t like politicians plucked from the Nonprofit-Law Firm-Washington pipeline.

What Does It Mean to Be a Working-Class Candidate?

Sarah Jones in New York Magazine has her own diagnosis of the Platner phenomenon:

While the pundits earn their paychecks, they avoid other, more complicated questions. Was Platner a real proletarian or a nepo baby who put on a show? Were his supporters working class? The truth may be that he was both: a Hotchkiss dropout who had experienced some hardship. […] The question about his base is harder to answer without a firm definition of the American working class. As the writer Osita Nwanevu pointed out in a piece for The Guardian, Platner was “down by roughly 15-20 points among voters without college degrees,” and one poll showed him “25 points behind among white men without degrees specifically,” which pokes holes in simple narratives about the oyster farmer and his rise. Still, polling can only tell us so much about the working class and who’s in it. If the category includes anyone without a college degree, a car-dealership titan can be a man of the people.

This is a popular line from many on the left who want a more expansive definition of the working class. The trouble is that it risks missing a growing section of blighted trees by zooming out to see the forest. It’s blue-collar and non-college educated workers, specifically, who are leaving the Democratic Party. What some people call the ‘traditional’ working class. If you don’t like that term, call them ‘a section of the broader working class,’ or whatever, just recognize that it’s the single largest group of working-class voters and it’s drifting away from left-leaning parties all over the world.

That’s the problem that we need to solve.

WATCH: A ‘Society without Capitalism’

CWCP Board member Bhaskar Sunkara was interviewed on Ross Douthat’s “Interesting Times” podcast for the New York Times.

Why not Troy Jackson for Senate? A new poll finds Americans think the economy is bad and getting worse. The case for nationalizing AI. Yet more evidence for economic populism. Rural initiatives that work to reduce ideological polarization. And, friend of the Center, Joan Williams, on winning working-class voters.

Plus, it’s forever 2016: an interview with Tad Devine on Bernie’s legacy (and how the Democrats screwed him).

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

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Graham Platner is out. Troy Jackson should replace him

Platner’s out. Luckily there is another Pine Tree State populist who can appeal to rural working-class voters, Troy Jackson:

Jackson was born to a 16-year-old mother in the northern Maine town of Fort Kent. He is a fifth-generation logger, union member and former state legislator. As a teenager himself, he went to work in the woods, and by 1998 he led a union logging blockade to prevent Canadian scabs from working Maine jobs.

In other words, he was on the frontlines as globalization devastated rural communities like his. He’s spent his life in the tradition of the New Deal, as one of those rare labor Democrats who have kept that spirit alive.

A lot of moderate Democrats smell blood in the water. They are taking the opportunity indict Platner’s populist politics along with his personal character. That’s a mistake. If Democrats nominate a buttoned-up business-class liberal they’ll be in trouble.

Economic populism is still the best path forward, and Jackson is a credible populist with a blue-collar background, and a lot of practice winning over rural voters in the heart of Trump country.

Half of Americans struggle to afford groceries and gas, exclusive poll finds

A new Harris/Guardian poll finds that 95% of Americans think we’re in the midst of an economic crisis:

Despite stable employment and record-high stock markets, more Americans believe the overall economy is getting worse (57%) than in February (46%), when the poll was last conducted and before the war in the Middle East sent gas prices soaring. Fewer people today also believe the economy is getting better (16%, compared with 28% in February) and more say their financial security has gotten worse. […] Two-thirds of Americans – including 49% of Republicans – said they have little faith that the federal government will improve the cost-of-living crisis they face.

The Case for Nationalizing Artificial Intelligence

It’s a long shot but not crazy, nationalizing AI firms is firmly in the public interest:

In the press, the so-called AI race is portrayed as a geopolitical competition whereby the Unites States and China compete for who can invest the most, learn the fastest, and build the best models. But this too is a myth. With the partial exception of China, the AI race is a competition between private firms, not nation-states. As such, the spoils do not redound to the citizenry, or the popular classes, but only to the oligarchy. This is especially the case in the United States, where the state has directly invested in the technology and secured a prime business climate for AI expansion through a biased regulatory environment and enormous tax incentives. Meanwhile, the only benefit to the popular classes seems to be the privilege we now enjoy of paying a small sum to slowly cook our brains with vertical video slop.

Eschelon Insights: Political Tribes 2026

A new study from Eschelon Insights says, again, what few Democratic Party factionalists are willing to admit: “Our traditional four quadrants confirm a 2026 electorate that is down the middle on cultural issues and left on economic issues.”

On the issues:

Local Organizing Can Slow the GOP’s Rural Takeover

The Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI) has worked to bring rural working-class people together through its Community Works program, an effort aimed at rebuilding some social trust. A new report finds they’ve made some impressive progress:

The main takeaway: Community Works reduces the intensity of partisan polarization. While the study period (2023–25) saw a shift toward the Republican Party in many rural communities, particularly in the rural Georgia counties surveyed, areas where Community Works operated changed their attitudes much more gradually, bucking the trend of hyperpolarization that makes it so hard for progressive voices to break through in rural America. Why? Community Works acted as a moderating force between everyday people and partisan narratives at the national level.

