In “What the Working Class Really Believes,” Harold Meyerson reports at The American Prospect that “A new study tracks the evolution of working-class beliefs, and those of more upper classes, over the past 65 years.” Further, “The reasons for the erosion of Democratic Party support within the American working class is a topic on which seemingly everyone has an opinion. It has renewed the debate between the left and the center of the party in the wake of the 2024 election defeat. It’s been an occasion for Republican schadenfreude, which certainly beats their turning a mirror on themselves. It’s been the subject of polling, of polling analysis, of exegesis of polling analysis. But nobody had sought to clarify these issues by assembling a numerically informed view of the evolution of public opinion during the past 65 years until the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), along with Jacobin, undertook a study that they’re releasing today…What CWCP did was to look at the answers to 128 questions about social and economic issues posed by three rigorous academic surveys—the American National Election Study, the General Social Survey, and the Cooperative Election Study—from 1960 through 2022. They then tabulated the answers from working-class Americans and from middle- and upper-class Americans (lumping these two classes together), compared working-class answers to the other combined classes’ answers, and tracked those answers, and those comparisons, over time…Its most valuable finding, I think, concerns the attitudinal changes not of the working class, but of the middle/upper class over the past 65 years. That’s the class (I’ll speak of it as a single class, since that’s how the study presents it) that’s moved the furthest left on social and economic questions. On economic issues, both then and now, the working class still holds more progressive positions than the middle/upper, but that middle/upper has closed much of that gap since 1960. On social issues, both classes hold more progressive positions than they did in 1960, but the middle/upper has widened its lead over the working class during the ensuing six decades. As the study reports, “working-class Americans have become moderately more conservative relative to middle- and upper-class Americans since the Obama administration, this is largely due to the latter group’s increasing progressivism rather than a rising tide of reaction among workers.”

Meyerson adds, “The report also compares the 2020 to 2022 responses of the two classes to a host of social-issue questions. Even on questions where the working class embraces egalitarian positions, their response still lags that of the middle/upper class. Asked, for instance, if gays and lesbians should be protected from job discrimination, 86 percent of working-class Americans said they should be, while 92.6 percent of middle/upper-class Americans answered affirmatively. Of the 37 questions on social issues to which CWCP compared the answers, the one with the greatest gap between classes asked respondents if they favored trans people in the military: 35.9 percent of working-class Americans said they did, compared to 57.1 percent of their middle/upper class compatriots—a gap of 21.2 percent…On immigration issues polled between 2020 and 2022, there were no questions on which middle/upper class Americans weren’t more progressive than their working-class counterparts, even when the working class heavily embraced progressive positions. For instance, 85.6 percent of working-class respondents opposed “returning undocumented minors”—I presume this was posed, or interpreted as, undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children—even as middle/upper class Americans opposed that by 92.4 percent. A much larger gap came in answer to the question as to whether immigration is good for the economy, with which 51.5 percent of working-class Americans agreed, far fewer than the 76.3 percent of middle/upper class Americans…On most economic issues, the working class was consistently more progressive than the middle/upper class, but not on all economic issues. In general, working-class Americans favor specific policies they see helping American workers and their families more than their middle/upper counterparts, but their middle/upper counterparts prove to be more supportive of spending and taxes generally, both historically and in the aggregation of polling from 2020 to 2022. While the working class favored limiting imports to protect jobs at a 62.1 percent rate during that latter polling period, for instance, only 47.6 percent of the middle/upper class supported that policy. Conversely, while 43.8 percent of the working class favored financing jobs programs with tax increases (I’m the one who added the italics), 52.7 percent of the middle/upper class favored that. Similarly, 72.4 percent of the working class wanted to expand Medicare, while only 63 percent of the middle/upper class wanted to expand it; but on the other hand, just 51.8 percent of the working class wanted the government to increase spending for health care costs, while a greater number of middle/upper Americans—57.4 percent—wanted the government to do that.” Read more here.

Some salient observations from Imran Khalid, writing in his article “The real message behind Musk’s America Party” at The Hill: ‘The U.S. political system, with its winner-take-all incentives and rigid party structures, has proven uniquely impervious to disruption. But today’s landscape feels different — not because the rules have changed, but because the public mood has…Start with trust — once a civic virtue, now a casualty. A Pew Research survey earlier this year found that only 22 percent of Americans trust the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” — down from over 70 percent in the 1960s. Meanwhile, Gallup reportsthat confidence in Congress sits at around 10 percent. This isn’t apathy. It’s disillusionment — a broad-based sense that the current political structure no longer listens, let alone delivers…Of course, the barriers to entry remain formidable. Ballot access laws, campaign finance hurdles and entrenched party loyalties conspire to keep challengers out. But technology, once the ally of incumbents, now levels the field. A candidate with a smartphone, a war chest, and a loyal digital following can bypass gatekeepers entirely. Donald Trump did it in 2016. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also built a movement with little more than a microphone and a mailing list…And the center, as they say, cannot hold. Political polarization has pushed the parties to their ideological poles, leaving a vast no-man’s-land where independents, moderates and suburban voters wander unaffiliated. Recent data shows that 43 percent of Americans identify as independents. The appetite for a new voice is real. What remains elusive is whether it can be organized into a coherent political force… That’s where most third-party ventures falter. They speak fluent grievance but go silent on governance. They thrive on outrage, but wither when the conversation turns to solutions. That’s not a bug; it’s the structure. Populism, left or right, is easiest to sell when your only goal is to sneer at the system. Governing, however, requires trade-offs — something Musk has famously disdained, whether building tunnels or tweeting policy.”

Thomas Beaumont and Jill Colvin explain why “The 2026 Senate map is tough for Democrats, but Republicans have their own headaches” at apnews.org. An excerpt: “Republicans are encountering early headaches in Senate races viewed as pivotal to maintaining the party’s majority in next year’s midterm elections, with recruitment failures, open primaries, infighting and a president who has been sitting on the sidelines…Democrats still face an uphill battle. They need to net four seats to retake the majority, and most of the 2026 contests are in states that Republican President Donald Trump easily won last November…But Democrats see reasons for hope in Republicans’ challenges. They include a nasty primary in Texas that could jeopardize a seat Republicans have held for decades. In North Carolina and Georgia, the GOP still lacks a clear field of candidates. Trump’s influence dials up the uncertainty as he decides whether to flex his influential endorsement to stave off intraparty fights.” In Texas, “National Republicans and GOP Senate strategists are ringing alarm bells amid concerns that state Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is facing a bevy of personal and ethical questions, could prevail over Sen. John Cornyn for the nomination…They fear Paxton would be a disastrous general election candidate, forcing Republicans to invest tens of millions of dollars they believe would be better spent in other states.”