Does the Working Class Vote Against Its Interests?

A perennially misguided question among progressives.

Just when it seemed the Democratic Party’s troubles couldn’t get any bleaker, a new report has unveiled the extent of America’s political realignment since the 2016 election. According to New York Times journalist Shane Goldmacher, there are over 1,400 “triple-trending” Trump counties out of a total of 3,144, compared to a mere 57 for Democrats. Even worse, nearly all counties in which Trump has continuously improved his margin have a median household income below $80,000. Democratic presidential nominees, by contrast, have mostly seen gains in affluent and rich counties that tend to be whiter.

Their party, in other words, has not only hemorrhaged culturally conservative blue-collar whites, as part of a seemingly irreversible trend stretching back to Richard Nixon’s courtship. Democrats are now unambiguously in the hole with working-class voters overall.

Undoubtedly, some progressives are tempted once more to ask the perennial question: Why do American workers so often vote against their interests? At surface level, this instinctive response is understandable. Congressional Republicans continue to unite around unpopular, regressive tax cuts and a penurious view of social insurance, food assistance, and other social programs. And they do so despite the fact that higher taxes on the wealthy, universal healthcare, a higher minimum wage, and tougher antitrust enforcement, alongside protecting Social Security and Medicare, regularly poll well across the political spectrum.

That difference in priorities is stark. Of course, many analysts point with good reason to the excesses of identity politics, social justice activists’ fringe policy prescriptions, and weak governance in blue cities, all of which tipped the scales against Democrats in 2024. At the same time, working-class voters’ growing aversion to contemporary progressivism must be seen in broader context. Although right-wing cultural beliefs could routinely outweigh left-leaning economic preferences, much as progressives fret, plenty of evidence suggests that the American electorate has grown more liberal and cosmopolitan since the end of the 20^th century. Another set of factors must also be driving America’s political realignment.

So, what else might explain why so many working- and lower-middle-class voters have joined the “America First” fold? A big part of the Trump phenomenon concerns the profound divergence in regional economic activity between coastal metros and most of the former industrial heartland and Farm Belt. As several reports noted in the last decade, “superstar cities” and their surrounding suburbs have pulled away from the rest of the country, erasing the decline in regional inequality that was achieved between the New Deal era and 1980. That trend certainly compounded perceptions that globalization was a raw deal for towns and cities that couldn’t readily adapt.

Yet a less-understood aspect of this story has to do with the way Democrats discuss—or, more accurately, evade—fundamental questions about the future of economic development, particularly for rural and micropolitan regions. This gradual departure from what political scientists call pre-distribution, or measures to actively foster economic well-being and intergenerational improvements in key outcomes, has been detrimental to how left behind Americans interpret Democratic rhetoric and campaign promises.

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Consider what today’s Democrats prioritize when distinguishing their economic record and philosophy from the right. They habitually insist they will “defend” Obamacare, SNAP, and other parts of the safety net from dogmatic, small-government Republicans. Under the circumstances, this appears to be the politically responsible and humane thing to do; cutting funds for such programs and making them harder to access won’t do anything but punish left behind Americans.

Democrats, however, are less open about what they would do to restore economic opportunity in distressed regions and strengthen Americans’ pride in where they live. They seem equally reluctant to acknowledge that the enrollment surge in means-tested programs such as SNAP since the Great Recession is not necessarily an unqualified testament to government’s ability to help the less fortunate. Indeed, rather than a tribute to Democrats’ good intentions and the effectiveness of the safety net, this trend could be seen as an indictment of America’s labor market policy and the deprivation that offshoring, anemic growth, lousy jobs, and chronic underemployment have created. Moreover, the explosion in food bank usage, crowd-funding to pay for medical procedures, and other forms of charity and nongovernment aid underscore the frequent inadequacy of these programs.

Stalwart Democrats have long intimated they would make social programs more generous if only they weren’t obstructed by miserly conservatives and their various dog-whistles on culture, race, and gender. The subtext is that they are perpetually in a defensive crouch, and that expectations for policy improvements must be kept realistic. Yet the tendency of Democrats to manage, not eradicate, poverty through patchwork transfers reflects an overlooked permutation of American progressivism.

For much of the 20^th century, liberal Democrats were primarily focused on promoting inclusive development while deterring economic predation and unfair business practices. Urban slums, labor repression, and the South’s acute underdevelopment were stains on the nation’s self-image as a beacon of economic liberty and industrial prosperity; the main answer to these challenges lay in using intelligent regulation and government programs to ensure more and more working-age Americans could earn a respectable living and actually build a nest egg for their families. In large part, positive government meant structuring markets to maximize their social utility while establishing rules, norms, and enforceable legal precedents that, over time, reduced exploitation and financial injury.

