Here's how Democrats win back voters

The Hill

4 days ago

Donald Trump is losing support fast. Voters are souring on the president due to his mishandling of the economy and brazen attacks on constitutional rights and the rule of law.
Yet a coherent roadmap for how progressives can take back the House in 2026 — likely the single most important short-term step to push back against the MAGA agenda — has yet to emerge.
James Carville's advice for Democrats to sit back and watch Trump unravel is a dangerous gamble. What's more, it would do nothing to help Democrats reverse the long-term bleed of working-class voters that allowed Trump's victory in the first place. To win the future, Democrats need a positive and convincing message that resonates with the many Americans who either voted for Trump in 2024 or who stayed home because they didn't like the options on offer.
Centrists will try to convince progressives to moderate their critiques of elites and their economic proposals, but don't be fooled: they are evoking the failed Clinton-era strategies that pushed the working class away from Democrats in the first place.
So what should Democrats do? Join team economic populism, using three key steps in the economic populist playbook.
First, welcome hatred of billionaires and corporations, and don't be afraid to attack the party establishment.
To succeed as an economic populist, you must first pick a real fight with economic elites. Democrats must offer a whole-cloth condemnation of the corporate takeover of our country, delivered in a visceral, raw style that makes working-class voters take note.
It's not that Democrats never critique economic elites. Even Kamala Harris — not widely regarded as a raging populist — regularly talked about corporate price-gouging and the need to rein in bad actors on the 2024 campaign trail. But these never came anywhere close to conveying that she really understood how angry people feel, or that she would do anything meaningful to put economic oligarchs in their place.
Too many Democrats talk about jobs, unions and the economy in safe, bloodless terms that fail to acknowledge the resentment that working-class voters feel after decades of economic devastation. They must do more than just acknowledge that 'families are struggling to make ends meet.' Democrats in competitive districts need to speak compellingly about how the economy was rigged against ordinary Americans by both corporate elites and the political leadership of both major parties. They must acknowledge that trade deals like NAFTA, corporate deregulation and financialization — championed by centrist Democrats and Republicans alike — decimated millions of good jobs and left entire communities hollowed out.
Research from the Center for Working-Class Politics suggests that both parts of this equation — attacking elites as well as the establishment — are winning strategies for reaching working-class voters.
Second, craft a bold, bread-and-butter policy platform that pushes the limits of what's possible. Tapping into voters' distrust of politicians and the government is crucial, but so too is an accompanying set of policies that gives voters a sense of how you would translate critique into action. Democrats must adopt a comprehensive economic agenda that tackles the structural challenges faced by working-class Americans.
It's not enough to talk about 'good jobs.' Candidates must outline an aggressive plan to create new and better jobs for Americans left behind, and reject the trade, tax and other policies that that cruelly pushes them aside. This means proposing major investments in infrastructure and industrial policy, using government contracts and incentives to keep jobs in the U.S. and closing loopholes that allow big companies to shift jobs out of communities. It means putting an end to stock buybacks and renegotiating unfair trade deals to include built-in protections for workers. It means raising taxes on mega-corporations and increasing access to vocational training to help give American workers a fighting chance.
Candidates must also fight to give workers a stronger seat at the table. They must strengthen labor rights through legislation such as the PRO Act, which would make it easier to form a union, and the No Tax Breaks for Union Busting Act, which would penalize employers who undermine union activities.
It's important to note the only sustainable path forward to rebuild communities hit hard by job loss and deindustrialization is through massive, targeted investments. This includes a federal jobs program, alongside broader spending on infrastructure, industrial policy and workforce training. Not only are these policies popular — the jobs guarantee proposal, for example, consistently receives majority support in surveys — but it is hard to paint such policies as unearned government handouts. The scale of the economic challenges at hand means that without such ambitious initiatives, many working-class communities will continue to fall farther behind — further eroding Democratic support.
Third, Democrats must show the base that economic populism doesn't conflict with core progressive values.
In the short term, the left's electoral priority must be to defeat more Republicans, while its long-term strategy hinges on building durable majority coalitions in traditionally purple and red districts. This can only be accomplished by reversing the trend of working-class voters drifting toward Republicans.
The 2024 data are clear: Democrats dominated in the 12 states where the percent of college graduates was above 40 percent, none of which were swing states. In contrast, Democrats captured only one of the 29 states with college-educated shares below 35 percent.
This is the structural and cultural backdrop that has enabled Trump's pseudo-populist rhetoric to resonate with so many working-class voters, increasingly across race and ethnicity. Trump's 'anti-elitism' focuses on highly educated cultural elites who occupy roughly the top 10-20 percent of the economic spectrum. His favorite targets include the news media, academia, Hollywood and, of course, Democratic politicians. In targeting cultural elites, Trump deflects attention away from the concentrated economic power at the tippy top: billionaires, Wall Street and mega-corporations.
It's important to understand why this strategy works.
First, there is the undeniable reality that many cultural elites have earned their share of blame for enabling the rise of neoliberalism, runaway inequality and the consolidation of wealth and rising power of the ultrarich. For decades, politicians and operatives from both parties embraced 'free trade' deals that threw American workers into a global race to the bottom, along with a suite of policies that were bad for working people (e.g., cuts to social programs and tax breaks for the rich). This is why it's so essential for candidates to openly criticize the political establishment, to establish even a baseline of credibility with disaffected voters.
Trump then lumps these blameworthy political actors and institutions together with everyone in the educated classes (at least the liberals), who can be viewed as condescending and oblivious to the realities and hardships of the majority of Americans. People tend to feel resigned to economic forces (like they are to the weather), but condescension has a human face. When affluent liberals parrot phrases like 'basket of deplorables,' people see red. It's not hard to tap into and channel this anger.
Then, when Trump goes after vulnerable communities, he weaves these attacks together with this anti-elitist rhetoric. For example, the subtext of Trump's final 2024 campaign ad (which targeted transgender students) was that 'Kamala Harris cares more about catering to this special group (that you harbor prejudice against) than she cares about hard-working people like you.'
But efforts to connect with working-class voters must not lead Democratic candidates to become 'Trump-lite' versions of themselves on cultural and social issues. The solution isn't to throw vulnerable communities under the bus. Democrats must lead with popular economic fights while also showing genuine commitment to stand up for the rights and freedoms of everyone.
Consider Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who visibly opposed a law that would have banned discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools and allowed teachers to refuse to use transgender students' chosen pronouns. Bashear built the popular support he enjoys in Kentucky by fighting visibly for the working class, including to protect public education, for better jobs and better pay, to expand Medicaid and more. Because of how Bashear has defined himself, it makes it much harder for MAGA opponents to define him on social wedge issues. We think there's a lesson here for other Democrats.
To be clear, the lion's share of blame for increased social division lies with Trump and Republicans who actively demonize marginalized groups, using wedge issues to keep working people divided. But when Democrats are unwilling to pick these fights with the economically powerful, Trump and the GOP get to tell people who to blame, uncontested. So long as Democrats fail to open up an offensive battlefront, they'll be stuck fighting defensive battles on the terrain where the GOP much prefers to fight.
The antidote to Trump's psuedo-populism is a full embrace of real progressive economic populism. This requires the courage to name the real culprits: the billionaires and powerful corporations that have rigged our economy and political system against working people, along with the political actors that enabled them — including when they are in our own party.
Jared Abbott is the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics. Jonathan Smucker is a political organizer, campaigner and strategist. He is co-founder of Popular Comms Institute, PA Stands Up, Lancaster Stands Up, Common Defense, Beyond the Choir and Mennonite Action, and author of 'Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals.'