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The Democrats’ working-class problem is not going away. In fact, it’s only getting worse — expanding beyond Donald Trump’s base of working-class whites to now include working-class Latinos and even a significant share of Black men.
Debates rage about how the Left can win back these workers. Influential pollster and Democratic consultant David Shor and the prominent liberal think tank Third Way have argued that the working class is simply more culturally and economically conservative than other voters. With this in mind, liberal journalists like Jonathan Chait have argued that progressive economic populism offers no real electoral benefit for Democrats.
Yet others counter that while the working class may hold more conservative views on a variety of sociocultural issues, they do not hold more conservative economic views. These advocates argue that economic populism is key to winning back working-class support.
To adjudicate these claims, a clear accounting of working-class attitudes is needed — not only for the present but over time. How have working-class attitudes changed? And critically, how do they compare to the attitudes of wealthier Americans?
To answer these questions, we analyzed 128 public-opinion questions from three of the most trusted and comprehensive surveys in US political science: the American National Election Studies (ANES), the General Social Survey (GSS), and the Cooperative Election Study (CES). Our data spans from 1960 to 2022, allowing us to track long-term shifts in working-class attitudes across six issue domains: immigration, civil rights, social norms, environmental policy, and two categories of economic policy — predistribution (like wages and job protections) and redistribution (like taxes and social programs).
To supplement this historical analysis, we dug into the 2020 ANES to isolate working-class Trump voters and measure how many hold progressive views on economics and moderate views on culture. The result: a small but decisive bloc that could swing close elections.
This is one of the most comprehensive empirical portraits of working-class public opinion available — and challenges conventional wisdom in both liberal and left circles.
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