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POLLING CONUNDRUMS: ACTIVIST GOVERNMENT, SÍ; DEMOCRATS, NO!  
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Harold Meyerson
June 3, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ Building a progressive populist movement requires Democrats to talk
about Wall Street, which most are reluctant to do. If they’re going
to benefit from the public’s anti-oligarch turn, however, they’re
going to have Bernie-fy themselves. _

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
greet the crowd during a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour event at
Arizona State University, March 20, 2025, in Tempe, Arizona, (Ross D.
Franklin/AP Photo).

 

There’s good news for liberal economics today, as well as bad news
for Democratic Party economics, and all-around confusion about the
public’s take on economics. The good news comes from some
polling analysis
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today by the Center for American Progress (CAP). The bad news, along
with a smidgen of good, comes from a new poll
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for CNN. The confusion comes when you try to reconcile the two, though
I’ll take a stab at it at the end of this On TAP.

The CAP study looked at responses to questions about economic policy
from voters both with and without college degrees—from both sides,
that is, of the increasingly paramount gap in American politics—and
found cross-class support for a number of liberal economic positions.
(The surveys they studied included those of both pre- and immediately
post-2024-election voters.) Fifty-eight percent of working-class
voters and 61 percent of the college-educated believed the decline of
unions had hurt American workers; 67 percent of working-class
respondents and 58 percent of college grads supported a $17 federal
minimum wage; 63 percent of the working class and 64 percent of
graduates favored higher taxes on those making at least $400,000 a
year; and roughly 75 percent of each group supported expanding
Medicaid to cover more low-income Americans.

But this cross-class concurrence didn’t have much effect on the
actual voting of these two classes. Fifty-six percent of college grads
cast their votes for Kamala Harris, while 56 percent of the non-grads
(who greatly outnumbered the grads) voted for Donald Trump. At
minimum, this suggests that despite voters having ranked the economy
as their number one concern, the economic policies listed above
didn’t figure very much in their economic assessments (at least,
when compared to the cost of living), or weren’t identified as
policies that Democrats favored and Republicans opposed, or, very
probably, both.

This weekend’s CNN-sponsored poll highlights the Democrats’
inability to brand themselves as the party with economic policies that
benefit the working and middle classes. To be sure, the public is not
in a libertarian mindset: Asked whether they believe that “the
government is trying to do too many things” or that “government
should do more to solve problems,” they opt for more problem solving
by a hefty 58 percent to 41 percent margin. So, advantage Democrats?
No.

When asked which party better reflects their view on handling the
economy, they prefer Republicans over Democrats by a 7 percent margin.
That’s down from a 15-point Republican margin in 2022, when prices
were soaring, so the Democrats’ disadvantage may still reflect
public discontent with prices. Still, when you contrast Americans’
support for activist government with their discontent with the party
that’s historically been the party of activist government, you’re
almost compelled to reverse a venerable and fundamental rule of
American public opinion: As propounded by Lloyd Free and Hadley
Cantril in 1967, it asserts
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Americans are philosophically conservative but operationally liberal.
For the moment, that seems to have been flipped on its head.

This topsy-turvy moment comes with some caveats, however. First, since
Trump took office again, there’s no question that Republicans in
general and Trump in emphatic particular have been the activists,
while Democrats have scrambled to find ways to respond and counter
him. Asked which is the party that can get things done, 36 percent
said the Republicans, while just 19 percent said the Democrats. The
GOP, of course, has trifecta control of government, while the
Democrats lack even a recognized leader—and their last leader, Joe
Biden, wasn’t up to the task of promoting even widely popular
policies like building new factories, roads, bridges, and broadband.

In a larger sense, though, Democrats have yet to make a compelling
story of the economic shifts of the past half-century—the shift of
income and wealth to the upper classes and the mega-rich in
particular, at the expense of everybody else. Public support for
discrete policies that stand little chance of enactment—labor law
reform, higher minimum wages, paid family leave—won’t have much
effect on voting habits unless there’s a plausible chance for their
becoming law, and until they’re fitted within a credible and
compelling story of the changes to American life. What stands out
about the efforts of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, what
makes their talks different from those of most Democrats, isn’t
their “radicalism” but rather their ability to place the thousand
unnatural shocks that Americans regularly experience within an
explanatory narrative about the shift in wealth and power that’s
dominated the past 50 years of American life.

For their part, Republicans do have a story, whose implausibility
hasn’t meant it’s ineffective. It’s the immigrants’ fault, and
that of welfare cheats (never mind that welfare, as such, has dwindled
to a trickle). The particulars of a progressive populist story are
there for the taking, with the added benefit that the culprits—Wall
Streeters and other wielders and champions of financialized
capitalism—are already widely and justifiably loathed. But building
a progressive populist movement requires Democrats to talk about the
role that finance and kindred institutions have played, which most
Democrats are still reluctant to do. If they’re going to benefit
from the public’s anti-libertarian, anti-oligarch turn, however,
they’re going to have to Bernie-fy themselves. That doesn’t mean
they have to support Medicare for All, but they do have to go after
the corporatization of medicine, the pernicious role of private
equity, the pricing practices of pharma, and the way those
institutions’ money dominates politics—and then invite the public
to draw its own conclusions. If Democrats are ever going to reclaim
the advantage that once came to them as the champions of
pro-working-class economics, they’re going to have to go big.

_Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect._

_The American Prospect is devoted to promoting informed discussion on
public policy from a progressive perspective. In print and online,
the Prospect brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex
issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary
to create good legislation. We help to dispel myths, challenge
conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue._

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