One Simple Question for Democrats

What would the working class say?

Democrats are roaming in the political wilderness and seem bewildered on how to find their way out. More resistance? More moderation? More lawfare? More denunciations of fascism/authoritarianism/lawlessness? Look for ways to compromise? Don’t look for ways to compromise? Shut down the government? Don’t shut down the government? Better messaging of Democratic positions? Actually change Democratic positions? It’s all so confusing!

It needn’t be. There’s one simple question—a sort of test—that would illuminate the path forward for Democrats.

What would the working class say (WWWCS)?

Let me explain.

The WWWCS test is not so hard to do but it does entail getting outside of the liberal college-educated bubble so many Democrats live within, particularly as experienced on social media, in activist circles and within advocacy, nonprofit, media and academic institutions. Look at actual public opinion data—not as summarized by someone you know or something you read. Look at focus group reports. Talk to actual working-class people—there are lots of them! Listen to your intuitions about how working-class people would likely react to policies and rhetoric currently associated with the Democrats —not how you think they should react. Think of family members or people you grew up with who are working class. Try to get inside their heads. They are less ideological, more focused on material concerns, more likely to be struggling economically, less interested in cutting edge social issues, more patriotic and generally more culturally conservative. All this makes a difference.

The “what-would-the-working-class-say” test can tell you a lot about whether Democrats are on track with their approach. If the test indicates that Democrats are advocating or saying something that is likely unpopular, off-putting and/or just lacks salience with working-class people, that policy or rhetoric is probably on the wrong track. Conversely, if the test indicates that working-class people are likely to view what Democrats are advocating/saying as desirable, in tune with their values and actually important to their everyday lives, that is a very good sign.

So that’s the test. Here’s why it’s so damn important.

As noted in an excellent new report by Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck:

For the first time since the mid-20th century, the central fault line of American politics is neither race and ethnicity nor gender but rather class, determined by educational attainment. But in the intervening half century, the parties have switched places. Republicans once commanded a majority among college-educated voters while Democrats were the party of the working class. Now the majority of college educated voters support Democrats. Meanwhile, the troubled relationship between the Democratic Party and white working-class voters that began in the late 1960s now includes the non-white working-class as well, as populist Republicans are expanding their support among working-class Hispanics and an increasing share of African American men….

The sorting of partisan preferences based on educational attainment is bad news for Democrats, demographically and geographically. Fewer than 38% of Americans 25 and older have earned BAs, a share that has plateaued in recent years after increasing five-fold between 1960 and 2020. And so, it appears, has the Democratic share of the college graduate vote (57 percent in 2020, 56 percent in 2024) even as the Republican share of the non-college vote surged from 51 percent to 56 percent. Meanwhile, non-college voters still make up 57 percent of the electorate, a figure that rises to 60 percent in the swing states. [Note that the figures for eligible voters are actually quite a bit higher—RT]

If Democrats cannot build a broader cross-class alliance, one that includes a larger share of non-college voters, their future is not bright. At the presidential level, they could end up confined to states with high densities of college-educated voters, leaving them far short of an Electoral College majority. Although Democrats won all the states with shares of BA degree holders at 40 percent or higher in 2024, there were only 12 of them, none swing states. By contrast, Democrats won only one of the 29 states with BA shares at 35 percent or lower while prevailing in seven of the 10 states with college attainment between 36 and 39 percent. [Note that the only swing state in the 36-39 percent group, North Carolina, was carried by Trump—RT] And because ticket-splitting between presidential and senatorial races has become more infrequent, the new class-based politics bodes ill for Democrats’ U.S. Senate prospects as well.

Here’s the visual on the difference between high and low education states:

---

---

Notice anything different about the two maps? The point about Senate implications cannot be emphasized enough. My Liberal Patriot colleague Michael Baharaeen recently did a crackerjack job of running down the Senate maps for 2026-2030. The Republicans have abundant pickup opportunities in low-education, working class heavy states while Democratic opportunities are slimmer and generally involve knocking off Republicans in the same kind of low-education states. This is daunting to say the least.

Here's another visual illustrating the Democrats’ working-class woes. From Patrick Flynn, as reworked by Patrick Ruffini, this shows that the Harris coalition of 2024 most resembles….the Dole coalition of 1996! As the graphic shows this is not the coalitional area a winning party wants to be in.

---

---

One more, showing the comprehensive move of the Democrats’ image away from being the party of the working class:

---

---

I trust these data and charts have shown you that the Democrats’ working-class situation is not as bad as you thought—it’s worse! And, dare I say it, it could be even worser. That’s because Democrats’ loss of working-class support is intimately bound-up with the country’s move into a new political era that Democratic elites seem utterly clueless about. This is well-described by Yascha Mounk in a recent essay on his Substack:

We are living through a change in political dispensation, one whose magnitude is—at a conservative estimate—likely to resemble Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal or Ronald Reagan’s rebellion against the postwar consensus.

