issue: Politics

Democrats’ Path to Winning Working-Class Voters: New PPI/YouGov Poll Reveals Crucial Insights

Posted on by Max Sherrill

WASHINGTON — For Democrats to restore their competitiveness outside urban centers and build durable majorities, they must improve their standing with working-class voters. Historically, Democrats have thrived when advocating for the economic aspirations and moral values of ordinary working Americans. However, with former President Donald Trump winning significant support among working-class Black and Latino voters, Democrats face an urgent challenge to regain the trust and support of these critical demographic groups.

Today, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) released a new poll commissioned by YouGov to aid Democrats in crafting more effective appeals to working-class voters. PPI President Will Marshall offers detailed findings and analysis in the report, titled “Campaign for Working America: A PPI/YouGov Survey of Working-Class Voters.”

“Despite falling inflation and rising wages, working-class voters remain deeply pessimistic about the economy, with illegal immigration ranking as their second-highest concern. The poll highlights a profound sense of alienation among these voters, who feel their government is more responsive to the wealthy and the college-educated than to people like them. On a positive note for Democrats, few non-college voters support outlawing abortion, and many are skeptical of the Republican initiative to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize private schools,” said Will Marshall.

“This PPI/YouGov poll provides Democrats with a roadmap for regaining the trust of working Americans by urgently addressing their economic anxieties and offering pragmatic and sensible solutions to our nation’s toughest challenges.”
This survey also informs the work of PPI’s Campaign for Working America, launched in partnership with former U.S. Representative Tim Ryan (D-Ohio). The campaign aims to develop and test new themes, ideas, and policy proposals to help center-left leaders offer a compelling economic message to working Americans, find common ground on cultural issues, and rally support for maintaining America’s global leadership.

The poll surveyed 6,033 working-class voters, including 902 in a national sample and oversamples in seven critical battleground states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Nevada. The respondents were registered voters without a four-year degree.

Key findings from the national poll include:

• Although the U.S. inflation rate has fallen below 3% and wage gains are growing faster, working Americans still rank the high cost of living as their top concern.

• This poll confirms a profound disconnect between the Biden administration’s economic record and public perception. Working-class voters believe Biden has given low priority to what the White House regards as its signature themes and accomplishments, such as creating more manufacturing jobs, building modern infrastructure, promoting green jobs like building electric cars, and delivering high-speed broadband to rural Americans.

• Non-college voters blame their economic woes mainly on the increase in illegal immigrants taking their jobs and raising costs. By a large margin, they believe the Biden administration is too soft on border security.

• Working Americans feel alienated from their government, viewing it as more responsive to wealthier people (75%), college-educated people (70%), whites (62%), urbanites (62%), and liberals (61%) than to “people like me” (41%). Less than half say the government is responsive to parents, religious people, and conservatives, and only about a third see it as responsive to rural and poor people. Working-class voters, especially in Arizona, Michigan, and North Carolina, don’t trust the federal government to do the right thing.

• A plurality of working-class voters (47-42%) support U.S. political and military support for Ukraine and worry that cutting off that aid would embolden Russian ruler Vladimir Putin to threaten Europe.

• Non-college voters are skeptical of a precipitous rush to end fossil fuel use in America, as well as the Biden administration’s pause in constructing natural gas export facilities.

• Working-class voters have made the connection between high housing costs and exclusionary zoning. By nearly 2-1 across the key battleground states of Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Pennsylvania, these voters support eliminating zoning regulations to enable the construction of more multifamily dwellings and drive down housing costs.

• A majority (52-42) of non-college voters believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. They trust Democrats more (53-47) to ensure families have access to reproductive health care. Working-class support for outlawing abortion altogether is negligible, with just 6% of working-class voters supporting a full ban.

• Working Americans are unhappy with the quality of health care. Fully 51% of the national sample say America’s health care system is getting worse, with just 24% saying it is improving. They seem open to big changes in health care policy. Nationally, working-class voters are tied, 42-42, on whether to repeal the Affordable Care Act. In the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, and North Carolina, they are also split on whether they generally trust Democrats or Republicans more to handle health care.

• Working-class voters are more upset about crime elsewhere in America than in their neighborhoods. Just 9% think crime in their community has gotten a lot worse recently, while 46% say crime is getting much worse “around the country.” They split evenly on whether the best solution to crime is “more police on the streets” or mental health care and social services, with about 25% supporting either approach.

• Working-class voters in Arizona, Michigan, and North Carolina are split on the subject of school vouchers. Michiganders squarely oppose them, with 38% supporting vouchers and 49% opposing. Arizonans support vouchers by a 49-40 margin, as do North Carolinians by a 46-41 margin. However, when framed as a choice between funding public and private schools, working Americans overwhelmingly (76%-24% on average across the three states) prefer improving the quality of local public schools to using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private schools.

Read and download the report here.

In November, PPI released a companion poll in a report titled “Winning Back Working America: A PPI/YouGov Survey of Working-Class Attitudes,” by PPI President Will Marshall. This study delves into the opinions and attitudes of working-class voters, providing essential insights for Democratic strategies leading up to the 2024 elections.

