The Democrats' Working-Class Problem Gets Its Close-Up
The distant past and potential future of the Democratic Party gathered around white plastic folding tables in a drab New Jersey conference room last week. There were nine white men, three in hoodies, two in ball caps, all of them working-class Donald Trump voters who once identified with Democrats and confessed to spending much of their time worried about making enough money to get by.
Asked by the focus-group moderator if they saw themselves as middle class, one of them joked, 'Is there such a thing as a middle class anymore? What is that?' They spoke about the difficulty of buying a house, the burden of having kids with student loans, and the ways in which the 'phony' and 'corrupt' Democratic Party had embraced far-left social crusades while overseeing a jump in inflation.
'It was for the people and everything, and now it is just lies,' one man said when asked how the Democratic Party has changed.
Trump, another man said, was the only one inhabiting the political center these days. But some expressed concern about how much they were benefiting from the early days of Trump's second administration, about the potential cost of new tariffs, and about the president's embrace of 'distracting' issues such as renaming the Gulf of Mexico and planning to redevelop Gaza.
'I feel like the administration is going for things that grab headlines, like trans rights, wars, things that people pay attention to, rather than actual inflation and pricing,' one of the men told the group. 'So that is part of the negativity of politics that I don't really enjoy.'
The February 18 focus group, in a state that saw deep Democratic erosion last year and will elect a new governor this fall, was the first stop of a new $4.5 million research project centered on working-class voters in 20 states that could hold the key to Democratic revival. American Bridge 21st Century, an independent group that spent about $100 million in 2024 trying to defeat Trump, has decided to invest now in figuring out what went wrong, how Trump's second term is being received, and how to win back voters who used to be Democratic mainstays but now find themselves in the Republican column.
'We want to understand what are the very specific barriers for these working-class voters when it comes to supporting Democrats,' Molly Murphy, one of the pollsters on the project, told me. 'I think we want to have a better answer on: Do we have a message problem? Do we have a messenger problem? Or do we have a reach problem?'
Mitch Landrieu, a former New Orleans mayor and senior adviser to the Joe Biden White House, said the Democratic Party needs to think beyond the swing voters that were the subject of billions in spending last year and give attention to the people of all races and ethnicities who have firmly shifted away from Democrats to embrace the politics of Trump.
'The first thing you got to do is learn what you can learn, ask what you can ask, and know what you can know,' Landrieu told me last week, before the New Jersey focus group. 'When you see it through a number of different lenses, it should help you figure out how you got it wrong.'
Since losing last fall, Democrats have railed against the price of eggs, denounced 'President Elon Musk,' and promised to defend the 'rule of law.' Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer even led a chant of 'We will win' outside the U.S. Treasury building. But there is still little Democratic agreement about the reasons for Trump's victory or how Democrats can make their way back to power.
The Bridge plan is to launch a series of interviews with party leaders, tracking polls and meetings with voters around the country to try to figure out how best to fix the party after an election that saw Democrats lose the popular vote for the first time since 2004. Former Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez and former Representative Colin Allred of Texas, who lost a bid for Senate last year, have signed up to work with Landrieu on the project.
Several other parts of the Democratic power structure are searching for answers as well. The new chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, has promised his own 'postelection review' by the party. 'Not an autopsy, because we're not dead as a party,' he said late last year. The details have not yet been announced.
Third Way, a moderate Democratic group, ran a recent Democratic strategist retreat outside Washington to begin the conversation about how to create a new economic agenda and how to extricate the party from unpopular positions on issues such as transgender athletes and immigration enforcement. Future Forward, the largest Democratic independent spender in the 2024 campaign, has continued to circulate 'Doppler memos' to Democratic decision makers, offering them real-time updates about how Americans are digesting Trump's actions and the most promising avenues for pushing back.
The Bridge effort emerged from a four-day Palm Beach donor retreat this month, just down the road from Mar-a-Lago. Top Democratic donors gathered for days of closed-door panels with titles such as 'What Went Wrong?,' 'What's Going on With Men?,' 'How to Stop Losing the Culture Wars,' and 'Sending the Right Message: Reviving the Democratic Brand.' A Saturday-night panel at the conference with Landrieu, Allred, and others laid out how much was still unknown. The title: 'It's All About Listening: How Can We Reconnect With the Voters We Have Lost?'
'I just really believe you have to start from scratch. You have to throw out all of your assumptions,' Landrieu told me. 'Whatever happened in the past is the past, and that is the last campaign. Joe Biden isn't president anymore, and they don't have Joe Biden as a foil.'
Even though the answers remain unclear, donors came away from the retreat saying they were eager to keep spending. Bridge has planned another donor conference in San Francisco for early next month. 'At a time when some Democrats are in retreat, I saw a large group of donors at Democracy Matters in Palm Beach spoiling to re-engage in the fight,' John Driscoll, a health-care executive and an American Bridge donor, said in a statement.
The early after-action autopsy of Bridge's own spending in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania last year echoed the early findings of other groups: Advertising for Kamala Harris and against Trump had a clear marginal impact where it was targeted, but it was unable to hold back the much greater Trump gains, including significant erosion among longtime Democratic voting blocs. A Bridge analysis conducted by the Democratic data firm BlueLabs of voters in the three states found that Democratic support overall dropped 3.9 percentage points in urban counties, 2.5 points in Hispanic-dominant counties, and 2.1 in Black-dominant counties. At the same time, counties where Trump received 60 percent or more of the vote saw their vote totals rise by about 5 percent.
Landrieu hopes to share early results before this year's fall elections so that new tactics and messages get a test run before next year's midterm elections.
After the focus group of white men, Bridge gathered a similar group of eight New Jersey Latino men—Trump-supporting members of the working class who had previously voted for Democrats. One voter said that the Democratic Party has walked away from representing the working class, given rising costs. Another expressed concern about the 'woke' rules of Democratic governance. 'People were getting hurt for any little comment, so you had to be politically correct for everything,' he said.
Democrats have spent years trying to convince nonwhite voters that Trump's racial insensitivity should be a redline. These voters did not try to defend Trump's racial views or argue that he is not racist. But even in that was a warning for the next iteration of the Democratic Party.
'Whether he is or not, I don't care,' one voter said. 'I vote with my pocket.'
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