In “‘The new soccer mom’: Both parties scramble for working class voters ahead of ’28,” Megan Messerly writes at Politico: ” President Donald Trump, two years ago, won over Latino and working class voters frustrated with Democrats’ economic stewardship with promises of a brighter future…Now, many of those voters are frustrated with him, too — and threatening to stay home in 2028…Nowhere is that more apparent than Nevada, the battleground state where Latino and working class voters are largely the same people — the hospitality workers, dishwashers and bellmen who keep Las Vegas humming and who were among the most coveted demographics of the 2024 election…They’re the new soccer mom. We are literally the new persuadable voter,” said Democratic strategist and former union organizer Chuck Rocha, who served as an adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 and 2016 presidential campaigns and ran the campaign’s efforts to turn out Latinos. “But I’m not sure if either party yet treats us that way.”…Strategists from both parties are facing an uncomfortable reality: These voters, who have in recent cycles swung between Democrats and Republicans, may not come back at all. The 2024 shifts to Trump, they say, were less about enthusiasm for Republicans than dissatisfaction with Democrats. Turnout among young Latino voters fell off sharply between 2020 and 2024, according to Tufts’ Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement; even as those Latinos who did show up swung to Trump…“It’s not a realignment,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist who specializes in Latino voter outreach. “It’s a dealignment — moving away from both parties.” More here.

Steff Chavez writes in “Democrats turn to working-class candidates to win back voters” at Financial Times, “Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles…
Democrats across the US know they’re in trouble. The party is still picking itself up off the floor after its brutal 2024 election loss and is struggling with relatively low national approval ratings. Even though Democrats got a boost from winning the New Jersey and Virginia governorships — and found a new energy in Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City — they still need to rebuild support and convince some Donald Trump supporters to vote for them instead in November’s midterms. The party is hoping to take control of both chambers of Congress — and deliver a strong rebuke to Trump. Democrats “haven’t talked about working-class people. They became known as the party of the elites. That’s a problem”, Bob Brooks, a former firefighter who is running in the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania’s seventh congressional district, told the FT’s Lauren Fedor…“That’s why I have watched my members in the firehouse drift to either independents or even to Republicans.” Congressional lawmakers are much wealthier than the broader US population — just 2 per cent have working-class backgrounds, according to a University of Chicago analysis.” More here.

From “Why the Working Class Has Given Up on the Liberal Establishment” by Les Leopold at Common Dreams: “We used demographic and mass layoff data in conjunction with election results and found a statistically solid causal relationship: As the county mass layoff rate went up, the Democratic vote went down between 1996 and 2020. Year by year, voters in areas hard hit by mass layoffs were abandoning the Democratic Party…Our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin found that 70 percent of the respondents have negative opinions of the Democrats…Are voters in red areas ready for working-class independents? Our YouGov survey shows they are. Looking only at rural county data in those four states (the reddest areas), there is strong support for a new party, independent of the two parties, that would run on a progressive populist working-class platform: Voter Support for the New Independent Workers’ Political Association

• Rural Republicans: 50%
• Rural Independents: 50%
• Rural Democrats“ 77%”

Leopold continues, “If the Democrats want to reconnect with working people, they need to put job security front and center. They need to stop relying on public-private partnerships, which use public funds to encourage corporate job creation that too often fails to materialize. And the Dems need to purge vacuous language, like the phrase “the opportunity society,” which promotes corporate-first thinking that adds to, rather than reduces, job precarity. In fact, they should replace their corporate-first thinking, with people-first thinking…To do so the Democrats should call for federal job guarantees. They would do well to read Jared Abbot’s review of a compendium of poll data that shows massive support for the government serving as the employer of last resort. People don’t want handouts; they want a chance to earn a fair living. (Even the new “Working Families Guarantee” agenda, put forward by the Working Families Party, guarantees just about everything but stops short of a federal job guarantee.)…But a shift to ensuring people-first job security will not come easily to a party dominated by wealthy donors, millionaire politicians, lobbyists, pollsters, and consultants. Corporate leaders will rail against the prospect of workers having access to federal jobs and thereby forcing the company to bid up wages and benefits to retain and attract employees. Heaven forbid that direct government support go to workers instead of corporations!…Until the party supports job guarantees and runs hundreds of working-class candidates, we can expect more working people to reject the Democratic establishment (and the liberal college administrators) who care so little about working-class job security.” More here.