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on Twitter.

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Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe – iokeefe@ppionline.org

Campaign for Working America: A PPI/YouGov Survey of Working-Class Voters

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Introduction

Since the 2016 election, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has focused intently on what we believe is the Democratic Party’s overriding political imperative: Regaining the allegiance of working Americans who don’t hold college degrees. The party has suffered severe erosion among non-college white voters, and is losing support among non-college Black, Hispanic, and Asian American voters.

Non-college voters account for about three-quarters of registered voters and about two-thirds of actual voters. Basic math dictates that Democrats will have to do better with these working-class voters if they want to restore their competitiveness outside urban centers and build durable 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, 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 likely to decide the outcome of this November’s national elections. This poll, taken April 26 to May 31, is the second in the series.

In addition to illuminating where Democrats stand with non-college voters, these three surveys inform the work of PPI’s new Campaign for Working America, launched this year in partnership with former U.S. Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio. Its mission is to develop and test new themes, ideas, and policy proposals that can help center-left leaders make a new economic offer to working Americans, find common ground on contentious cultural issues like immigration, crime, and education, and rally public support for keeping America strong and engaged in the defense of freedom abroad.

YouGov sampled a total of 6,033 working-class voters, including 902 working-class voters in a national sample, 843 in Michigan, 833 in Pennsylvania, 816 in Arizona, 812 in Georgia, 803 in North Carolina, 520 in Wisconsin, and 503 in Nevada. Each sample was weighted separately, with some respondents from the national sample pooled into their respective state samples for those separate weights.

Our respondents, like working-class voters in general, are disproportionately conservative and Republican in their political habits. Donald Trump won them in our national poll 47-41. Trump won working-class voters in each state in this sample by 7-10 percentage points. This includes a small but consistent gender imbalance, with Trump’s vote margin consistently 2-4 percentage points higher among men than women.

About 36% of this sample is Democratic, 38% Republican, and 26% Independent — in other words, considering Trump’s electoral fortunes among this population, this survey includes independents and Democrats who are much more likely to support Trump than voters with these partisan inclinations would be among the general population.

About 14% of the sample is Black, 13% of the sample is Hispanic, and the rest is white. Less than 2% of the sample is Asian or Middle Eastern. While Trump likely won less than 10% of Black voters overall in 2020 and just over one-third of Hispanic voters, this poll shows him winning almost 13% of working-class Black voters and about 40% of working-class Latino voters. These non-white Trump voters are disproportionately male, with Trump winning almost twice as many Black and Latino men as Black and Latino women.

Read the full report for the poll’s key takeaways.

Ainsley in The Wall Street Journal: The U.K. Elects a No-Drama Prime Minister After Years of Post-Brexit Chaos

Posted on by Alex Terr

Starmer’s tenure nearly came to a quick end. In 2021 the party lost a special election in Hartlepool, a Labour heartland, to the Conservatives, which nearly prompted him to quit, aides say.

Starmer’s aides looked to other social democrats across the world for inspiration. They saw how the Biden campaign had succeeded against Trump in 2020 by promising an alternative to chaos. In Germany and Australia, staid center-left politicians, Olaf Scholz and Anthony Albanese, had won victories running tightly disciplined, unshowy campaigns, says Claire Ainsley, who was Starmer’s executive director of policy and now works at the U.S.-based Progressive Policy Institute. 

“We needed to target towns and suburbs around the country,” she said. “We couldn’t just be the party of metropolitan voters in the big cities.” That meant ditching a lot of progressive policies to attract back working class voters and present themselves as a party which respected national security and business, she says.

Read more in The Wall Street Journal.

Ainsley in NBC News: Who is Keir Starmer, the self-described socialist set to lead the U.K.? Some Brits still don’t know

Posted on by Alex Terr

It was a chaotic party under Corbyn, who hailed from the unpolished far left and enraged many colleagues. Starmer held several senior roles but also participated in a failed plot to topple Corbyn, finally replacing him in 2020 after Labour suffered a colossal defeat to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

“It’s hard to overstate how much that election had damaged the party,” Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former policy guru, said in an interview. “Morale was at rock bottom, its spirit and purpose had been broken” and it was 26 points behind in the polls, added Ainsley, who is who is now a director at the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

Supporters say Starmer’s remaking of Labour — now 20 points ahead — shows he can enact radical change. It has become a sleek, professionalized electoral force, while Starmer has cast himself as Corbyn’s antithesis.

Read more in NBC News. 

Kahlenberg for The Liberal Patriot: Teaching Students What It Means to Be an American

Posted on by Max Sherrill

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

The United States is celebrating its 248th birthday at a moment when people across the political spectrum agree that the country’s experiment in liberal democracy is in deep trouble.

