From “Democrats Lost Working-Class Voters’ Trust” at Jacobin.

“As the 2026 midterm elections approach, the question of why Democrats have increasingly struggled with working-class voters — and why Donald Trump’s Republican Party has been able to make inroads with them — is becoming more urgent. This question has long occupied the Center for Working-Class Politics, who published the results of an exhaustive survey this fall on the attitudes of working-class voters in the Rust Belt.

Center for Working-Class Politics director Jared Abbott recently talked about the report’s findings with sociologist Rachel Rybaczuk on her podcast Shifting Terrain. The two discussed how and why the Democratic Party has lost many working-class voters.

That loss of working-class support has not been confined to the Rust Belt, however, or to white voters, as was once imagined; more and more Latino voters have also been moving to the Right. To understand this trend, Rybaczuk also interviewed René Rojas, an assistant professor of human development at Binghamton University and a Catalyst editorial board member, who has recently analyzed Latinos’ role in the 2024 election. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

RACHEL RYBACZUK

You’ve been thinking about working-class voters for a while, and the Center for Working-Class Politics recently released a report based on a survey of 3,000 voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. What did you learn from this research?

JARED ABBOTT

The first thing we learned is that Democrats have a toxic brand in the Rust Belt, and we wanted to see just how important that might be in elections. So we tried to get the strongest candidates that we could find in terms of reaching working-class voters in the Rust Belt.

We put together these profiles of candidates that were economic populists: they’re talking about the harms that are [caused by] elites and the need to raise up working-class folks and give them a shot at a better future and so on. We made different candidates Democrats, and we made some independents.

They were exactly the same except for the partisanship of the candidate, and that one fact alone dramatically penalized candidates in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. There’s something about just being a Democrat, which is not necessarily putting Democrats completely out of contention,but which is dramatically penalizing them.

We wanted to know why and what we could do about it. And we found that when you ask people, “What do you think about when you think of the Democratic Party?”, a lot of people do talk about the party being out of touch culturally and being too woke and too extreme and that sort of thing.

But more than that, people focused on the [idea that] Democrats are just not trustworthy. They’re not a party that people believe would actually deliver on the things that they say they’re gonna deliver on, and they’re not a party that working-class people think actually represents their interests.

Part of our goal then was to figure out what are the types of policies that Democrats and independents for that matter could run on, which might be most compelling to working-class voters. So the last part of our survey was to do a test of twenty-five different economic proposals, and we forced people to choose which of these is most important to you, which do you think should be prioritized the most.

We found that regardless of partisanship, regardless of class, regardless of geography, and so on, there was a set of robust progressive economic proposals — everything from cappingprescription drug prices to trying to ban members of Congress from engaging in stock trading, and even more expansive programs stopping corporations from involuntary layoffs of workers without just compensation — that polled very well, basically across the board.

The punchline there is that while Democrats have this major reputational problem, one of the ways in which they’re gonna be able to regain some of that trust is offering a set of clear, economic, bread-and-butter proposals, which show working-class people that Democrats really care about them, and that they’re focused like a laser on making a better future for working-class voters.

RACHEL RYBACZUK

Have you thought about the results of this research and reconciling those things over time — looking historically, in addition to how we got to where we are right now?

JARED ABBOTT

Historically, starting back in the 1930s under the administration of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, the Democratic Party has been the party associated with and in fact delivering all kinds of benefits, from Social Security to basic labor protections and union rights.

That started to change with the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, which had the effect of gutting many communities, particularly in southern towns that had textile manufacturing and other sorts of manufacturing that could be sent to Mexico.

Even before that, in the 1980s, as European and Japanese competition for manufacturing got stronger and stronger and communities throughout the Rust Belt were losing jobs, the Democrats didn’t do very much to try to stop it. They didn’t help unions very much.

All this came together to create a toxic brew in which, many working-class people just didn’t trust the Democrats anymore, as they moved away from a focus on working-class issues and toward a greater focus on highly educated voters, starting with the Clinton administration.

What about the Republicans? They haven’t delivered for working-class people. And they keep promising; at least Donald Trump does. But whatever he says, “we brought jobs back to this John Deere factory” and so on — you look into the details, and you find that that’s not true at all.”

More here.