The Progressive Policy Institute launched its Campaign for Working America in February 2024. Its mission is to develop and test new themes, ideas, and policy proposals that can help Democrats and other center-left leaders make a new economic offer to working Americans, find common ground on polarizing cultural issues like immigration, crime, and education, and rally public support for defending freedom and democracy in a dangerous world. Acting as Senior Adviser to the Campaign is former U.S. Representative Tim Ryan, who represented northeast Ohio in Congress from 2003 to 2023.
Since 2016, Democrats have suffered severe erosion among non-college white voters and lately have been losing support from Black, Hispanic, and Asian working-class voters as well. Since these voters account for about threequarters of registered voters, basic electoral math dictates that the party will have to do better with them to restore its competitiveness outside metro centers and build lasting governing majorities. The party’s history and legacy point in the same direction: Democrats do best when they champion the economic aspirations and moral outlook of ordinary working Americans.
To help them relocate this political north star and to inform our work on policy innovation, PPI has commissioned a series of YouGov polls on the beliefs and political attitudes of non-college voters, with a particular focus on the battleground states that have decided the outcome of recent national elections.
This report is the first in a series of Campaign Blueprints detailing new ideas that can help Democrats reach across today’s yawning “diploma divide” and reconnect with the working-class voters who have historically been the party’s mainstay.
Housing in America is too expensive, and residential areas are increasingly segregated by economic status. For most
Americans, housing is their single biggest expense, and today, it is less affordable than at any time in the last 40 years. Housing prices have tripled since 2000, outpacing wages, which have doubled. The median household needs to devote a whopping 40% of its income to afford the median-priced home.
In the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris has put a priority on making housing more affordable. She has correctly pinpointed the central problem — a shortage of housing supply — and outlined a number of policies to help the private and nonprofit sectors produce 3 million new homes. Planting herself firmly in the pro-housing camp, Harris is allied with Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) forces. By contrast, former president Donald Trump has taken a classic Not in My Backyard
(NIMBY) approach, falsely claiming that federal incentives to produce more housing would somehow “abolish the suburbs.” He banks on addressing the imbalance of housing supply and demand with a fantastical plan to uproot millions of undocumented immigrants and deport them. Economists point out the plan would have the perverse effect of removing many workers who make the construction of new housing possible.
It’s especially important for working Americans that smart housing policies be enacted. Theirs are the families whose budgets are most stretched by surging rents and housing prices and whose children see their opportunities curtailed when rising economic segregation excludes them from the safest neighborhoods with the highest-performing public schools.
