Democrats have a working-class voter problem that progressives like Abdul El-Sayed are still struggling to solve

According to political scientist Nicholas Jacobs in The Conversation, progressives keep diagnosing the working-class voter exodus as fundamentally economic. But decades of data suggest something more complex. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's twenty twenty-six Democratic Senate primary on a platform of economic populism, yet performed strongest in wealthier, educated areas, while his opponent drew more support from working-class communities. That reflects a broader pattern: the Democratic coalition's share of working-class voters fell from fifty-six percent in nineteen sixty to just thirty percent today. The progressive explanation: Democrats abandoned working-class voters on trade, wages, and industrial policy. Some evidence supports this. In nineteen eighty-eight, both groups favored trade protections at roughly equal rates; by twenty twenty-four, only twenty-six percent of Democrats did, versus fifty-four percent of working-class voters. Yet Jacobs argues the real divergence cuts deeper. Working-class voters understand their lives through hard work and personal responsibility; Democrats have shifted toward emphasizing structural barriers and systemic inequality. On abortion, immigration, religion, and family values, significant gaps have opened where little existed before. It wasn't working-class voters who moved right—it was Democrats who moved left. The result is a working class increasingly estranged from both parties, with diminishing attachment to either.

Listen to this story

Hear this and more stories in a personalized audio briefing.

Open The Chonkerton