Can Economic Populism Save the Democratic Party?
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The Democratic Party sees itself as a party of the working class. To the extent it has any shared self-identity at all, it is that. But the Democratic Party is no longer the party of the working class. Doesn't matter if you define the working class by income, by education, or both. Democrats have been losing ground among these voters for years now. In 2024, Donald Trump won both voters making less than $50,000 a year, and he won voters without a college degree. And the way Trump won these voters wasn't just to rack up a giant majority among the white working class. First in 2020, and then even more so in 2024, Trump made huge gains among working class Hispanic voters, significant gains among black voters.
Republicans are building. The multiracial working class coalition the democrats imagine themselves as speaking for. There are two theories of how Democrats lost the working class and what it might take to win them back. One theory says the democrats were once economic populists, and they just need to be that again. The other theory is says that the working class knows perfectly well the Republicans cut taxes for the rich and Democrats expand healthcare for the poor. But the room class feels unrepresented by Democrats in a broader way, left behind and looked down upon by a party that's moved sharply left on culture, on climate, on guns, on immigration. A party that doesn't talk like them and doesn't like the way they talk.
Jared Abbott is a director of the Center for Working Class Politics. His group has done a huge amount of polling and research on what working class voters believe and what they want to see in their politicians. Among their findings is what they call the democratic penalty, which is a force that should scare the hell out of Democrats. So I asked him on the show to describe what he's found and what it would take for Democrats to once again be the party of the working class. As always my email Ezra Clientshow at NYTimes dot com.
Jared Abbott, welcome to the show. Thanks. Appreciate the invitation. So I want to begin in a recent study you all did where you found something you called the democratic penalty. Mm-hmm. What was the democratic penalty and how did you find it?
So, you know, we were sort of interested in this idea that Sherrod Brown couldn't win in Ohio, right? It's like, oh my God, if we're economic populists and uh the greatest economic populist holding on in a red state uh couldn't continue holding on, what's going on there? And so we we thought, and uh we had good reason to think that that was probably a brand identity problem. And we just kind of wanted to look at that in a more scientific way. So what we did was we had these hypothetical candidates that we gave to Rust Belt voters in this survey. We had some of the candidates be Democrats, say this is a Democratic candidate, and some say that they were independents. They were all economic populists. And the exact same candidates.
That had an I versus a D did ten points better in Michigan, did fifteen points better in Ohio. Interestingly, in Pennsylvania, we didn't see much of a Democratic penalty. And that's something that we're kind of trying to think more about. But in the other three states, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, we see these massive penalties just because of the D next to their name. And so we were just trying to quantify how bad actually is it just to have the albatross of the D around your neck? And it's pretty bad, especially in those working class heavy rest belt states.
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