Franklin Roosevelt’s proposal for a Second Bill of Rights in 1944 glimpsed a future in which government would strengthen protections from hardship while further democratizing the realization of personal initiative, most centrally among the working-class. For America to fulfill its vast potential, economic security, social cohesion, and genuine equality of opportunity had to be symbiotic. Accordingly, leading Democrats of the early postwar era not only supported the GI Bill and widespread housing construction, they sought to emulate their counterparts in Western Europe and build a comprehensive system of social insurance that would provide decent, universal healthcare and protect workers from destitution in the face of injury or tragedy. Progressive taxation, which remained elevated through the 1970s, would help in this regard. But the vision of a strong welfare state was tied to the expectation that wages, public health, education levels, and other key metrics would be standardized over time, thereby eliminating once-major gaps between regions and demographics. In short, Democrats had an abiding belief in the importance, and feasibility, of continued enablement through decent jobs, schools, housing, and affordable family recreation.

That strength and clarity of purpose began to falter sometime after the 1990s. The tech boom and “knowledge economy” failed to materialize in broad swathes of the country, and Democrats became more hesitant to speak concretely about how they would address the void created by offshored jobs and hollowed out downtowns. This reluctance corresponded to, and in all likelihood exacerbated, the party’s mounting defeats in the Rust Belt and other former Democratic strongholds.

The result was a vicious cycle in which Democrats, who still saw themselves as champions of the common man and woman, were increasingly seen as out of touch. To be sure, the party’s growing deference to Wall Street and Big Tech greatly diminished its fealty to Rooseveltian liberalism. Yet the party’s gradual withdrawal from working-class districts and manufacturing regions also meant that white papers and think tanks substituted for having an intimate knowledge of what struggling Americans wanted most. The intensifying reliance on heavily-curated expertise, combined with the party elite’s highly-credentialed cultural milieu, put Democrats in a box. They had become at once too business-friendly and divorced from the big developmentalist ideas that had guided the successful public-private partnerships of the past. Their recurrent emphasis on the social safety net, meanwhile, bespoke a guilty conscience more than a determination to prevent bad outcomes. Mainstream economics, even of the most liberal variety, dictated that the jobs which had provided the foundation for postwar prosperity were obsolete, leaving many well-meaning Democrats at a loss over how to talk about a crisis of development in the world’s most advanced economy.

Of course, media and partisan patter about “red states” and “blue states” became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Working-class areas that turned from “purple” to “deep red” purportedly opposed new government interventions in economic affairs, feeding the impression that the descendants of the old New Deal coalition didn’t want what Democrats had to offer. But that analysis obfuscated the fact that Democrats on the whole weren’t offering bold job programs or ways to reactivate dormant production hubs.

On the contrary, Democrats from Al Gore to Barack Obama and Gavin Newsom were tarred as supporting top-down climate prescriptions. Fairly or not, many believed that Democratic priorities would raise energy costs (and thus the overall cost-of-living) while eliminating what remained of high-wage and often-unionized employment in heavy industry and resource extraction. Climate policy, rather than a means to creating a more stable economic future, was seen as adding insult to the jobs losses attributed to flawed trade agreements and overly-prohibitive environmental regulations. While Republicans may have not offered much of anything in terms of public policy, they took advantage of Democratic blind spots by routinely promising to green-light new sources of growth in traditional energy sectors.

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The policy space has undoubtedly changed since Trump’s 2016 election. In particular, progressives are much more attuned to the importance of regional industrial policy, antitrust enforcement, infrastructure investment, and vocational training—that these ideas are essential to building a fairer, more productive economy. Some progressives are finally starting to recognize, too, that the only way to grow durable political support for climate policy is to be less dogmatic and focus more on economic patriotism. As with the immense and sometimes-unfathomable challenges posed by AI, working Americans want ample proof they are going to be supported by, not bear the brunt of, new technological transitions, and that public policy is actually going to improve their lives.

If Trump severely mishandles the economy, Democrats may have an opportunity to turn their newfound appreciation of disinvestment and regional inequality into a compelling political narrative. Still, they have a long way to go before they reverse the GOP’s Trump-fueled gains in lower-income counties. Although “Bidenism” made some important steps toward rediscovering the Democratic Party’s older ethos about development and fair competition, its unavoidable political failure underscores that voters’ perceptions can’t be changed overnight.

It should now be clear that breaking that political bottleneck first requires a bigger reckoning in progressive circles. Once unfairly caricatured as harboring “limousine liberals,” Democrats are now struggling to disprove evidence of their elitism toward the less-educated and disaffected. (Their new $20 million initiative, “Speaking with American Men,” is just the latest example of how desperate and disingenuous their communications strategy has become.) The extent of the problem, however, runs deeper than the party’s close association with the discourse and worldview of cultural radicals. Just as they have grown estranged from the industrial heartlands, Democrats have also taken working-class constituents in their own backyards for granted.

While some progressives might think that a rhetorical shift that uses “relatable” language and highlights the ills of corporate greed is sufficient to change working-class attitudes, the truth is that Democrats are seen as elitist in large part because of their predominant approach to political economy in the last twenty-five years.

The roots of lasting change will therefore depend on more than a politically-expedient “populist” makeover vis-à-vis Trump. Above all, Democrats must uniformly move beyond treating the symptoms of industrial decline and reimagine the possibilities for those who have been deprived of a dignified livelihood through no fault of their own. Only then will Democrats recall what it meant to build a nation that lifts up those without privilege.