From “Working-Class Voters Are Winnable for the Left. Here’s How.” by Ned Rust at Jacobin:

In a new report from the Equality Action Center, Joan C. Williams and Jared Abbott lay out a sensible, pragmatic approach to what has always seemed a Sisyphean task: explaining to progressives how they can turn more people on to their politics than they turn off. In so doing, Williams and Abbott offer a means to block one of the misanthropic right’s signature moves: playing populist and turning the working class against a college-educated left that wants to address our system’s fundamental injustices.

The report is essentially a “For Dummies” coalition guide for progressive smarties (especially social justice advocates, political candidates, and funders) that shows how to recognize and redirect the antisocial, prejudicial habits of their class and channel them toward the common goal of taking populism back from the Right.

Much of the guide’s wisdom comes down to the broad working class’s perception that college-educated voters are too focused on problems that don’t affect workers’ lives. Citizens scrabbling just to get by are turned off when they see elites focusing on issues that may be real and significant but that they perceive are at a distance from the pressures they face to put food on the table, collect a paycheck, and pay the rent.

Wage-earners certainly are not mostly anti-LGBT, anti-international, anti-immigration, anti-art, anti–gun control, anti-abortion, anti-democracy, or anti-environment. But they do prioritize issues directly connected to their economic and social precarity. This is not hard to understand, and progressive and the Left — if they hope to win the trust of working-class voters — need to remember it.

This is exemplified by the biggest priority gap in the survey: the 40-point delta (90 percent versus 50 percent) between liberal college-educated voters and no-four-year-degree working-class voters on “defending democracy.” The issue was the second-highest priority for the college set, but just the nineteenth (of the twenty-five priorities Williams and Abbott tested) for the working class. Food, jobs, health, wages, and safety outpoll any four-syllable word used by a group that’s uphill from you.

More here.