Progressive Democrats have coalesced around a familiar theory: a latent working-class majority, bound together by shared economic grievances, is waiting to be reassembled into a winning electoral coalition. The New Deal assembled it once before, the argument goes, and a renewed "economic populism" can do so again.

The theory takes many forms. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders rails against "the oligarchs". Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy declared after the 2024 election that "Democrats must reclaim our identity as the party of the working class". A new generation of candidates — tattooed veterans, mechanics, bartenders — are presented as whose personal biography is meant to accomplish what policy has not.

Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who became the left's latest blue-collar champion until he ended his campaign amid a sexual assault allegation, put the theory in stark terms. "We are in a form of class war," he said. "And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people."

The most recent high-profile progressive to embrace that mantle is Abdul El-Sayed, whose economic populism carried him to victory in the 2026 Michigan Democratic Senate primary. Praised as a "working class" champion by the United Auto Workers, El-Sayed performed strongest in wealthier, higher-educated areas of the state. His opponent, Haley Stevens, drew greater support from Detroit and working-class communities.

Yet the question remains whether reform-minded Democrats are genuinely interested in understanding working-class voters on their own terms. Working-class voters are not simply waiting to be activated by the right messenger, program, or slogan. "Fight the oligarchy" probably will not do it.

Working-class voters hold a worldview that, over 50 years, has grown increasingly incompatible with the Democratic Party's — not because working-class voters changed, but because Democrats did.

Working-Class Identity

Since the early 1950s, the American National Election Studies (ANES) has surveyed respondents on whether they identify as members of the working class.

Even as a larger share of the electorate has earned college degrees and household incomes have risen, the proportion of Americans who consider themselves working class has held remarkably steady: roughly 35% of voters over the past 70 years, reaching 38% in 2024. Working-class identity is more durable and culturally rooted than a simple description of who is not a billionaire. It represents a distinct lens through which people interpret the world.

Conventional definitions often overlook how individuals understand their own societal position. In the 2024 ANES data, 21% of those who identify as working class hold a college degree, only 5% belong to a private-sector union, and 37% own stocks. Conversely, most Americans without a college degree do not identify as working class.

Working-class voters have never been a predominantly Democratic group — not even at the height of the New Deal coalition. According to the ANES self-report measure, the working-class share of the Democratic coalition peaked near 56% in 1960 and has declined more or less continuously since, now standing at approximately 30%.

The share of working-class voters who identify as Democrats has been falling for half a century: a majority did so in 1958, but not since. Working-class voters have not, however, become Republicans. Only in 2020 and 2024 — the first time in the survey's history — did more working-class voters identify as Republican than Democrat, and even then only by narrow margins.

The data reveals a politically homeless working class: estranged from the Democrats, not absorbed by the Republicans, suspended in between with weakening attachment to either party. That makes the political challenge less about flipping a single issue and more about rebuilding credibility across several domains at once.

Economic Abandonment

What drove them away? A segment of the progressive left offers a ready explanation: Democrats abandoned working-class voters on economic matters — trade, wages, and industrial policy — and working-class voters responded rationally. Fix the economics, and the coalition returns.

Trade represents the strongest version of this argument. In 1988, roughly 74% of both Democrats and working-class voters favored limits on imports to protect American jobs. By 2024, only 26% of Democrats supported such limits, while 54% of working-class voters continued to do so. Unlike most Democrats, many working-class communities do not see globalization as serving their interests.

Running alongside the trade gap is a widening values divide that no tariff policy can bridge.

What Fairness Requires

In 1984, Democrats and working-class voters broadly agreed that treating people more equally would reduce social problems. A divergence opened after 2008 and accelerated after 2016. Democrats are now 28 points more likely than working-class voters to believe the country should prioritize equality.

In 1986, half of mainstream Democrats and a slightly smaller share of working-class voters agreed with the statement that Black Americans do not succeed because they do not try hard enough. By 2024, Democratic agreement had collapsed to 13%. Working-class agreement also declined, to 32%.

That gap is not primarily a story about rising working-class racial resentment. It reflects the Democratic Party's rapid post-2008 shift toward a worldview that places far greater explanatory weight on structural barriers and far less on individual effort and personal responsibility. Working-class voters, who have historically interpreted their lives through a framework of hard work and earned reward, did not shift nearly so dramatically.

Alignment Becomes Division

On cultural questions, the same pattern holds: working-class voters did not lurch rightward in reactionary revolt. Democrats moved left.

In 1986, Democrats and working-class voters agreed at similar levels that the country would have fewer problems with more emphasis on traditional family ties. By 2024, a 25-point gap had emerged. On whether religion is an important part of their life, a near-zero gap persisted through the early 1990s before reaching 17 points by 2024. On abortion, a 3-point gap in 1980 widened to 30 points in 2024. On whether immigration levels should be increased, the two groups were virtually identical in 2000 at roughly 8% support; by 2020, Democrats stood at 48% while working-class voters remained at 24%.

Even where working-class voters nominally support a Democratic policy goal, they do not trust the institution asked to deliver it — a distrust decades in the making.

How the 'System' Plays

In 1958, working-class voters and Democrats were within 5 points of each other on whether government wastes a lot of tax money. By 2024, that gap had reached 27 points — not because working-class voters veered toward anti-government extremism, but because mainstream Democrats became dramatically more trusting of government as an instrument of social change.

Working-class voters are 17 points more likely than Democrats to say people like them have no say in what government does. In 2024, 88% of working-class voters and 75% of Democrats said government is run by a few big interests. Both groups agree the system is captured. Yet the Democratic policy response, invariably, is to expand that system.

On support for expanding government programs — from healthcare to jobs to environmental spending — Democrats and working-class voters have diverged dramatically since the 1980s. By 2024, approval gaps of 20 to 30 points separated the two groups on government health insurance, environmental spending, and a guaranteed jobs program. On every major plank of the progressive economic agenda, Democrats now stand substantially to the left of the workers they claim to champion.

Not All Class War

Working-class voters have been telling pollsters for 60 years that the political system does not hear them. Democrats, over the same period, have grown more comfortable with the very institutions in which working-class voters have decreasing faith.

This distrust is rooted in specific experiences: deindustrialization that happened on government's watch, trade deals that economists endorsed and workers paid for, a 2008 financial crisis response that saved banks and foreclosed on homes, and an opioid epidemic that regulators failed to catch.

To be fair, this is exactly what the new generation of reform candidates says it wants to address. The argument that the right candidate can shift the landscape is not unreasonable. Candidate quality matters. Personal trust can substitute for institutional trust, at least at the margins.

But economic-grievance politics represents a very small fraction of what working-class voters are actually communicating. The data documents a comprehensive, decades-long divergence in how working-class voters and mainstream Democrats understand fairness, government, personal responsibility, and social change. Reducing all of it to class war forces working-class voters into a prefabricated progressive agenda rather than taking seriously what they are saying.

This is an updated version of a story originally published on June 2, 2026.

Nicholas Jacobs, Goldfarb Family Distinguished Chair in American Government, Colby College; Institute for Humane Studies.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.