What Working-Class Voters Really Want

Hint: It’s not what white college graduates want.

Democrats appear to have rediscovered the working class in the wake of the 2024 election. Their dismal showing among these voters—both white and nonwhite—doomed Kamala Harris’s candidacy and got them, and the country, another term of Donald Trump. So now Democrats want those voters back, and they’re racking their brains trying to figure out how to sell their party to the working class. All factions of the party—from AOC and Bernie Sanders to the Blue Dogs—are pitching their approach as the way Democrats can bring these voters back into the fold.

But perhaps, instead of trying to message their way into the hearts of America’s working class, they should first ask: what do these voters really want? That’s harder than it sounds because it entails suspending your ideology—and any conception of what these voters should want—so that you can find out what they do want.

The point about ideology is very important. Right now, Democrats are dominated by the most ideological voters in the country—white college-educated voters. It’s no secret that Democrats have been doing increasingly well with white college-educated voters, even as they’ve been slipping with nonwhite and working-class (noncollege) voters. Between the 2012 and 2024 elections, Democratic performance among white college graduates improved by 17 points, while declining by 37 points among nonwhite working-class voters.

Less well appreciated is how politically polarized white college graduates have become as these trends have unfolded. Patrick Ruffini’s analysis of data from the 2020 Cooperative Election Study (CES), an academic survey with over 60,000 respondents, demonstrates this vividly. Across 50 policy items, white college Democrats are highly likely to give consistently liberal responses, while white college Republicans give consistently conservative responses.

Ruffini explains:

[G]iving the conservative or liberal answer more than 75 percent of the time places you in [ideological] camps. Otherwise, you’re in a non-ideological middle ground. The 75 percent cutoff is an important one. Above we find Assad-like margins for Donald Trump or Joe Biden in 2020 of more than 98 percent. If you’re above this threshold, you’re not persuadable in the slightest. In the middle, your vote is basically up-for-grabs, progressing from one candidate to other in sliding scale fashion according to your policy views.

This approach leaves relatively few white college voters—38 percent—in an ideological middle ground where their responses are significantly mixed across the 50 items. In contrast, black, Hispanic and Asian voters are much less polarized, including within education groups, and have far more voters of mixed orientation in their ranks. This middle ground includes 83 percent of black voters, 77 percent of Hispanic voters, 69 percent of Asian voters, and even 58 percent of white non-college voters, despite the fact that they skew conservative.

Taken together with the trend data, this means that as Democrats have increasingly relied on white college voters, they have been adding many more ideologically consistent liberals while shedding less ideological nonwhites with mixed policy preferences. Strikingly, among the most liberal voters—those who agree with liberal positions more than 90 percent of the time—there are 20 times more white college-educated voters than black voters.

These developments can only push the party toward being uncompromisingly and uniformly liberal in its policy orientation—and that is indeed what we’ve seen. Moreover, the cultural outlook of highly liberal white college graduates—given the heavy weight of this group in the Democratic Party infrastructure, as well as in sympathetic media, nonprofits, advocacy groups, foundations, and educational institutions—has inevitably come to define the culture associated with the party

For example, liberal white college graduates tend to view the police as a racist institution and oppose rigorous enforcement of the law for public order and safety. And their belief that America is a structurally racist, white supremacist society makes it no surprise that this same group believes that you should never refer to illegal immigrants as “illegal,” that border security is less important than welcoming immigrants, and that objective tests are fundamentally flawed if they show racial disparities in achievement.

Liberal white college graduates also tend to see patriotism as a dirty word and the history of the United States as a bleak landscape of racism and oppression. And they are highly likely to believe that sex is “assigned at birth” and can be changed by self-conception, rather than being an objective biological reality.

Views like these have come to define the Democratic Party in the eyes of many working-class voters, despite the fact that many Democrats do not endorse them. Liberal white college graduates punch far above their weight in determining the party’s image.

A few other findings that underscore the salience of Ruffini’s analysis about just how partisan, overrepresented, and monolithic these voters are:

1. According to Gallup, there has been an astonishing 37-point increase in professed liberalism among white Democrats between 1994 and today. White Democrats are now far more liberal than their black and Hispanic counterparts, who are overwhelmingly moderate to conservative.

2. White liberals are now more liberal on many racial issues than black and Hispanic voters.

3. White liberals now outnumber the nonwhite working class among Democratic voters.

4. Pew data found that of 21 policy priorities tested, protecting the environment and dealing with global climate change ranked 14th and 17th, respectively, on the public’s priority list. But among liberal Democrats, these issues ranked first and third. The pattern was essentially the same among white college-educated Democrats, who, as noted, are heavily dominated by liberals.

5. Gallup data indicate that two-thirds of white college Democrats are liberal, while 70 precent of black working-class and two-thirds of Hispanic working-class Democrats are moderate or conservative.

While the Democratic Party is a complex entity, it’s increasingly true that its positions and image are defined by the burgeoning ranks of white college-educated liberals who have made the party their political home. In the process, it has become much harder for many working-class voters, white and nonwhite, to feel comfortable in the party, given their more mixed policy views.

This is a problem. As Ruffini remarks:

[White college graduates are] less than 30 percent of the American electorate. If everything seems polarized these days, it’s probably because of the circles you run in. Not everyone is like this. And the people that aren’t—the multiracial working class—are wildly underrepresented in political media.