WATCH: Can Democrats win back the working class, with Joan Williams

LISTEN: “How the Democrats Screwed Bernie”

Longtime Democratic Party strategist Tad Devine on his new book:

Nicholas Jacobs recently wrote an article in which he argues that “On every major plank of the progressive economic agenda, Democrats are now substantially to the left of the workers they claim to champion.”

He goes on to say that Democrats want government healthcare but the working-class doesn’t, and that “Most working class voters don’t want job guarantees.” And generally concludes that class war—e.g. Fight-the-Oligarchy campaigns and his own state’s Democratic senate candidate Graham Platner’s sentiment that the war has already begun and the Democratic Party “needs to pick the side of working people.”—is not the way for the Democrats to win back the working class.

Jared Abbott addresses—and contextualizes—Jacobs’s conclusions in a new piece in Jacobin. Among other things, Abbott points out that the framing and the messaging matter, and matter a lot. Jacobs’s read holds up as far as it goes, but it draws on a single dataset, American National Election Studies (ANES).

Abbott helps illustrate the situation with two issue-based heat maps (which alone are worth a visit to the free article) that highlight the working-class v. Dem stances across not just ANES but also Cooperative Election Survey, the General Social Survey, Pew, AP-NORC VoteCast, and Gallup.

And he points out that the working class holds strong progressive attitudes across a wide range of economic issues—“minimum wage (58%), expanded Medicaid ( 78%), paid leave (66%), stronger unions (about 60%), and higher taxes on corporations and top earners (57 to 69%).”

In short, and in fact,

“The real gaps between workers and Democrats are concentrated in the most abstract and far-reaching versions of these policies and in framings that don’t connect with core working-class values — not in any general resistance to progressive economics.”

You can read all about it here. (Hopefully after you ensure you’ve remembered to subscribe to this newsletter.)

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And happy 4th to you from all of us at The CWCP.

A short one this week. Also, no newsletter next week: Happy 250th America!

On patriotism and populism. A new organization for blue-collar candidates. All eyes on Pennsylvania (again). And, are Democrats overlooking AI anxieties?

Plus, I was invited on the Factually! podcast with Adam Conover.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

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The Left Needs to Rediscover Its Patriotism

Michael Kazin has a good read in The Atlantic:

On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence, more Americans on the right than on the left say they feel patriotic. Recent polls show that a majority of Democrats are “proud” of the country only when a president of their party is in the White House. And many progressive activists and historians see the founding of the nation as a tragedy for Native Americans and enslaved people instead of the glorious fight for liberty that conservatives insist it was. Why love a country founded in conquest and exploitation that remains deeply unequal today? After the terrorist attacks of September 11, Noam Chomsky dismissed patriotism as the political elite’s way of telling citizens ‘‘You shut up and be obedient, and I’ll relentlessly advance my own interests.’’

That attitude is deeply flawed as a way to understand history, as well as a serious political error.

One way to rebuild a progressive patriotism is through a more thoroughgoing critique of globalism and a positive assertion for domestic popular sovereignty. Nothing about this should entail xenophobic or chauvinistic appeals. Just the simple admission that the nation-state remains the only political organization capable of delivering both our democratic and economic ideals. Attempts to dissolve or otherwise bypass the nation have resulted in less, not more, popular control; weaker, not stronger, working-class organization; and far greater inequality.

Patriotism versus globalism seems like a solid enough foundation to build on. Why not?

Blue Collar Brigade

Looks like another new political action committee has started with the express intent of recruiting blue-collar candidates:

We’re the Blue Collar Brigade — a coalition of working-class candidates joining forces to bring real voices to Congress and take back the majority. We’ve spent our lives punching a clock, standing on picket lines, and fighting for the people who keep this country running.

Bob Brooks, Kayla Berg, Sam Forstag, Brian Poindexter, and Randy Villegas are featured. Hey, we know those guys.

Blue-Collar Battleground

And for more on Brooks CNN caught up with some PA voters:

Democrats Are Missing a Huge Opportunity to Win Working-Class Voters

A new survey was just published on AI anxieties:

The poll shows that 73 percent are “concerned” that AI will lead to job losses in the United States, while 62 percent worry it could “affect their own job, household income, or jobs of people close to them”; 58 percent think it will hurt working-class families overall. Among the jobs that a majority said AI would hurt are truck drivers; retail and service workers; office and administrative workers; and writers, designers, and other creative workers.

Listen: FACTUALLY! With Adam Conover

Here’s me talking about the need for a jobs agenda:

Closing Note: The pie gets bigger but labor’s slice gets smaller…

Blue-collar voters are turning on Trump, but there is plenty of room for Democrats to screw up the opportunity. Why ‘democracy mongering’ still doesn’t work. You’ll never guess who is buying all the fire engine manufacturers. And a few more on Platner.