A change in dispensation usually entails two stages. First, the old way of doing things runs out of steam. There is a long period in which it comes to look increasingly outmoded, its ability to solve problems palpably diminishes, and popular support for it gradually erodes. Then a new politician or political movement comes to power determined to disrupt the old order, often in a way that is—initially, and sometimes persistently—inchoate, chaotic or irresponsible.

The first of these elements has been in evidence for at least a decade. The second fully kicked into gear on January 20, 2025….

Over the course of my lifetime, a political order that seemed natural and even inevitable has transmogrified into an ancien régime that, even to its most ardent supporters, feels increasingly outmoded. Now, the political forces which don’t in any way feel beholden to that old order have taken power, and are gleefully dismantling it.

Right before our eyes, Humpty Dumpty has tumbled from a great height. For years, he remained suspended in midair, seemingly defying the laws of physics. Now he is about to hit the ground. We don’t yet know the full magnitude of the impact. But it is already clear that all the establishment’s horses and all the establishment’s men won’t be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again….

For at least two decades now, we have had an establishment mostly composed of people pretending that they are staging a great revolt against the powerful. We are ruled by a (mostly meritocratic) caste of the privileged phenomenally adept at identifying and exaggerating and broadcasting the small ways in which they are comparatively underprivileged. We have handed the reins of large swathes of our society over to supposed experts who have, again and again, turned out to be conspicuously inexpert in fulfilling the important tasks with which they have been entrusted….

We will not fix this problem by competing for who can call Trump the worst names. We will not fix this problem by reverting to the playbook of the #resistance that failed the first time around. We will not fix this problem by doubling down on a worldview that has proven to be deeply polarizing and toxically unpopular. And anybody who, like the new chair of the DNC, confidently asserts that they have the right message most definitely doesn’t.

This ups the stakes on asking “what would the working class say?’ Democrats are in danger of losing the plot entirely in this new political era; they won’t find their way back until they consistently subject their positions and rhetoric to this test. If they did, they’d do things differently since, as Galston and Kamarck point out, working class voters:

…tend to be patriotic and religious, even if they don’t attend church regularly. They believe in the traditional family, even if they are not living in one. They cherish the places where their families have lived, often for generations, and they are reluctant to leave them or find that they can’t leave them because of the huge disparity in housing prices between their homes and the housing prices in prosperous parts of the country.

They believe in opportunity and hard work and prefer jobs with a future to government guarantees. They want upward mobility for themselves, and especially for their children. They have lost trust in government as an instrument of economic progress, and they don’t want anyone—especially government—telling them how to live their lives.

They believe that the Democratic Party is dominated by elites whose privileges do not serve the common good and whose cultural views are far outside the mainstream and lack common sense. They believe that educated professionals look down on them and that the professional class favors policies that give immigrants and minorities unfair advantages at their expense. They believe that educational institutions preach a set of liberal values that are out of the mainstream and that parents, not schools, should be teaching values.

The current positions and rhetoric of the Democratic party could not—should not—survive contact with these realities of the working class worldview. But such contact depends on constant and honest application of the WWWCS test. Otherwise, Democrats will likely change little and continue to wander in the political wilderness hoping Trump’s mistakes and excesses will bring them back to power.

Hope’s not much of a strategy though. What if the future holds more scenes like this one from the end of the 2024 campaign, described by journalist Ethan Dodd?

On Election Day Eve, I was covering Kamala Harris’s rally in Pittsburgh at the Carrie Blast Furnaces, a testament to the city’s steel glory, now a museum. The Harris campaign made a last-minute venue switch there to connect the San Francisco attorney to the union roots of western Pennsylvania. It felt forced, like the rally Harris held with President Joe Biden months earlier at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union hall on Labor Day….

Harris spoke for less than ten minutes that night at the Carrie Blast Furnaces before handing the show off to Katy Perry, who sang “Dark Horse” to strobe lights below the dormant man-made volcano that once smelted iron ore. A “Steelworkers for Harris” sign lit up one of the shadowy brick buildings as I walked into the ill-fated party, but there were no steelworkers in sight. They were nine miles away, standing behind Trump at his rally in Pittsburgh’s PPG Arena.

Looking back now, it was an omen that would be confirmed the following night: Democrats had lost the working class.

That’s worth repeating: Democrats lost the working class. Since Franklin Delano Roosevelt stepped in to save “the forgotten man,” the Democratic Party has been identified with the vulnerable, whether the wage worker, farmer, or professional forced to join the ranks of the unemployed and destitute. Trump’s Republican Party, really the America First movement, has been the death knell of that Democratic Party.

Can the Democratic Party rise from these ashes and avoid future scenes like the one Dodd describes? I don’t know but I do know what such a resurrection should start with: what would the working class say, asked over and over again. WWWCS? It’s the key to Democrats’ future, if they have broader aspirations than building a moat around Blue America to keep out the “deplorables.”