It’s that time again. Every election that ends in a Democratic defeat seems to produce the same breathless analysis: Democrats have lost the working class!
In 2004, we heard that “working-class Americans, once the core of the Democratic Party, are voting Republican.”
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In 2016, we were told: “Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more.”
And now, inevitably, headlines over the past three weeks have been revealing the same startling discovery all over again:
“Democrats’ working-class exodus sets off reckoning within party.”
“Why Democrats lost their working-class coalition.”
Follow Dana Milbank
“Is This the End of the White Working-Class Democrat?”
This is getting tedious.
It’s not that the conclusion is wrong as much as it is woefully outdated. Working-class voters, roughly defined as those who aren’t college educated, haven’t been reliable Democratic voters since the New Deal coalition dissolved — decades ago. So why do political analysts keep concluding that the Democrats have, all of a sudden, lost the working man and woman?
I asked someone who has studied the voting attitudes of the working class as much as anyone alive: Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO and a prominent figure in progressive politics. He said political analysts have been claiming that Democrats have just lost working people “every election for the last 50 years,” based on the “idiotic assumption” that all workers without college degrees, or nearly two-thirds of the adult labor force, can be lumped together into a single category — “working class” — with the expectation that they have a shared identity as workers and will vote accordingly.
“The idea that working people would vote for Democrats goes back to the New Deal era, when being a worker was an actual identity that [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and the Democrats appealed to by saying that when corporations want to do bad things to you, we’re on your side,” Podhorzer notes. Back then, Democrats did get about 80 percent of the working-class vote, because Democrats emphasized the class conflict. But “in the current two-party structure, where both parties are dominated by billionaires and corporations, there isn’t an actual place for working-class identity.”
They no longer vote their interests as “workers” but cast ballots for all kinds of different reasons. They shifted several points away from Democrats between 2020 and 2024 — but so did many different groups across the electorate, mostly because they were unhappy with the Biden administration’s performance on inflation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...y/?itid=mc_magnet-opwork_inline_collection_20
The reductive analysis of working-class voters abandoning Democrats is particularly maddening because it misses what’s actually happening to them, which is a crisis much bigger than the temporary fortunes of a political party. This is less a Democratic problem than an American problem — but Democrats have a fresh chance to try to fix it.
For nearly a half century, and particularly over the past two decades, corporate America has plunged workers ever deeper into job and income insecurity. Employers, benefiting from weakened labor laws and lax enforcement of those that remain on the books, have been forcing workers into erratic schedules, hiring them as contractors or temporary or gig workers and stealing their wages. It’s no coincidence that all this happened while labor union membership, which peaked at one-third of the workforce, shriveled to the current 10 percent.
With the decline of unions and collective bargaining, pay has stagnated and pensions have disappeared. Wealth inequality has soared, earnings have become less dependable, and most workers report that they feel stressed, unappreciated, disconnected and distrustful of their employers. They are surveilled on the job, sanctioned for expressing themselves and subjected to dehumanizing workplaces. “Here most of us are, toiling under the authority of communist dictators, and we do not see the reality for what it is,” writes University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson. The financial collapse of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic only deepened the insecurity and misery.
Voting patterns, not just this year’s but this century’s, reflect the discontent and instability. In nine of the last 10 federal elections, one party or the other has lost control of the White House, Senate or House. Voters, desperate for a fundamental change, punish the incumbent party and then, inevitably finding no relief, punish the other party two years later. Politics has become a depressing game of ping-pong, with no enduring wins.
“We’ve never had a period since at least the late 19th century where there have been so many knife’s edge elections,” Podhorzer tells me. “So, coming out of every election, Democrats assume all we need is fine tuning, because we barely lost. We have to get past thinking we’re going to message our way out of this moment. It’s so much bigger than that. And it ignores the fact that, for all of the 21st century, we’ve been seeing that voters just want a different system, a more profound change.”
Even some on the right have begun to argue for a revival of labor unions and New-Deal-style government intervention to undo the damage of the past half-century of neoliberalism, the era of the unfettered free-market that began with President Ronald Reagan. The conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari argued in his 2023 book, “Tyranny Inc.,” that the current “domination of working and middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the asset-rich,” has “drained the vigor and substance out of democracy, facilitated massive upward transfers of wealth, and left ordinary people feeling isolated and powerless.”
