Progressives should be careful not to get comfortable. There is work to be done
Democrats had a great midterms result. Big wins in Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, Maine and Texas show the potential for a majority coalition that reaches well beyond traditional liberal strongholds. That’s a good sign for the party’s chances come 2028.
Not surprisingly, the story of the midterms was “affordability”. Surveys showed that the economy was the top issue for the election, with a third of voters citing cost-of-living concerns as their number one issue, and nearly 40% of voters claiming their personal financial situation has worsened over the past year. It’s clear that voters don’t approve of Donald Trump’s economic management.
That’s good for Democrats in the short term, but voters kicking out the party in charge doesn’t mean they’ve been convinced by progressive appeals, nor that they will stick by the party come 2028. Remember, 2024 was also an “affordability” election, one that Democrats lost.
In fact, despite the victories, the midterms revealed a few troubling signs for Democrats.
While populist, pro-worker candidates in purple districts such as Sherrod Brown, Brian Poindexter and Bob Brooks did have a great showing in blue-collar districts, overperforming expectations, these “Bernie-dog” candidates are few and far between.
The reality is only 47% of voters without a college-degree pulled the lever for Democrats, as compared with 51% of whom voted for Republicans. That’s an improvement over 2024, but there is a long way to go.
Democrats did win (53%) the lower- and middle-income brackets ($30,000-$99,000 per year). But the party performed best among higher-income voters – about 60% of those who make more than $300,000 voted blue. These are worrisome signs that despite “affordability” concerns the party’s reputation among working-class voters is still in rough shape. Repairing it should be the major priority for these next two years.
To do so, Democrats need to address three key weaknesses before 2028.
1 ‘Affordability’ is not an economic program
First, it’s good that Democratic candidates were able to endlessly hammer Republicans on their failures to address pocketbook issues; that’s a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, it’s no substitute for an economic program that can actually address the problems we face.
There is a real danger that, thanks to the success of “affordability” politicking, Democrats will neglect building a credible, and ambitious, economic program. Fixing our lopsided, K-shaped economy is going to require major new investments in domestic infrastructure, industrial policies to revive manufacturing, crackdowns on corporate gouging, and new means to generate public funds.
Worryingly, despite all the populist sounding rhetoric, many “affordability” ideas proposed by leading liberals point in the opposite direction.
Consider the cheap anti-tax pseudo-populism on offer by the senator Cory Booker. Booker campaigned to exempt all residents making under $75,000 from federal income tax –that would mean a $5tn dollar tax cut, enough to make Grover Norquist blush.
Of course, this kind of cash-in-hand promise can win blue-collar votes in a cost-of-living crunch but it won’t win their loyalty in the long run. Democrats need to address the affordability issue as a wage and job crisis, not just a price problem, and that means it’s an expensive problem to fix.
A better message: pledge to balance the budget on the back of rich tax cheats, big pharma, Silicon Valley and Wall Street, all of whom have grown fat off taxpayer largesse. Reinvest the lost revenue in American industry, American infrastructure and the American worker.
Democrats need a post-Trump economic model for shared prosperity, it won’t be built on policy gimmicks.
2 The revolt against globalism isn’t going away
Relatedly, there is a danger that in reaction to Trump’s tariffs, Democrats might end up ignoring the worldwide working-class revolt against globalism.
In 2016, liberals were blindsided by Trump’s attacks on free-trade; he excoriated Nafta and the “American carnage” that unfettered globalism wrought. Then, in 2024, Trump again capitalized on Democratic aloofness by attacking Biden’s border failures. Both issues, and they are linked, suggest a hunger for a step back from hyper-globalization.
And yet, despite a decade of experience, Democrats spent no effort making a positive case for a post-free-trade, post-neoliberal economy.
In fact, according to the Wall Street Journal, Democrats spent more than $58m on ads bashing tariffs and exactly $0 on making a positive case for a new trade agenda. Obviously, Trump’s tariffs have failed to bring good jobs home, and nary a Republican will defend them today.
But without making a positive case for a world beyond free-trade, beyond the neoliberal global order, Democrats are unable to address one of the central concerns that propelled Trump to power in the first place. If the anti-tariff message hardens into an embrace of the economic status quo ante, Democrats will be in trouble.
The same goes for immigration. While the cost-of-living was the dominant concern this cycle, immigration was number three on the list. And it remains among the only issues where voters still trust Republicans more.
Democrats are right to decry the brutality and illegality of Ice tactics, but they should not conflate anti-Ice sentiment with a sudden embrace of liberal border policies. Working-class voters want humane border enforcement and a path to citizenship for peaceable residents. But if Democrats can’t make the case that they can reduce illegal immigration, they will suffer.
3 Winning working-class votes means reflecting working-class values
Finally, Democrats are still far from working-class voters on many moral-cultural issues. While leading progressives have signaled a retreat from the liberal-to-the-max approach of the recent past – as evidenced by AOC’s admission: “Woke 1 was crazy” – the shift is tactical and superficial, designed for political expediency.
No doubt, some social liberals in the party will take yesterday’s results as reason to reanimate the spirit of 2020. That’s a mistake.
As Jared Abbott and Joan Williams show in an important recent report from the Center for Working-Class Politics, the “biggest single contributor” to winning blue-collar voters “is embracing cultural positions that resonate with the working class”.
Now, working-class voters are not uniformly conservative on social issues, and in many cases they have moved significantly to the left in recent years.
However, professional-class voters are far more socially liberal than the working class as a whole, and they are more liberal than they were just a few years ago. And because many of the operatives in Democratic politics come from professional-class, uniformly liberal, social worlds. They simply don’t know many (or any) blue-collar people or their views and values. That’s a liability.
If professional-class progressives fail to reckon with how different their own views are from those of working-class voters – on gender, abortion, crime, climate, immigration, etc – and adjust their appeals (if not to adopt working-class values, at least to accommodate differences) they will fail.
Democrats have been gifted a victory thanks to Trump’s economic mismanagement. They ought to accept it with some humility and spend the next two years hammering out a political vision that can actually win voters’ loyalty for the long haul.
The good news is there is time yet to demonstrate to working people that Democrats can represent both their values and their economic interests.
We need big new investments in American infrastructure to provide high-wage jobs for the left-behind parts of the country. We need a new post-global plan for trade so that we can begin to rebuild American manufacturing – and the industrial unions that made those jobs good.
We need to expand Medicare, social security, and provide new programs to make life easier for young families. We need better public schools for our students, free community college and trade programs, and a slew of new workplace rights.
In other words, we need candidates that can marry working-class populism with progressive economic policies in a way that can reach deep into Trump-country and win over enough independents to deliver a commanding majority in 2028. That work starts now.
Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623
