Tom Vilsak on “Why Democrats Don’t Get Rural America” at Politico: “I think the challenge that we have in rural America is that we talk a lot about programs and not about vision. And I will, if you don’t mind, take you all the way back to my first race for governor in 1998. I ran and I was way behind and nobody thought I had a chance of winning. And I went out and I talked about making Iowa the food capital of the world. And I had a media guy who at the time was not well known [David Axelrod]. He and my pollster were not very happy with me for talking about the food capital. They basically said, nobody understands what it is and you should be talking specifically about class size reductions, property tax relief and expanding access to health care. I continued to talk about it. I won that race by 6.5 to 7 percent. I’m pretty sure that 7 percent were the people I was talking to who knew the vision. They didn’t quite understand what it was, but when you have a vision, it is what a leader does. A leader takes you from here to there, tells you where you’re going to go and allows you to fill in the detail….But if you want to be president of the United States, if you want to represent this country and you want to do what everybody says they wanna do which is to bring the country together and end this us-and-them thing, you’ve got to be able to reach out and reach across and be credible. But you can’t be credible if what you’re selling is a program. You’ve gotta be selling a vision and that vision has to not be what you think but based on what you know about these people, you know matters to them. And what matters to them is the ability to say to their kids: you don’t have to leave. You can come back. And you can have a good life here.”

“For years, Democrats have wrestled with declining support from non-college-educated voters, a demographic that once formed the party’s backbone,” Brianna Westbrook writes in “Why Democrats lost in 2024: Lessons from Phoenix and the working class” at The Arizona Mirror. “This trend was starkly evident in the 2024 presidential race, where turnout among working-class Democrats hit historic lows….While the party centered its campaign on social issues and climate initiatives, it failed to adequately address the economic struggles that dominate the lives of millions. The result was widespread alienation among working families, many of whom opted to sit out the election….

To win back this critical demographic, Democrats must:

1. Focus on universal economic policies: Policies like Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage (adjusted for inflation) and robust labor protections remain immensely popular across the political spectrum. Democrats must make these initiatives central to their platform.
2. Challenge corporate power: A bold stance against corporate monopolies, as championed by Warren, can galvanize voters frustrated by rising costs and stagnant wages. Breaking up monopolies and regulating Wall Street should be presented not as niche issues but as critical to the everyday lives of working families.
3. Invest in grassroots campaigning: Hernandez’s victory underscores the importance of building trust through local organizing. Rather than relying on consultants and glossy ads, Democrats should empower community leaders to engage directly with voters.
4. Reframe the narrative: The language of class struggle, long championed by Sanders, resonates with voters who feel left behind. Democrats must articulate a clear vision of economic justice, uniting voters around shared struggles rather than dividing them with identity-focused messaging alone.”

At Brookings, John J. Dilulio writes in “The 4 working-class votes,” “If Democrats are determined to fret and sweat about where they stand with working-class voters, the exit poll data would justify them worrying—not about some pro-Trump or pro-GOP multiracial working-class coalition, but about Latino voters….Trump was a landslide winner with working-class white evangelicals, but his single biggest gain in 2024 over 2020 was among white evangelical women with college degrees….Democrats who emphasize pro-worker/pro-family policies and messages do better with voters than otherwise comparable Democrats who don’t.”….exit polls show that working-class voters, defined as voters without a college degree, split 56% for Trump to 42% for Harris. The same polls tell us that white working-class voters favored Trump over Harris by 66% to 32%, and that Trump won a larger share of working-class Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020…..The white working-class electorate consists of two distinct voting blocs: white evangelicals without college degrees and all other whites without college degrees. The latter bloc, which encompasses working-class white catholics and other non-evangelical whites without college degrees, is slightly larger than the former bloc….As I have documented elsewhere, in 2016 and 2020, Trump won a majority of white evangelical working-class voters, but he lost a majority of white non-evangelical working-class voters. He lost them again in 2024….Among Latinos, the only subgroup that did not bolt from the Democratic fold was college-educated Latino women, who favored Harris 63% to 33%, a 30-point margin identical to the one they gave Biden in 2020….But Trump’s victory in 2024, his more than 76 million votes and his swing-states sweep, is owed the most to white evangelicals. White evangelicals voted for Trump more than four to one, constituting more than a third of his 49.9% share of the popular vote….his single biggest gain in 2024 over 2020 was among white evangelical women with college degrees…. Having suffered a double-digit drop in college-educated white evangelical women’s vote between 2016 and 2020, in 2024 he turned a 6-point spread in Trump’s favor against Biden (53% to 47%) into a 50-point spread in his favor against Harris (74% to 24%)….So, in the 2024 election, a majority of white evangelicals without college degrees once again favored Trump, but majorities of blue-collar Black, Latino, and non-evangelical whites did not.”

Dilulio adds, “Still, I believe that there are at least three things one can credibly say about the 2024 presidential election results at this stage. First, as we have already established, contrary to so much of the commentary, Trump won a vast majority of white evangelical voters without college degrees, but Harris won majorities among blue-collar Blacks, Latinos, and non-evangelical whites; second, Harris did better with the electorate as a whole than has hitherto generally been acknowledged; and, third, it would seem that, other things equal, Democrats who emphasize pro-worker/pro-family policies and messages do better with voters than otherwise comparable Democrats who don’t….Despite being the first Black woman to run for president as the nominee of a major party; despite running in place of a highly unpopular first-term sitting president whose record she could neither easily run on nor run from; and despite running what many observers judged to be a tactically mistake-ridden campaign yoked to easy-to-attack anti-majority opinion positions on hot-button issues such as transgender women being allowed to compete on women’s teams in sports; Harris won more than 74.3 million votes, constituting 48.3% of the national popular vote to Trump’s 49.9%; and lost Pennsylvania by 1.7%, Wisconsin by 0.8%, and Michigan by 1.4%….So, a less than 0.8% shift her way in the national popular vote would have tied Trump’s tally, and a less than 1% shift her way in the three “blue wall” states would have added 44 electoral votes to the 226 she received and made Harris the next president…. In addition to winning working-class majorities among non-evangelical whites, Blacks, and Latinos, Harris beat Trump among union workers 57% to 41%. As I have explained elsewhere, most Americans now see the decline in private-sector unionization (from about a third of all workers in the mid-20th century to 17% in the mid-1980s to just 6% now) as bad for America; 70% of working-class Americans approve of unions; and an estimated 60 million nonunionized workers would like to have the opportunity to join a union.”