Plus, trouble ahead for Australian Labor.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

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Trump’s Big New Vulnerability in 2026: Blue-Collar White Voters

It’s good news, of course, and not to toot our own horn, but we predicted as much back in March:

As we argued back then, Trump’s failure to deliver on his affordability promise, or provide big wage hikes, made his whole project vulnerable. The Times story points to the acute effects of the Iran war as the last straw:

Tim Spencer, a retired tool and die maker who lives in Pella, Iowa, previously voted for Mr. Trump, but higher gas prices are making him feel squeezed. That along with the president’s increasingly erratic behavior have left him no longer supporting Mr. Trump.

The cost of filling his Chevy pickup truck has risen to around $140 from $90, he said. In past summers, Mr. Spencer, 72, and his wife pulled a camper to campsites throughout the Midwest. “With the price of gas now, it’s an Iowa camper,” he said.

Still, the tone of triumphalism coming from several liberal outlets is worrying. Talk of an “an extraordinary swing” could be premature. MSNOW is reporting on “working-class white voters’ HUGE shift away from Trump.” And celebrations at Salon and HuffPost take the polling as unfalsifiable reports of the incoming blue wave.

Look, there is still plenty of time for Democrats to screw this up.

Part of the danger lies in what political scientists call the “thermostatic reaction”—that seemingly inevitable swing against the party in power. When such a reaction happens it doesn’t tell political leaders very much about how they ought to campaign. Right now it looks likely that Democrats will have a successful mid-term season, but if that success is owed largely to a reaction against Trump, it doesn’t provide Democrats with a set of positive commitments and convictions. The party will be left with no coherent message, candidate, or political program to persuade these blue-collar voters in 2028.

Praying for the pendulum to swing your way means relying (again) on a lazy anti-Trumpism as the lowest common denominator. That’s not a recipe for longterm success.

Plus, these shifts in the electorate aren’t nearly as “extraordinary” as liberal pundits suggest. The latest polling shows that Trump’s approval ratings are actually rebounding. And if Trump does reach a deal with Iran, and gas prices do come down, who knows what the political result could be.

The Voters Who Believe That Trump Defends Their Values: Why calls to “save democracy” don’t work

And here is more from the “we-told-you-so” file:

Our research suggests that activists seeking to protect American democracy from authoritarian influences are pursuing a failing strategy. They are defending largely abstract democratic processes, such as norms and rules, on the assumption that everyone agrees that they are legitimate and worth saving. But such arguments are unlikely to resonate with voters who have come to believe that many of these norms and processes have abandoned the country’s bedrock values. Calls to defend democracy promise to alienate anyone who feels that democratic institutions have somehow failed them. Few care to preserve a system they feel stopped serving its purpose long ago.

Two years ago we found that “pro-democracy” messages—which work really well to get liberal foundations to give you bags of cash—fell flat with working-class voters.

That analysis still holds up:

What to know about the fire truck crisis

Bet you didn’t even know there was a fire truck crisis. Add that to your never-ending list of crises. This one is infuriating:

The fire truck crisis — also called the fire apparatus crisis — is the combination of soaring prices and multi-year delivery delays for fire engines, ladder trucks, and ambulances. The average price of a new fire engine has roughly doubled since 2020, and wait times that once ran about 18 months now stretch up to four and a half years. The result: departments keep aging, sometimes unsafe, apparatus in service far longer than they should.

How did the fire truck crisis start?

Private-equity consolidation. Over roughly two decades, firms such as American Industrial Partners rolled up once-independent manufacturers into a handful of giants. Today, three companies — REV Group, Oshkosh (which owns Pierce), and Rosenbauer — control more than 70% of U.S. production.

Here we have an extraordinarily high-value, Made-in-USA, industry, that owes almost all of it’s success to public investment—private companies don’t buy fire trucks, local and state governments do. The tax-payer is getting hosed by Private Equity vultures who are eroding industry standards, prolonging delays, and weakening the final product.

A clear case for populist industrial policy if ever there was one.

The attacks on Graham Platner didn’t just fail – they may have backfired

I’m in The Guardian writing on Platner’s populism. A lot of the debate about Platner’s has revolved around whether the candidate’s rocky personal record is a help or hindrance. This misses the point:

Some have argued that Platner’s special appeal resides in his “flawed” persona. I’m not so sure. It’s not that Platner’s personal foibles made him more attractive, but, instead, the fact that he was so clearly targeted by a totally discredited liberal elite.

The plainly coordinated campaign against him stretched across social media, television, podcasts, magazines and newspapers and it signaled to voters that the gatekeepers of the Democratic party do not like this guy. To many voters, that means he’s just the man for the job.

For a more critical perspective on Platner, see here:

Handful of Earth

The Populism-Industrial Complex

The popular music YouTuber, Rick Beato, devoted one of his recent videos to the topic of why the contemporary music industry is dominated by rich kids. He observes that most of the biggest pop stars, including Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Gracie Abrams, all…

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3 months ago · 32 likes · 22 comments · Vincent Kelley

And on the question of Platner’s popularity among working-class voters, here:

Some Convenient Tree

Does the Working Class Like Graham Platner?

