Nick Miller is a Democrat who knows how to reach working-class voters. In 2022, he became the youngest candidate elected to Pennsylvania’s Senate in over a century by winning an Allentown-based district where more than three-quarters of adults lack a bachelor’s degree. This was no easy feat: Just two years later, the same district backed Donald Trump for president.
What was Miller’s secret?
“I ran as a pragmatic, commonsense candidate focused on results rather than ideology,” he says. “Independent voters play a critical role in our elections. And they consistently respond to leaders who are willing to work with anyone to get things done.”
If Democrats want to become competitive again outside the blue islands of major metro areas and college towns, their single most important task will be winning back the Americans without college degrees who have abandoned the party in droves during recent decades. This report brings together interviews with dozens of politicians who’ve already shown they can do just that: 28 state legislators from seven battleground states who, like Miller, have managed to prevail in competitive, heavily working-class districts. We asked them about the issues they focused on, how their voters view the national party, and what on-the-ground tactics they relied on to win.
While these lawmakers represented disparate corners of America, they were remarkably consistent in their message. Their working-class constituents, they said, are intensely focused on basic pocketbook concerns like the cost of groceries and health care, and many believe Democrats are too preoccupied by fights over cultural issues like LGBTQ rights and abortion — an assessment that dovetails with much of the polling that followed Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 election. To overcome the national party’s baggage, these lawmakers often campaign as practical problem solvers, rather than rigid partisans.
“Being a moderate formed the core of my strategy,” says Wisconsin State Sen. Kristin Alfheim, whose district centers the Fox Cities region. “People would ask which party I was from and my response was, ‘Should it matter?’ Getting past that first initial knee-jerk response was critical to getting into what matters for voters — kitchen table issues.”
The lawmakers who spoke with PPI could hardly be more different from the left-wing populists who’ve captivated the national media this summer. Insurgent candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America have won a handful of primaries in New York and Denver by knocking off more established opponents, while progressive favorite Graham Platner won Maine’s primary vote before dropping out over allegations of sexual assault. In the Midwest, left-wing favorite Abdul El-Sayed won a narrow victory in the Michigan primary.
All of these candidates style themselves as champions for the working class and promise a lavish array of free public goods and services to lower the cost of living. Ironically, however, their left-wing insurgency thus far has mainly unseated liberal and even progressive Democrats. The democratic socialists aim their messages mainly at white college liberals and professionals instead of the non-college voters Democrats need to win general elections against Republicans. In those races, they’ll likely be dogged by past calls to abolish police and prisons and return to open borders.
In most cases, their performance with actual working-class voters has been middling to poor. DSA candidates in New York fared best in higher-income tracts of their districts, for instance. El-Sayed ran up the score in college towns while losing less-educated parts of the state. Before he dropped out, polling by The New York Times showed Platner trailing incumbent Susan Collins by 20 points among Mainers without a college degree.
In contrast, the state and local lawmakers featured in this report don’t campaign as strident ideologues or radical insurgents. Most focus on working families’ everyday struggles to make ends meet and avoid elite preoccupations like anti-fossil fuel crusades and trans rights. Fifteen described themselves as “moderate,” while others identified as progressives or something else. None identified as democratic socialists. All won their seats by listening to working people and offering down-to-earth ways to help them solve their problems.
We chose to focus on state legislators for this report because their voices are often absent from the New York and Beltway-centric debates about how to win, despite their having a unique and important vantage point. Since their districts are smaller than Congress members’ and they have less money to run expensive TV ads come election season, state lawmakers often spend more time in face-to-face interactions with their constituents, making them an important ear on the ground in places where the party’s national brand can be a hindrance.
We selected politicians for interviews based on three criteria:
- They won their most recent race.
- Their district is competitive, defined as a margin of less than 10%.
- The share of voters without a college degree in their district is higher than the national average of 64.3%. There are a variety of definitions of “working class,” but this one is most common and easiest to quantify.
There are not many Democrats who check these boxes, partly due to gerrymandering, but also because of the party’s general weakness with working-class voters. Democrats who win these districts comprise just 10% of State Senators in the seven battleground states and 13% of House members. Wisconsin and Nevada have the highest shares. Some of the districts are heavy on white working-class voters, while some are dominated by Black or Hispanic voters. The lessons from all of them should be relevant to Democrats, given how the party lost ground with non-college voters of all races in 2024.
These districts were also competitive in more than state legislative races. Margins in the 2024 presidential race were also less than 10% in all but one of the districts. Harris won 20 of the districts, but 20 of the featured legislators ran ahead of her.
Most of the as-told-to essays in this report were written based on live interviews with the legislators. Three of the lawmakers wrote their own essays based on questionnaires. They all offered their own unique insights, and some diverged from one another on some issues.
However, five themes emerged most strongly.
