Two Simple Lessons for Democrats to Win the Working Class

In 1964, Democrats portrayed Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater as the unstable genius of his time, telling voters, “Deep down, you know he’s crazy.” President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign stepped up its attack on Goldwater’s suitability for the job with an infamous Sept. 7 television ad that depicted a young girl counting the petals of a daisy before turning into a mushroom cloud. The commercial concludes with Johnson, who warns: “The stakes are either creating a world in which all of God’s children can live, or going into darkness. We must either love each other or die.”

In 2024, the Democratic Party is repeating Johnson’s playbook, calling Trump and Vance “weird” and portraying them as an existential threat to our country’s future. But while “Daisy” may have played a role in securing Johnson’s landslide victory, the opposite appears to be true in Harris’ case.

A recent poll conducted by the Center for Working Class Politics (CWCP) and YouGov of 1,000 Pennsylvania voters tested the strength of Kamala Harris’ message about Trump as a threat to democracy against several other key campaign themes – the economy, populism, abortion and immigration. — determine which messaging approaches have worked best and worst.

The results were clear: messages about Trump as a threat to democracy were worse than all other messages. It trailed the most popular message tested, which focused on economic populism, by 9 percentage points and had the lowest approval among virtually all demographic groups, including independents and Republicans, men and women, rural and urban voters, union and non-union members, and many others. . .

The message of Trump and democracy has fared especially poorly among Pennsylvania’s most important working-class voters, who make up majority of state voters. Regardless of how the CWCP/YouGov poll measured class—by income, education, or occupation—directly intimidating voters with rhetoric about Trump and democracy was the most ineffective approach.

Moreover, the damage these messages did to Harris’ support, relative to the most successful messages tested, was much greater among working-class respondents than among Pennsylvanians as a whole: Trump as a threat to democracy received 13 and 12 percentage points less support than the top is the implementation of Harris’ message among respondents without higher education and workers, respectively.

This is lesson #1 for Democrats: Attacking Trump as a threat to democracy is a losing strategy.

Whatever the real threat of a second Trump presidency, most of the voters Harris needs to win in key swing states aren’t all that worried. Trump may be a liar and a terrible person, but in the eyes of many voters, so are most politicians. Yes, he says crazy and even dangerous things, they admit, but they don’t take his bragging seriously.

What they take seriously is the feeling that politicians don’t care about them and never deliver on their promises. Whatever empirical validity these assertions may have, they are an understandable reaction to decades of wage stagnationDemocratic Party, which has deviated further and further from its traditional working class base and years of post-Covid inflation.

Instead of urging Americans to vote for Harris because Trump would be much worse, the CWCP/YouGov poll found that a better approach would be to take a strong economic populist position.

Here’s the message we tested to reflect strong economic populism:

The American working class is struggling while billionaires are getting richer. We pay too much for gas, groceries, and even the medications we need. It’s time to stand up to big corporations and the politicians in Washington who serve them. I will fight to cap the cost of prescription drugs, fight price gouging, make sure corporations pay their fair share, and end tax breaks for fraudulent billionaires. It’s time to put working families first.

We wrote it to express the anger and frustration of American workers at being left behind while billionaires and their Washington pals get richer, and to pledge to prioritize working-class families.

This finding is consistent with previous studies conducted by CWCP, which checked the power populist messages of hypothetical Democratic congressional candidates and examined the real situation influence on elections populist rhetoric among nearly 1,000 Democratic congressional candidates in 2022.

In our latest poll, strong economic populist messages were not only more effective than all other sound bites tested in the survey among Republicans, rural voters, blue-collar voters, and non-college-educated respondents, but they were also as or nearly as popular relative to others. messages among every key Democratic Party constituency such as African Americans, women, urban voters, voters under 30, service workers and professionals.

In other words, the study found that populist messages appeal to demographic groups that Democrats have struggled with in recent years, and have little electoral compromise among other important groups in the Democratic coalition.

Unfortunately, however, the Harris campaign recent messages focused far less on economic populism than on Trump as a threat to democracy. Of the 25 Harris campaign television ads posted on Harris’ YouTube page between Sept. 15 and Oct. 15, Trump as a threat to democracy or his incompetence as a leader was the focus of eight, more than any other topic. In contrast, economic populism was the focus of just three ads, and economic elites—not counting Donald Trump himself—were mentioned in just four.

Other topics in Harris’ recent television spots have included the economy, health care, immigration and abortion. The CWCP/YouGov poll suggests that either approach would be preferable to talking about Trump as a threat to democracy, but neither would be as effective as economic populism.

It’s important to note that the poll’s messages about economic populism did not use Harris’ own language, but instead went beyond the populist messages she sometimes uses on the campaign trail. To gauge Harris’ populist-flavored rhetoric, the survey included a message taken directly from her own language, calling out the bad guys on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms for price gouging and tax evasion while recognizing that most businesses do play by the rules.

In contrast, the poll’s strong populist message used more aggressive rhetoric against economic elites, contrasted elite greed directly with the suffering of American workers, and blamed not only economic elites (as in Harris’s own populist messages) but also politicians in Washington for abandoning American politics. workers.

Lesson #2 for Democrats: Working-class voters will listen when you show them that you hear their frustrations and identify more with working people than with the elites on Wall Street or in Washington—the elites that many workers instinctively believe you represent.

Appeals to working-class voters are more effective if they are targeted working class candidatesand Harris obviously has an elite background, but populist appeals have historically given other candidates an edge. In the past, grotesquely wealthy coastal elites from Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump have successfully communicated with working people using the language of economic populism.

It will of course it will take a lot more than just setting up messaging create a lasting Democratic majority that can deliver the gains that American workers have been promised for so long. But in the short term, there are a few simple steps Democrats can take to improve their chances against MAGA nation: Stop imagining that most swing voters can be moved by scary messages about Trump’s authoritarian tendencies, and instead focus on connecting with the working Americans around them feelings. frustrations that the economy is stacked against them and that politicians don’t care about them.