“I’ve made mistakes in my life, mistakes that I regret, that I live with, that I continue to learn from. And I’m still far from perfect. But every day I wake up and I try to be a little bit better and a little bit kinder than I was the day before. And if you give me the chance, I w…

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3 months ago · 9 likes · 5 comments · Chance Phillips

Australia: Has Labor underestimated right-wing populism (again)?

Yes, they spell ‘labor’ the same way we do. That’s about the only surprising thing here:

It was not just One Nation’s rising poll numbers that should concern the federal government. Labor had a major wake-up call at the South Australian election back in March. As political scientist Luke Mansillo pointed out, SA Labor’s massive victory came with warning signs. He detected “enough places that Labor has suffered losses to One Nation for the federal government to worry about. Peter Dutton’s strategy of outer urban and regional seat targeting is coming off for One Nation, who can peel off voters the Liberal Party could not.”

Mansillo was referring to the Coalition’s populist strategy at the 2025 election, when Liberal leader Peter Dutton depicted himself as more in touch with ordinary working-class voters than Labor, which he accused of pandering to racial and ethnic minorities and woke elites.

The story is the same everywhere (except maybe Mexico and Denmark). Figuring out how to win back working-class loyalty against right-wing populist appeals, remains the global challenge for the Left.

Closing Note: Get in touch…

Most mainstream political discussions today, online and in the broader media, are dominated by hardcore partisans. This is despite the fact that a plurality of voters (45%) don’t identify with either party. Instead they have a mix of varied, often disparate, views—this is especially true for working-class voters. A new study, Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology, from Pew Research helps outline some of the hidden ideological tribes among us.

Pew’s researchers found that the single largest group in the electorate is a group they call the “Order and Opportunity Left,” (18% of adults). It’s a racially diverse group that is economically liberal but more concerned about crime and immigration than other majority-Democrat groups (65% of this group are Democrats or lean Democrat, 25% are Republican or lean Republican). Another oft-overlooked left-leaning group is called the “Left-Out Left” (12%). They are among the most financially stressed groups, overwhelmingly Democratic but more likely than most other voters to feel politically ignored. As a result, they are skeptical about participating in our political system at all.

These groups combined total nearly a third of the electorate. For those of us who support a working-class forward politics, winning their loyalty isn’t optional. And it isn’t all that complicated, but it does take reexamining some progressive priors. What workers want — whether they’re worried about public safety or unconvinced that voting even matters — is to feel like elected officials are listening to them and actually delivering for them, not cozying up to the elite or doing woke-speak while our public goods continue to decay.

Take public transit for example. During the COVID pandemic, public transit ridership fell drastically as white collar workers began to work exclusively from home. But it hasn’t rebounded fully since the end of the pandemic — in 2025, all major US transit agencies remained below pre-pandemic ridership. Interestingly, the cities where ridership has recovered well are ones with a larger blue-collar and hourly-worker base, like NYC’s MTA, whose ridership in 2025 was at 87% of 2019 levels, and DC’s WMATA, which was at 85%. Meanwhile, BART in the Bay Area, known for its white-collar workforce, is still under half of their 2019 ridership.

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Lack of ridership on public transportation creates a vicious cycle, with politicians saying it’s not worth funding because no one uses it, and as a result, coughing up fewer funds for cleanliness and safety, making people obviously less interested in using the system at all. Progressives often advocate for more funding to expand transit access, but are less willing to talk about the need for safety reforms or rule enforcement. As a result, many low-wage workers (the Left-Out Left) who take the subway think progressives just don’t care about the grime and crime. On the flipside, better-off workers (the Order and Opportunity Left), are reluctant to vote for more funding when they think progressives neglect these issues.

For workers who own cars or work from home, this may feel like less of an urgent issue — who cares if the subway is dirty or if someone is smoking on it? Maybe everyone can agree that’s not ideal, but the only people who are forced to deal with it day in and day out are those workers who have no other options: often low-wage workers of color.

While some progressives believe that dysfunction on public transit is part of the “authentic urban experience,” the average grocery store worker, home health aide, or library assistant doesn’t see it that way. They want what the vast majority of people want: a functioning society where public amenities feel safe, clean, and efficient. This is only possible with adequate funding.

A left that wants to win back workers must hear demands for order not as a racist rallying cry or as a dog whistle for something else entirely, but as a genuine and urgent call for our public goods to actually work, and to work well. It’s easy to not care about crime or value public safety when you are cocooned in your home, working on your computer. But for the workers who interact with the public — whether at work or on their way — being able to get to work safely, and to work safely, are of the utmost importance. And voters need to see that elected officials actually take their concerns seriously by acting on them swiftly.

Improving public transit by providing more funding for it — and having transit authorities actually focus on cleanliness, safety, and other quality-of-life issues — will give voters faith in their elected officials and in the promise of the state to better their lives.

