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DEMOCRATS ACT LIKE ELECTIONS ARE COMPLICATED. THEY’RE NOT  
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Sean Mason
July 22, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Yet another study confirms what we already know: economic populism
is the only way for Democrats to win working-class voters. _

A voter walking to the voting booth on February 11, 2020, in Bedford,
New Hampshire, Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty Images

 

In American politics, working-class votes are a requirement for
electoral success. Frustratingly, however, Democratic candidates who
want to run campaigns that appeal to the working class often find
themselves running against their own party, too.

A new report
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from the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) and _Jacobin
_analyzes 128 questions from gold-standard academic surveys
administered over the past few decades to understand the preferences
and priorities of the working class and how they have evolved over
time. Our findings underscore that Democrats can win back
working-class voters by focusing on economic populist policies. It may
seem obvious, but most Democratic candidates and strategists have
failed to grasp this simple formula in recent years. Now the party
ship is sinking, and it’s time to take this finding seriously.

Our research found that economically populist policies — like a
higher federal minimum wage, limits on imports to protect US jobs, and
expanding Medicare — appeal to working-class people on both sides of
the aisle. We also went further, examining the appeal of specific
policies to one particular group of working-class voters: those who
voted for Donald Trump in 2020. We found that there is significant
potential for Democratic candidates to win these voters back in
upcoming elections, provided they stake out an economically
progressive position.

This is hardly the first time that research, including previous
research
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conducted
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the CWCP and _Jacobin_, has uncovered strong signals that campaigning
on economic populism increases a candidate’s chances of winning
working-class voters. Democratic Party leaders and their hired
strategists would like us to think that things aren’t that
straightforward. Rather than embracing the massive potential of
economic populism to reshape the American political landscape in their
favor, they erect intraparty obstacles to candidates promoting it.
They do this for a combination of ideological and structural reasons,
not least because wealthy special interests are deeply embedded
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the party’s machinery.

A recent prominent example of this is New York City’s mayoral
primary, in which the Democratic political establishment and moneyed
interests lined up behind disgraced former New York governor Andrew
Cuomo to oppose democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. Cuomo Super PACs,
funded by real estate interests and others who feared Mamdani’s
policies would cut into their profits, red-baited Mamdani
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throughout the campaign, portraying him as a fringe radical whose
ideas are out of step with ordinary Americans. The race’s outcome
undermined their theory that economic progressivism is a nonstarter:
Cuomo lost decisively despite outspending
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Mamdani four to one.

Mamdani attributes his victory to his laser focus on economic
messaging. As he told _New York Magazine_
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“We have tried to listen more and lecture less, and it’s in those
very conversations that I had with Democrats who voted for Donald
Trump many months ago that I heard what it would take to bring them
back to the Democratic Party — that it would be a relentless focus
on an economic agenda.” He outlined, at a high level, what political
priorities could win over Democrats who broke for Trump in the 2024
election, saying, “When I asked why they did it [voted for Trump],
what they told me again and again came back to rent and child care and
groceries, and even the $2.90 that it costs for a MetroCard.”

The Democratic establishment that so strenuously opposed Mamdani is
the same Democratic establishment that selected Kamala Harris as the
party’s 2024 presidential candidate. It then steered her campaign
away
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from anti–economic elite messaging toward a focus on Trump’s
threats to democracy — a pivot that arguably played a major role in
her defeat.

Of course, even the most centrist Democrats occasionally float
progressive economic policies. Cuomo pledged to raise New York
City’s minimum wage to $20 an hour, for example. But there are two
key differences between run-of-the-mill Democratic Party economic
messaging and full-throated economic populism. One is the degree to
which candidates focus on their progressive economic demands and a
corresponding view of society; establishment Democrats like Cuomo tend
to do this
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sparingly. The other is the strength of the policies in terms of how
far they go toward helping workers. Mamdani surpassed Cuomo with a
promise to raise the minimum wage to $30 by 2030. (According to the
MIT Living Wage Calculator, a single adult with no children currently
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$32.85 to meet basic needs in New York City.) Likewise, Mamdani’s
platform included a tax on million-dollar-per-year earners, while
Cuomo’s had no corresponding plank.

Since our report analyzes survey responses from across the country to
a broad range of political issues, our results can help illuminate how
a campaign like Mamdani’s might fare on the national stage. A
millionaire tax didn’t seem unwelcome to New York City Democratic
primary voters, but is it a crazy socialist idea that would
immediately kill a campaign anywhere else? Our analysis suggests
otherwise. We found that 44 percent of working-class people nationwide
who voted for Trump in 2020 supported increasing income taxes on
people making over $1 million per year.

A portion of our study sought to find out what percentage of
working-class Trump voters in 2020 were in favor of robust
economically populist packages. For a package that included higher
taxes for millionaires, increased federal public school spending,
increased federal spending on Social Security, and a hike in the
federal minimum wage, we found 19.7 percent support. We then ran an
analysis that cautiously assumed that the most socially conservative
working-class Trump voters are too far gone to ever vote for a
Democrat, and that no economically progressive messaging would ever
win them over. Even in this scenario, we still found enough support
for a progressive economic platform to have easily overcome Trump’s
2024 advantages in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Social security, public school spending, raising the minimum wage, and
taxing the rich were all in the foreground of Bernie Sanders’s 2016
and 2020 presidential campaigns. Predictably, Democrat-aligned media
outlets painted him as an out-of-touch old man with unrealistic
political ideals, and party leadership
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schemed to block him
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from the presidential nomination in both cycles. The Democratic
establishment thus prevented Sanders’s political approach from being
tested on the national stage, impeding our ability to fully assess the
power of economic populist messaging in national politics. Our
research suggests it is enormous.

We shouldn’t expect the Democratic establishment to change how it
operates, even when it is clear that business as usual risks more
losses in winnable elections. Political messaging opposed to economic
elites resonates with working-class voters
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the most, but corresponding policies almost always contradict the
material interests of wealthy people — and Democratic Party insiders
won’t bite the hand
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that feeds them.

With the pro-corporate, anti-populist Democratic establishment here to
stay, the logical conclusion from our analysis is that politicians who
want to win working-class voters shouldn’t just take an oppositional
stance toward the economic status quo, but _also _toward their own
party — at least to the extent that the party fails to embrace
economic populism. We contend that the candidates with the best chance
of winning are the ones with an orientation similar to that of Sanders
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_in_ the Democratic Party when necessary, but not _of _it, and
fundamentally opposed to the party’s pro-elite elements.

It’s no longer a matter of debate that the Democratic Party needs to
win back working-class voters from the GOP. There also shouldn’t be
any debate about how to do it: in study after study, an economically
focused platform is the clear winner. Our research reinforces this
notion and may provide some useful insights to fine-tune an effective
approach. But whatever the details, the basic idea is straightforward,
even though the Democratic Party top brass would have us think
otherwise.

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Sean Mason is a researcher at the Center for Working-Class Politics.

* Democratic Party; Working Class; Economic Policy;
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