Add to that the fact that white college-educated liberals make up less than 10 percent of all voters—and perhaps only twice that share among Democratic voters. This illuminates a core truth that Democrats and Democratic politicians need to absorb: being highly ideological and consistent in your positions may appeal to the party’s educated, professional-class base, but it’s a terrible way to reach the far more numerous working class, where views on many issues diverge dramatically from that ideological consensus. That has to change—which means Democrats must be willing to relax their ideological orthodoxy and embrace a heterodox mix of positions that brings them closer to the median working-class voter. Otherwise, these voters will continue to regard the party with suspicion—and not as their own

Indeed, to even get in the door with many working-class Americans and make their pitch, Democrats must convince these voters that they are not looked down upon, that their concerns are taken seriously, and that their views on culturally freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. With today’s Democratic Party that is difficult. Resistance is stiff, particularly among white college-educated liberals, to any compromise that might involve jettisoning ideological orthodoxy and moving closer to working class voters on such issues.

In my own research, I’ve found this same disjuncture between even nonwhite working-class voters⎯three-quarters of whom are moderate or conservative⎯and white college-educated liberals. My analysis, based on a 6,000-respondent survey conducted by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life (SCAL) and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), highlights several specific topics where the views of college-educated white liberals are diametrically opposed to those of this key Democratic constituency:

Structural racism. Is racism “built into our society, including into its policies and institutions”, as held by current Democratic Party orthodoxy? Or does it “come from individuals who hold racist views, not from our society and institutions?” In the SCAL/NORC survey, moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters—70 percent of whom identify as moderate rather than conservative—chose the latter view, that racism comes from individuals, not society, by a margin of 61 percent to 39 percent. In stark contrast, white college-educated liberals chose the structural racism position by a lopsided margin of 82 percent to 18 percent. That tells you a lot about who influences the Democratic Party today and who does not.

Public safety. Voters were offered a choice between “we need to reallocate funding from police departments to social services” and “we need to fully fund the budget for police departments.” Nonwhite moderate-to-conservative working-class voters supported full police department funding by 63 percent to 36 percent. But white college-educated liberals favored moving police department funding to social services by a whopping 76 percent to 22 percent. The luxury belief to “defund the police” might sound moral in an ivory tower, but it hardly passes muster with everyday Americans.

Transgender athletes in team sports. Should “transgender athletes… be able to play on sports teams that match their current gender identity,” or should they “only be allowed to play on sports teams that match their birth gender?” By a staggering 70 percent to 26 percent margin, moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters chose the second option—that sports team participation should be determined by birth gender—directly contradicting current Democratic Party doctrine. But white college-educated liberals are almost exactly the reverse, endorsing the Democratic Party’s gender identity stance by a 40-point margin. Again, it is easy to see to whom today’s Democratic Party is really listening.

Renewable energy. As Democrats have rushed headlong into an energy transition to replace fossil fuels with renewables, this too threatens to leave most nonwhite working-class voters behind. In the SCAL/NORC survey, when given a choice between the country using ‘a mix of energy sources including oil, coal, and natural gas along with renewable energy sources’ and the current Democratic approach—phasing ‘out the use of oil, coal, and natural gas completely, relying instead on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power only’—moderate-to-conservative nonwhite working-class voters endorsed the continued use of fossil fuels by an overwhelming 75 percent to 25 percent margin. In contrast, white college-educated liberals favored eliminating fossil fuels entirely, by a margin of 66 percent to 34 percent.

Despite the radical nature of many of these positions and the fact that Democrats’ working-class supporters do not typically share them, the clear direction of the party has been to embrace these positions ever more enthusiastically. It should not be a surprise that even working-class “people of color” have been reconsidering their loyalties.

Since white working-class voters tend to be even farther away from today’s ideological Democrats in these and other areas, the scale of the working-class challenge for Democrats is immense. The only viable solution for the Democrats is a stiff dose of heterodoxy to bring them into closer alignment with the median working-class voter. Some examples of positive principles that Democrats could—and should—endorse:

On culture, there must be a recognition that, while our country is not perfect, it is good (and reasonable) to be patriotic and proud of the role America has played in world history. Equality of opportunity should be held up as a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not. Yes, racial achievement gaps are a problem, and we should seek to close them, but not every example therein can be attributed to racism. Standards of high achievement—particularly at a moment of intense geopolitical competition—should be maintained for people of all races. And critically, language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith.

On economics—an issue that helped sink the Democrats with working-class voters in 2024—white college-educated liberals should recognize that making climate change the party’s rallying cry is self-destructive, and solutions won’t come overnight. As we move toward a clean energy economy with an ‘all of the above’ strategy, energy must become and remain cheap, reliable, and abundant. That means fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will continue to be an important part of the mix.

And the degrowth fixation that the climate focus sometimes inspires is the worst idea on the Left since Communism. Ordinary voters want abundance: more stuff, more opportunity, cheaper prices, and nicer, more comfortable lives. The only way to provide this is with more growth, not less.

To deliver that, we need to make it much easier to build things, from housing to transmission lines to nuclear reactors. That cannot happen without serious regulatory and permitting reform. That should be paired with a robust industrial policy that goes far beyond climate policy. We are in direct competition with nations like China, a competition we cannot win without building on cutting-edge scientific research in all fields. That would lend itself to a more bipartisan approach than Democrats’ recent fixation on climate.

These are all positions that working class voters would likely heartily embrace, even if they caused heartburn among many of the Democrats’ professional-class supporters. Working-class voters simply want the country to be prosperous, provide them with opportunities for upward mobility, treat everybody fairly, and not tell them to believe dumb stuff. They’ll do the rest; they could care less about ideology. This leaves plenty of room to criticize Trump and the GOP for their excesses and policy errors, while signaling to working-class voters that Democrats are no longer in thrall to their most ideological supporters. In this Democratic party, voters with mixed views that combine conservative and liberal inclinations would be welcome. And the more of these voters who felt welcome, the more Democrats would come to understand what the working class really does want. Right now, they don’t.

Editor’s note: A version of this essay originally appeared in Commonplace, American Compass’ webzine.