Platner’s populism. More ways the Democrats are wrong on the working class. A new bill to speed up union contracts passes the House. A new report on how unions can win big again. And new review of Les Leopold’s new book.

Plus, The Daily on the ‘college-educated working class.’

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

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The Maine Senate Race Ramps Up, With Trump Offering Color Commentary

Graham Platner won his primary with over 70% of the vote. Part of his appeal was his outsider status. His populist cred was built on the fact that the Democratic Party gatekeepers did not want him elected. Now in the broader waters of a general election will attacks from the GOP unite the party behind him? And if so, does that help or hurt his ability to win back disaffected voters?

President Trump used an appearance in the Oval Office to deliver a two-minute monologue attacking Mr. Platner, calling him a “thug” nearly a dozen times and assailing Democratic leaders for supporting his bid.

“He’s worse than any human being that’s ever run for office, probably,” Mr. Trump said. “He’s a cheap, no-good person.”

Democrats Have Two Basic Ideas About How to Regain Working Class Support. Both of Them Are Wrong.

Andy Levison has a new strategy memo out from The Democratic Strategist, it’s well worth a read:

In this perspective the basic strategic choices candidates face are whether to “move to the center” on a range of divisive social issues or whether to “double down” on progressive economic proposals while dismissing social issues as a distraction. The problem with this approach is that it is essentially based on a limited, largely academic political science perspective that visualizes working people as if they were isolated individuals sitting in their living rooms watching TV or reading a newspaper and thoughtfully making their electoral choices by evaluating the political messages and policy proposals that they see presented.

What is entirely ignored in this way of conceptualizing how workers make political choices is the massive effect of social and community life, of neighborhood and community institutions and a voter’s personal history and experience on their political perspective – on how daily interaction with friends, neighbors, co-workers and others in a workers’ neighborhood, workplace and community shape that person’s political attitudes.

Political candidates are often told that to be successful they need to be good at fundraising, and to be good at fundraising you simply need to know a lot of rich people. Ironically, winning working-class support is a bit like that—but in reverse. To win working-class voters you need to know a lot of working-class people; you need to be embedded in working-class life in a way most liberal professionals can never be.

This is why it’s essential that working-class organizations (mostly, labor unions) spend their limited political funds on raising up candidates that can genuinely connect with working-class voters—not because they have perfectly poll-tested positions, but because they organically convey a worldview that is readily recognizable to their peers.

But, you can see the contradiction here. To be good at winning working-class votes is, in large part, at odds with what it takes to be good at fundraising. Meanwhile, good fundraisers are usually the kinds of elite Democrats that fail to win working-class support. Solving this paradox is one of the main tasks today. Blue-collar candidates need some combination of independent PAC money, labor backing, and party cash in order to overcome the fundraising hurtle. Much work to do.

House approves bill to speed up union contract negotiations

A pretty significant piece of labor legislation just passed in the House:

Now, by a vote of 230 to 193, the House has approved a bill that would force employers to the table, allow federal mediators to get involved if a deal is not reached within 90 days, and — if needed — settle the matter through arbitration shortly thereafter. Twenty Republicans joined Democrats in voting on Tuesday evening to pass the measure, called the Faster Labor Contracts Act.

“No more stop the steals. You got an election, you can get a contract,” said New Jersey Democrat Donald Norcross, a union electrician and the bill’s sponsor, at a press conference last fall.

Norcross says the measure would be the most significant new protection for workers since before World War II, an assertion echoed by labor leaders.

If the FLCA (is that what we’re calling it?) becomes law, and if the enforcement mechanisms aren’t defanged along the way, it would be a major step forward. The bill would force employers to the table within 10 days of a successful union election and if no progress is made within 90 days of the first bargaining meeting, it force federal mediation to get the contract settled.

Renewing Labor and Winning at Amazon

Our friends at the Center for Work and Democracy have a fantastic new report out on the need for labor to go after the big fish, and how unions might do so:

Despite these challenges, tackling the largest employers and the most powerful companies is possible. The labor movement has considerable resources, though they are fragmented and poorly allocated for maximizing the power of working people. Even the largest and most powerful companies have vulnerabilities, whether they are due to regulatory risk, operational fragility, labor relations regimes, or political vulnerability. And while the labor movement has become better at running corporate and strategic campaigns, and mobilizing the levers of government and the public against employers, it is only infrequently that these are all deployed in a strategically coherent fashion to maximize the likelihood of winning recognition and contracts. Doing so in the case of Amazon will require going beyond site-by-site organizing and supporting the efforts of workers to build a strategic campaign that can exploit the company’s vulnerabilities to bring them to the table.

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Don’t Write Off a Third-Party Challenge to the Democrats

Our own is in Jacobin reviewing Les Leopold’s new book:

It turns out the party whose president was in office when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) passed (even if it was, as he reminds us, the majority-Republican congress that was driving the bus), the party that has become “loaded with nonprofit leaders who are uniformly members of the professional class,” is suffering a perception penalty so severe that it is entirely persona non grata across vast swaths of the country.

