A new study from the Center for Working-Class Politics and Jacobin analyzed three comprehensive surveys in U.S. political science, revealing where “working-class voters stand on key issues.” The study found that “the message is clear: economic populism must be the core of progressive appeals to workers.” The data spans from 1960 to 2022, tracking long-term shifts in working-class attitudes across six issue domains: immigration, civil rights, social norms, environmental policy, and two categories of economic policy.
Key takeaways, according to Jacobin:
- Working‑class voters overwhelmingly support a range of bold progressive economic policies, like raising the minimum wage and protecting Social Security.
- Working-class voters hold more progressive views than middle- and upper-class voters on a host of economic issues.
- Cultural conservatism isn’t a brick wall. While less progressive than middle- and upper-class Americans, working‑class views on civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and immigration have shifted to the left over the past two decades.
- Middle- and upper-class voters have moved left more quickly than working-class voters.
- There’s an opening with some Trump voters. Over 10 percent of 2020 Trump voters are working‑class, economically progressive, and cultural moderates. With the right messaging and messengers, they are persuadable.
JARED ABBOTT; [email protected]
Abbott is a political scientist, professor, and director of the Center for Working-Class Politics.
Abbott told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “You hear people talking all the time about ‘working-class people this, working-class people that,’ and it’s often based on some random survey of more or less questionable validity. We wanted to get a sense of things using reputable, high-quality, publicly available surveys like the three we analyzed, pulling together all the questions they ask about social and economic issues. The goal was to come to a general answer to the question: How conservative or progressive are working-class people across these issues and across time?
“That’s a big part of this story. Working-class people are often portrayed in the media as conservative reactionaries, but when you look at it over time, working-class people have not become more conservative. In fact, they’ve gotten more progressive or egalitarian. At the same time, middle-class and highly educated people have become much more progressive. It’s just about proportionality. Middle- and upper-class voters have moved left more quickly than working-class voters. As the core of the Democratic Party has become more highly educated and increasingly higher-income, the party has reflected the views of those groups; the messaging has been catered to those folks.
“But there is a way to reach working-class people, as long as you communicate in a way that feels relatable and not condescending. We’re not that far apart. These voters are moving in a progressive direction over time. The left just needs to reach out more carefully and bring these voters back into the progressive fold. Working-class people are still, generally speaking, more progressive on economic issues than middle-class people. That’s often contested. The common assumption among mainstream commentators is that the working class is reactionary on economic issues. But we’re finding that’s not the case. There are nuances, of course, but broadly speaking, working-class people support policies that align with their material interests. That’s an important part of the story. We need these folks in the coalition because they are the strongest advocates for the social democratic policies needed to build a country that works for everyone.
“One surprising finding came at the end of the report through an analysis of 2020 Trump voters. We broke down the percentage of Trump voters that might be considered ‘gettable’ based on an economically progressive or populist focus. When we exclude people who are very conservative on social issues and clearly incompatible with Democratic or progressive platforms, there is a percentage of remaining Trump voters that are actually economically progressive. There are Bernie bros in the 2020 Trump camp, basically. It’s not a huge percentage, but it’s substantial. That’s maybe 2.5 to 3 percent of the entire electorate… The working class is not this reactionary group that should be left behind. They’re critically important electorally and have characteristics that could make them a key part of a progressive strategy. We need to make sure that Democrats understand that we can’t write off these voters. There’s no need to. Many of them hold moderate or progressive views. We just need to be more creative in how we message to them and focus on what they respond to: progressive economics.
“This is one of the most important questions in electoral politics right now, and it’s a big part of why Donald Trump keeps winning elections. Unfortunately, it’s not a big part of the Democratic consultant/talking-head conversation. On the left, people point to the success of [Zohran] Mamdani’s campaign and its focus on bread-and-butter economic issues.
“The stereotype among centrists is that working-class people reject social spending due to stigma: the idea that undeserving people might receive benefits, or that high social spending conflicts with working class values of hard work. But working-class people overwhelmingly support protecting the biggest parts of the safety net, like Medicare and Social Security. On the economic front, they support making jobs better and more secure and protecting people when they need help or when they lose their jobs.”