‘Trump’s riding a working-class revolt’: Where should the Democrats go next?

Democrats need to put working-class voters and their interests first and reject “divisive identity politics” if they are to return to power again, according to a leading US think tank.

A recent review of the 2024 presidential election by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) found that the Democrats’ coalition is shrinking as non-college-educated voters defect and that the party needs a “dramatic course correction” to head off a political realignment.

“It is the kitchen table struggles of working-class families that now need to become the fixation for Democrats,” the report said.

LabourList sat down with Will Marshall, president and founder of PPI, a US-based think tank once known as Bill Clinton’s “idea mill”. He said the continued erosion of the Democrats’ core voters, particularly among Black and Latino voters, was “disconcerting”.

He said: “What we have is a kind of general picture of a class-based politics, in which the Democrats increasingly represent upscale, affluent, college-educated voters, and the Republicans increasingly represent a kind of multi-ethnic working class. It looks like Trump is riding a working-class revolt against the political establishment.”

‘We need to find a centre ground on cultural issues’

While Marshall said Democrats remained disoriented by the scale of their defeat to Donald Trump, he said there is consensus around some points as to why they lost in November.

“Cultural politics based on gender, immigration and crime were really damaging. They were major Democratic vulnerabilities for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.

“We need to find a centre ground on many of these fraught cultural issues.”

He said that those on the left have often tried to “foreclose conversations” people want to have on particular cultural issues, such as transgender rights.

READ MORE: ‘Trump’s inauguration heralds profound change for America and the world’

While Marshall said polling suggests most working class Americans do not want to discriminate against LGBT people, they oppose children being able to make decisions around transitioning themselves and also want to have conversations about whether trans people can play on single-sex sports teams.

“I do think there is a problem with speech policing coming from the left and it hurt Democrats. I think there’s common ground that we can find on these issues. It takes time for the country to move along and you’ve got to have conversations.”

The trap of deliverism

Marshall also notes that the election in America proved that delivery is not enough to win, with the Democrats having presided over a strong recovery from the pandemic but falling short in November’s election.

“Democrats are feeling hard done by. They presided over a really robust economy, and Biden did the kind of things that one expects the centre-left to do – come in and make big public investments. But he made so many big public investments that I think they lost the narrative in it.

“While they were spending, Americans were feeling the pain of the rising cost of living. The administration’s narrative never landed with working-class voters. It wasn’t alleviating their immediate pain, day in and day out.

“It was a policy issue. Biden came in with no expectation he was going to launch a fairly stupendous public investment agenda. That’s not what he ran on but when he got into office, there seemed to be this opportunity to get big things done and they fell into the trap of deliverism – if we pass a lot of big bills and we show that government could deliver, then some of the anti-government animus in American politics would abate and that working class voters would be impressed that the system was working.

“The problem was it didn’t seem to be working for them. They were facing a cost-of-living crisis day in and day out, and the national benefits of all these big investments hadn’t yet appeared.”

READ MORE: ‘Deepening ties with EU best way for UK to deal with Trump tariff fears’

‘Don’t let inflation get out of control’

The toxic ingredient for any government seeking re-election, Marshall said, was and is inflation.

“Inflation is hell on incumbents everywhere, and I’ve seen it before in the United States. Leaders who preside over a big bout of inflation usually do badly.

“Kamala Harris, to her credit, ran a fairly decent campaign in the short amount of time allotted to her, but she could never overcome the drag of the economic pain voters were feeling and the fact that they blame President Biden for that.

“If there is one big economic lesson from the US election, it’s ‘don’t let inflation get out of control’. Inflation undermines the working class like nothing else. It’s the problem that blots out all other problems.”

Spending on the right priorities for working people

PPI’s report found that, while working-class voters in the US want to see governments who are fiscally responsible, they also want to see spending on infrastructure and also investment in alternatives to college education.

Marshall said it is possible to square that circle by focusing on who is being prioritised by government spending.

“President Biden laid great stress on college student loan forgiveness – $400 million he pledged to that end. That is a wonderful thing if you’re a college student, but working-class voters, as we define them – they’re people without college degrees, and there are many kids who don’t particularly want to go to college.

“We should have been investing in alternatives to college. Working families and people without college degrees are in danger of downward mobility and we need to invest in career pathways – alternatives that are as robust and as effective as our post-secondary systems, colleges and universities.

“We didn’t do that – we instead emphasised student loan forgiveness, which was a comfort to those who are already going to get degrees and get bigger lifetime earnings.”

‘Engage in the debate and you win respect’

As politics in the United States, and globally, continues to become increasingly polarised, so too has the media landscape. With left and right wing Americans getting their news from very different sources, how can Democrats break increasingly hardened perceptions of the party among voters it has lost?

“Right-wing media has grown as a kind of insurgency against legacy media, which has usually tilted somewhat to the left. They have developed their own media that defines reality differently and Democrats are going to have to go into these settings and make arguments in these settings.

“If you can go in there and hold your own, people respect that even if they don’t agree with you.”

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Marshall pointed to Pete Buttigieg as a good example of this, who debated 25 undecided voters in a “town hall” on YouTube and makes regular appearances on Fox News.

“I love the way he does it. Engage in the debate and you win begrudging respect at first, and over time, you might find that your arguments begin to get some traction.”

He also argued that, although it may not have made much of a difference overall, Harris should have gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

“It would have been good to go out there and I think she would have been respected for that and heard more than she was by those voters.”

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