In one study by the Center for Working-Class Politics (where I work as a researcher) and Leopold’s Labor Institute, in which populist messages were tested on Midwestern respondents, they identified an 11 to 16 percent penalty for candidates who run as Democrats versus as independents.

It’s true the Democratic Party brand is trashed. Though, the structural challenges (like first-past-the-post elections, the ‘spoiler’ problem, money etc.) are remain very steep. Steeper still might be the political challenges: what policies to run on, what priorities to emphasize, what stories to tell. A new political party can’t just be independent in name, it needs to have an independent identity; something distinct from the duopoly in philosophy as well as ballot line.

To that end CWCP is working with The Labor Institute on a follow-up study to see what kind of independent political appeals might win over workers in deep-red districts.

Listen: The Young Economic Populists Reshaping the Left

Noam Scheiber is on the The Daily talking about his new book “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.”

The book mostly chronicles the flurry of union organizing taking place among downwardly mobile college-educated workers. Beyond that, Scheiber sees the trials of this group as a major motivator for the rise of economic populism today.

No doubt, downward mobility is a powerful political motivator but we should be careful to avoid putting college-educated workers at the center of the story—or the politics.

First, despite the outsized media coverage of this group, college-educated workers are still a minority (around 38-40% depending on how you measure). And among them, the vast majority are doing basically fine. Yes, a larger group of college-educated workers are struggling now than at anytime since maybe the 1930s, but this is a relatively small group overall.

Second, even college-educated workers who are downwardly mobile are by-and-large doing way better than those workers without a degree. In many cases these workers live in completely different social worlds. One way to demonstrate the divide (among other things) is here:

Non-college educated working-class men have experienced negative wage gains since the inauguration of our so-called knowledge economy. And while working-class women have experienced some wage increase, they started from a much lower starting point. The bottom line: yes downward mobility is a problem but wage disintegration is the current condition of the blue-collar working class.

Closing Note:

Smokejumper Sam Forstag wins the Democratic Primary in Montana. The gaps between the working-class and the liberal left aren’t all economic. What Talarico must do to win in Texas. The P.M.C. and Platner. Meet ‘The Disillusioned’ voters, they are legion. And a review of ’s new book.

Plus, The New Yorker podcast catches up with Dan Osborn.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

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Sam Forstag wins Democratic primary in Montana’s 1st Congressional District, CBS News projects

After a late night of vote counting, Sam Forstag has claimed victory. Now the real test begins:

Forstag will face off in the general election against Aaron Flint, who won the Republican primary for the seat. If Forstag wins the House race in November, it would be the first time in 30 years that a Democrat has represented Montana in the lower chamber.

Democrats don’t get why they’ve lost most working class voters

Political scientist Nicholas Jacobs on the gaps yawning between Democratic partisans and the working class. Here’s the big takeaway:

But economic grievance politics is a very small slice of what working-class voters are telling us. The data documents a comprehensive, decades-long divergence in how working-class voters and mainstream Democrats understand fairness, government, personal responsibility and social change.

Reducing that to class war jams working-class voters into a prefabricated progressive agenda rather than taking seriously what they are actually saying.

Jacobs gets a lot right, though he overstates some of these political gaps. Look for a more thorough CWCP response in the next few days.

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If Democrats are to win Texas, James Talarico must win blue-collar voters

I’m in the Guardian reminding liberals that they need to focus on winning over blue-collar voters if they want to win a Senate seat:

It’s true that a bevy of early polls show Talarico slightly ahead. But if you dig into the results you’ll notice that these surveys skew toward highly engaged and highly educated voters. Consider a recent poll from Public Policy Polling that has Talarico leading Paxton by seven points; only 22% of voters sampled have less than a college education. Or a recent University of Texas poll which has Talarico up eight points; only 27% of respondents lack a degree. Polls like these could be giving Democrats a false sense of confidence by overrepresenting college-educated voters who increasingly skew liberal.

The Politics of the Downwardly Mobile Professional Class

The P.M.C. wars are back baby. Noam Scheiber, at the New York Times Magazine, chronicles the ongoing debate over Graham Platner’s class background: Is he really working class or just another professional-class poseur?

Often these disputes are based on the assumption that a person is either authentically working-class or not — a kind of binary logic that can disqualify Platner. “This is not a salt-of-the-earth guy coming up from a hardscrabble existence,” Tony Buxton, a former Maine Democratic Party official who backed Ms. Mills, told The New York Times. “If he’s an oysterman, I’m a florist, OK? Because I raise roses and give them to my wife.”

But as the debate over Platner’s authenticity has raged these past few weeks, it’s failed to capture a new reality: The contours of “working class” are increasingly difficult to draw neatly.

Scheiber is right that class can be a very tricky thing to make sense of, especially from a far. At the same time, candidates like John Fetterman, Zohran Mamdani, and Platner have all played The Everyman while coming from families that have made hefty investments in their expensive educations.