In 2004, we heard that “working-class Americans, once the core of the Democratic Party, are voting Republican.”
Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for answers to the election’s biggest questions
In 2016, we were told: “Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more.”
And now, inevitably, headlines over the past three weeks have been revealing the same startling discovery all over again:
“Democrats’ working-class exodus sets off reckoning within party.”
“Why Democrats lost their working-class coalition.”
Follow Dana Milbank
“Is This the End of the White Working-Class Democrat?”
This is getting tedious.
It’s not that the conclusion is wrong as much as it is woefully outdated. Working-class voters, roughly defined as those who aren’t college educated, haven’t been reliable Democratic voters since the New Deal coalition dissolved — decades ago. So why do political analysts keep concluding that the Democrats have, all of a sudden, lost the working man and woman?
I asked someone who has studied the voting attitudes of the working class as much as anyone alive: Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO and a prominent figure in progressive politics. He said political analysts have been claiming that Democrats have just lost working people “every election for the last 50 years,” based on the “idiotic assumption” that all workers without college degrees, or nearly two-thirds of the adult labor force, can be lumped together into a single category — “working class” — with the expectation that they have a shared identity as workers and will vote accordingly.
“The idea that working people would vote for Democrats goes back to the New Deal era, when being a worker was an actual identity that [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and the Democrats appealed to by saying that when corporations want to do bad things to you, we’re on your side,” Podhorzer notes. Back then, Democrats did get about 80 percent of the working-class vote, because Democrats emphasized the class conflict. But “in the current two-party structure, where both parties are dominated by billionaires and corporations, there isn’t an actual place for working-class identity.”
They no longer vote their interests as “workers” but cast ballots for all kinds of different reasons. They shifted several points away from Democrats between 2020 and 2024 — but so did many different groups across the electorate, mostly because they were unhappy with the Biden administration’s performance on inflation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...y/?itid=mc_magnet-opwork_inline_collection_20
The reductive analysis of working-class voters abandoning Democrats is particularly maddening because it misses what’s actually happening to them, which is a crisis much bigger than the temporary fortunes of a political party. This is less a Democratic problem than an American problem — but Democrats have a fresh chance to try to fix it.
For nearly a half century, and particularly over the past two decades, corporate America has plunged workers ever deeper into job and income insecurity. Employers, benefiting from weakened labor laws and lax enforcement of those that remain on the books, have been forcing workers into erratic schedules, hiring them as contractors or temporary or gig workers and stealing their wages. It’s no coincidence that all this happened while labor union membership, which peaked at one-third of the workforce, shriveled to the current 10 percent.
With the decline of unions and collective bargaining, pay has stagnated and pensions have disappeared. Wealth inequality has soared, earnings have become less dependable, and most workers report that they feel stressed, unappreciated, disconnected and distrustful of their employers. They are surveilled on the job, sanctioned for expressing themselves and subjected to dehumanizing workplaces. “Here most of us are, toiling under the authority of communist dictators, and we do not see the reality for what it is,” writes University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson. The financial collapse of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic only deepened the insecurity and misery.
Voting patterns, not just this year’s but this century’s, reflect the discontent and instability. In nine of the last 10 federal elections, one party or the other has lost control of the White House, Senate or House. Voters, desperate for a fundamental change, punish the incumbent party and then, inevitably finding no relief, punish the other party two years later. Politics has become a depressing game of ping-pong, with no enduring wins.
“We’ve never had a period since at least the late 19th century where there have been so many knife’s edge elections,” Podhorzer tells me. “So, coming out of every election, Democrats assume all we need is fine tuning, because we barely lost. We have to get past thinking we’re going to message our way out of this moment. It’s so much bigger than that. And it ignores the fact that, for all of the 21st century, we’ve been seeing that voters just want a different system, a more profound change.”
Even some on the right have begun to argue for a revival of labor unions and New-Deal-style government intervention to undo the damage of the past half-century of neoliberalism, the era of the unfettered free-market that began with President Ronald Reagan. The conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari argued in his 2023 book, “Tyranny Inc.,” that the current “domination of working and middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the asset-rich,” has “drained the vigor and substance out of democracy, facilitated massive upward transfers of wealth, and left ordinary people feeling isolated and powerless.”
