Polling results released Monday show that working-class voters in the United States are broadly more supportive of major progressive agenda items than those in the middle and upper classes, offering Democratic political candidates what one union leader called a "clear roadmap to winning back voters we've lost to a GOP that's growing more extreme by the day."
The survey of over 5,000 registered U.S. voters was conducted last August by HIT Strategies and Working Families Power (WFP), a sibling organization of the Working Families Party.
The poll found that a majority of working-class voters either somewhat or totally support a national jobs guarantee (69%), a "public healthcare program like Medicare for All" (64%), a crackdown on rent-gouging landlords (74%), and tuition-free public colleges and universities (63%), landing them "overwhelmingly to the left" of higher-income segments of the population.
Upper- and middle-class respondents were far less likely to support the above policy proposals. Just 39% of upper-class voters surveyed, for instance, said they completely or somewhat support "a nationwide jobs guarantee" that would provide "stable, good-paying work for everyone who needs it."
WFP found that the "differences between classes are much smaller on social and cultural questions compared to economic fairness questions, and they do not uniformly point to a working class that is more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes."
The poll results, said WFP, call into question the belief that "the greater social and cultural conservatism of the working class explains the working class' drift away from the Democrats and towards the GOP.""The working class is not a monolithic group that wears a hard ha
t and hangs out in diners."Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said the new survey results underscore that "the working class is not a monolithic group that wears a hard hat and hangs out in diners."
"It's a multiracial, multigenerational group that isn't confined to a single geography, and it includes a tremendous diversity of views," said Mitchell, suggesting that Democrats learn from the results to defeat former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, in November.
"We need our strategy and messaging to reflect that reality," he said. "That's how we defeat Trump's MAGA movement and win back working-class voters."
The new report identifies seven "clusters" within the U.S. working class that it labels as Next Gen Left, Mainstream Liberals, Tuned Out Persuadables, Anti-Woke Traditionalists, Secure Suburban Moderates, Diverse Disaffected Conservatives, and Core MAGA—and the survey data shows "large differences" between them that help explain disparate voting behaviors. For example, just 30% of the Next Gen Left cluster—which is disproportionately young and strongly progressive—are homeowners compared to 75% of the Core MAGA cluster, which has what WFP described as "down-the-line right-wing views."
The survey results were released in the heat of an election campaign that has seen the GOP—spearheaded by Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—cast itself as "the party of working-class people." Democrats, whose 2024 White House ticket is backed by major U.S. unions, have lost support from working-class voters in recent years while making gains among more affluent segments of the population.
WFP said that its findings "do not contradict the widespread belief that support for Democrats is stronger among middle- and upper-class voters than it is among working-class voters," but they do "strongly call into question the explanation most commonly advanced for those political alignments, namely that the working class is simply more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes."
"Our study shows that the most salient differences in worldview between classes revolve around questions of class, distribution, and economic fairness, where the working class is well to the left of the middle and upper classes, and regression analysis strongly suggests that the further left a voter is on these questions of class, distribution, and economic fairness, the less likely they were to have supported Donald Trump in 2020," said WFP.
The new analysis was accompanied by what the Working Families Party described as a "practical handbook to winning the working class," which makes up roughly 63% of the U.S. electorate.
Messaging that resonated most strongly across segments of the working class, according to the handbook, emphasized class conflict and the "need to elect Democrats who will fight for working people to keep the money they earn by cracking down on price-gouging at the grocery store, making wealthy tax cheats pay their fair share, and lowering the costs of prescription drugs."
Derrick Osobase, vice president of Communications Workers of American District 6, said in a statement Monday that Democrats must embrace and act on the new findings if they hope to reverse their recent losses among the nation's working class.
"During a time of record high corporate profits," said Osobase, "Democrats need to show working-class voters that we have their backs and will fight for an economy that works for all of us."
Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.