Of course, FDR was as aristocratic as they come, and there is no shortage of affluent populists throughout history who have made positive contributions. Still, as our research has shown, working-class voters like working-class candidates because they come from their social world, and understand the world from that vantage point, not because they have tattoos or refuse to wear suits. Substituting affect and attitude for the genuine article does risk appearing phony.

Meet America’s ‘Disillusioned’: the 32% feeling betrayed and rejecting the establishment—and they’re not who you think

Fortune has a good write up on a new poll by the Roosevelt Institute. The survey found that about a third of voters have become thoroughly disilusioned:

Disillusioned voters are distributed across urban, suburban, and rural zip codes in almost exactly the same proportions as the broader electorate. They are 68% White, the same as the overall voter pool. They are nearly evenly split by gender. They span every age cohort.

What does set them apart is class and income. They over-index as working class (35% vs. 33% overall) and lower income, with 64% earning under $75,000 a year. Seventy percent lack a college degree. And they have made financial sacrifices at rates that outpace almost every other group in the poll: cutting transportation, buying groceries on credit, taking on gig work, skipping bills.

Their financial lives aren’t dramatically different from the working-class majority. They’re just a few degrees worse, sustained long enough to harden into a worldview.

That might seem like a good thing for working-class populist politics, a third of the electorate ready for the taking. But as the authors point out, these voters aren’t so easily won over. Their skepticism of the economic system extends into pessimism about what government can do, with many fearing that any government involvement would make things worse. It’s a long road ahead.

Labor Can’t Remain Shackled to the Democrats

Neal Meyer in has a review our our good friend Les Leopold’s new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own. Here is Meyer:

Leopold’s argument here is a welcome take on party politics in the United States, and one more grounded in reality than what you’ll get from some on the progressive left. It has become conventional wisdom that party labels and ballot lines are meaningless, and that running left-wing candidates as Democrats has no downside. But as Leopold shows, for the vast majority of Americans party labels are exceptionally important devices for understanding their choices come election time. They are so meaningful that candidates championing an otherwise popular policy platform, like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, get dragged down and lose because of their party’s toxic brand.

Dan Osborn, the Independent Senate Candidate Who Could Tip Nebraska

Radio Hour caught up with Dan Osborn on the heels of some impressive new polling numbers.

Closing Note: The Wages of War…

The New Yorker interviews Jared Abbott on the fading fortunes of the Trump coalition. The Washington Post claims Trump’s working-class base is eroding. And Platner holds his lead in the latest polling.

Plus, the economy is making us miserable.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

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Is the Working Class Finally Turning on Trump?

made the trek out to Pennsylvania to check in on some blue-collar Trump voters and see how their feeling. They also managed to get in touch with CWCP director Jared Abbott:

Although it is often assumed that Trump’s most loyal supporters are working-class people without college degrees, the opposite pattern emerged in the survey. Thirty-two per cent of respondents without high-school diplomas said they are now “wavering” on voting for a Republican; just eighteen per cent of respondents with four-year college degrees said the same […]

Of course, the fact that some working-class voters have grown disillusioned with the Republicans does not mean that they will turn out for the Democrats. In Abbott and Williams’s survey, less than one in five of those who were vacillating about voting Republican in 2028 said that they might vote for a Democrat. Most said that they were undecided or would back neither party. “People really don’t like what Trump is doing, particularly lower-income people of color, but they are not seeing the Democrats provide something that makes them want to vote for them, either,” Abbott said.

You can read more about working-class vote switchers here:

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Trump’s approval plunges among his White working-class base

You heard it here first but The Washington Post cites a recent CBS news poll to confirm the trend:

White voters without college degrees, who have powered Trump’s victories since 2016, are growing frustrated with his second term. In a striking shift, the group that voted to reelect Trump by a huge margin is now net-negative on how Trump is handling his job in several polls. They join other Americans across demographic lines souring on the president’s second term, especially his handling of the economy.

Platner Leads Collins in Maine Senate Race

Platner is holding on strong:

With the Maine primary only two weeks away, Graham Platner holds a dominant lead in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate following the withdrawal of Governor Janet Mills. Platner leads incumbent Republican Susan Collins in a general election matchup. Troy Jackson and Nirav Shah are tied in the race for the Democratic nomination for governor.

The Antisocial Economy

A lot of commentators are ignoring the way the economy is making us miserable:

Simply being around people is a core ingredient—maybe even the main ingredient—for human flourishing. Yet, since 2019, virtually every cost associated with social life has increased, well beyond economy-wide wage increases. Socializing in America has become expensive. And we’re all much lonelier, more isolated, and more pessimistic about the future as a result.

Closing Note: Automated Underground…

Just a quick note here in case you have access to a copy of (or a paywall-circumventing account with) The New Yorker. , author of Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America interviews Abbott about his recent work with and . Here’s the link—

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/is-the-working-class-finally-turning-on-trump

On the Biden-to-Trump “switchers” in the survey, Abbott notes they “were likely not MAGA diehards but people ‘just annoyed at how expensive everything was’ and willing to give Trump a chance to fix the problem.”

And on the opening this creates—or doesn’t—for Democrats, he’s blunt: “People really don’t like what Trump is doing, particularly lower-income people of color, but they are not seeing the Democrats provide something that makes them want to vote for them, either.”

It’s not yet on ’s free Substack, but we will include a link in this week’s newsletter, if it shows up.

Firefighter Bob Brooks wins his primary. More broadly blue-collar populists have won a slew of primaries to date. Trey Martin talks class in Oklahoma. The real cost of union busting. And Democrats’ dueling ‘affordability’ agendas.

Plus, the DNC finally released their much anticipated “autopsy” of the 2024 election.

Below you’ll find a range of news and views that concern working-class politics today. Many are written by research associates and friends of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

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Bob Brooks Rides Blue-Collar Bona Fides to Victory in Pennsylvania

Brooks won. We’ve been watching this race since Brooks entered. He’s got what it takes to win in November as well.

Brooks entered Tuesday’s race with a unified coalition in today’s divided Democratic Party. Brooks, who has campaigned on issues like “Medicare for All” and pro-union legislation, got endorsements from across the Democratic base. Those ranged from progressives, like Sen. Bernie Sanders, to moderates including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

It’s a great template: working-class candidate plus bold pro-worker policies.

If you want to catch up with more of the candidates we think hold the keys to a winning a working-class coalition take a look at this overview:

Two Democrats, one chance at flipping Oklahoma’s 5th District

Over in Oklahoma’s 5th District the primary is all about class. Trey Martin, ironworker and union leader, has been battling it out with his opponent, Jena Nelson:

Martin takes issue with Nelson’s remarks about U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, where she criticized his lack of a college degree, referred to him as a “plumber,” and questioned if someone with that background was interested in “protecting civil rights.” Martin said Nelson’s remarks were dismissive of blue-collar workers and part of what drew him to run for office.

“She chose to attack his education and profession,” Martin said. “That really bothered me.”

Nelson strongly rejects that characterization.

Interestingly, Nelson hasn’t just denied the charge, she’s leaning into her own class background: “I’m working-class, full stop.” It wasn’t that long ago that this kind of language was foreign in American politics, now candidates are fighting with each other to demonstrate their blue-collar bonafides.

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The Real Cost of Union Busting Is Much Higher Than You Think

A new report details the immense amount of money that goes into ensuring workers can’t have unions:

A new study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and LaborLab estimates that employers spent about $1.7 billion on union avoidance specialists and union-busting attorneys in 2024. The jointly authored report is one the most expansive and thorough estimates of union avoidance costs performed in decades.

Democrats want working-class voters. They disagree on how to woo them.

It seems like a version of this article is written every week:

The progressives are pitching 10 proposals that they argue would immediately improve low- and middle-income Americans’ lives. The bills would put $1 trillion toward new housing stock, create a federal standard for utility rates, target grocery store chains and oil companies for increased prices, guarantee two weeks paid time off, increase overtime wages, and ban AI surveillance pricing, which sets customers’ prices based on their personal profile or choices. Progressives say that all of their policies have bipartisan support, citing polling data from left-leaning think tank Data for Progress. […] The New Democrat Coalition, a group of 115 moderate House Democrats, released their own affordability agenda in February that focuses on promoting competition, growing the economy and reducing regulatory barriers. Their proposals “give everyone the shot to get ahead,” said the group’s chair, Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Illinois).

The New Democrat coalition is back at it with a long list of ideas that are both too timid and too complicated to excite anyone. If populism is the mood of the day, “reducing regulatory barriers” isn’t going to cut it.

That said, the Progressive Caucus’s agenda is also lacking. The ideas are good, and some are impressively ambitious, but taken as a whole, the program is glaringly incomplete. There is virtually nothing about jobs, infrastructure, or bringing back manufacturing. Plus, there’s a globalization-sized hole: trade and immigration are completely absent.

The omissions are instructive. Because progressive leaders are increasingly drawn from the ranks of nonprofits, universities, and activist organizations, the economic priorities of non-college educated workers are foreign to them. That needs to change if progressives want to win the working class.

Yes, there is a lot we can do to bring costs down. But we also need to bring the wages of millions of people up. As much as many would appreciate a $20,000 check to buy their first home, a more durable solution (and more defensible one) would be to design an economy that doesn’t require the government to endlessly subsidize low-wages.

Read the Draft of the D.N.C. Report

The DNC finally released it’s so-called autopsy of Kamala Harris’s failed 2024 campaign. There’s a lot in the 192 page report, including recognition that a focus on working-class voters must be part of the future, but more than any of the recommendations the report shows that party leadership is completely riven with factionalism. Check out the petty infighting in the comments:

The whole thing is like this. There is, of course, a ton of evidence that Harris leaned into a lazy anti-Trumpism, and away from economic issues, especially toward the end of the campaign. That party leaders are still unwilling to confront that is troubling. More troubling is the fact that they seem incapable of writing and releasing a coherent evidence-backed report.

Closing Note: Anemic…