A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable that the presumptive Republican candidate for president would be someone who had tried to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and speaks of suspending the Constitution. The threat to liberal democracy on the left is less stark, fueled by the power of culture, rather than the power of the state. But it too is chilling. More than half of very liberal college students say it’s acceptable to block fellow students from hearing speakers, (compared with only 13 percent of very conservative students.) College campuses have become deeply corrosive cultures, in which eight in ten students surveyed feel they can’t speak their minds. Illiberalism on the left rises as people become more educated. Antisemitism, a former Harvard dean notes, has taken stronger root in elite colleges than in other American institutions, from libraries to hospitals, because of the way students are being taught.

It is especially worrisome that the willingness to give up on democracy is much greater among young people than those who are older. Whereas only 5 percent of those over 65 said, “Democracy is no longer a viable system, and America should explore alternative forms of government,” a shocking 31 percent of youth ages 18-29 agreed.

Why now?

Keep reading in The Liberal Patriot.

Ainsley for The Liberal Patriot: It’s Election Time in the UK

Posted on by Max Sherrill

By Claire Ainsley

This Thursday, the United Kingdom is heading for a historic day. Voters across the UK will go to the polls in the first general election since December 2019, when the Labour Party lost its fourth successive election to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives, who won a thumping 80-seat parliamentary majority. Extraordinarily, it looks like the Labour Party will now win this election, and usher out fourteen years of continuous but chaotic Conservative governments.

In fact, pollsters are predicting not just a Labour victory but a Labour landslide and a Conservative wipe out, at the hands of a resurgent Labour Party, revived Liberal Democrats, and support for Nigel Farage’s new party Reform UK.

Most of us who have fought for the last five years working for a Labour turnaround are reluctant to talk about election certainties. Part of this is our heads—polls have been wrong before, especially about “shy Tories.” A lot of voters are still undecided, and voters are much more likely to switch parties than they used to be. But part of this reluctance is our hearts, too.

Observers could be forgiven for thinking Labour have been the passive beneficiaries of the Conservatives’ collapse, waiting for the contradictions in the party’s electoral coalition and inter-political rivalries to take them down. They could not be more wrong.

Keep reading in The Liberal Patriot.

Marshall for The Hill: The GOP’s pessimistic platform for the future is the worst of our past

Posted on by Max Sherrill

By Will Marshall

Gathering in Charlotte four years ago to renominate President Donald Trump, Republicans didn’t bother to draft a party platform. Evidently, they figured, “more Trump” was all the public needed to know about their second-term plans.

It probably was, although not in the way Republicans had hoped, as the voters dumped Trump and hired Joe Biden.

Americans vote for people, not platforms. But these manifestoes, however platitudinous and boring, are like a quadrennial Rorschach test of a party’s state of mind. The GOP’s decision to recycle its 2016 platform seemed calculated to paper over internal ideological rifts as well as their nominee’s frequent lapses into incoherence.

This time, party leaders plan to write a new platform for next month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. This time, having thoroughly routed traditional conservatives and the GOP’s dwindling band of dissenters from his “stolen election” fantasy, Trump can expect blind obedience from his party.

Keep reading in The Hill.

UK General Election Bulletin – 1 Week Remaining

Posted on by Max Sherrill

This is the fourth and final of PPI’s weekly bulletin charting the course of the UK General Election, from PPI’s Claire Ainsley.

Claire is based in the UK, directing PPI’s project on center-left renewal, and is former director of policy to Labour leader Keir Starmer. She is supporting the Labour campaign, as a media commentator, as well as on the ground ahead of polling day next week on Thursday 4th July.

The U.K. is entering the final days of its general election campaign, and whilst the overall polls aren’t budging much with a sustained lead for Labour, there are some undercurrents that means the result is not a foregone conclusion.

A large minority of voters are undecided, even at this late stage. In the main, these are people who voted Conservative in 2019, don’t really want to vote for them again, but are holding back from changing their vote to Labour.

A good proportion of them are switching to new entrants Reform U.K.,  partly driven by their dissatisfaction with the Conservatives’ failure to manage immigration, and who want change not the status quo. Reform U.K. are set to do much better than the national political conversation is accounting for, taking votes mainly at the Conservatives’ expense but also from Labour. It may not translate into many MPs, but it doesn’t need to play havoc with British politics. Just look at Brexit.

Then there are the undecided voters who would normally vote Conservative, might have voted Labour under Tony Blair, but are yet to come over to Labour. Their concerns are primarily on tax and spend, which Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves have been reassuring voters they will not put personal taxes up nor unleash public spending without the proceeds of improved growth to pay for it. The Tory campaign is now focussed on these two groups, and makes the overall result open to a broader range of election possibilities than the media coverage would suggest. Sunak threw punch after punch Starmer’s way in our final leaders’ television debate, which are not as widely watched as in the US, but signalled that’s where the Conservative strategy is at.

All this underscores the need to center-left parties to meet the voters where they are, and win the argument against the political right about destination. British voters want a better economy and better public services. They are sceptical any political party can really deliver that. Despite that, Labour’s lead is holding ahead of election day. If they do succeed, they will need to waste no time in delivering the change the country has voted for.

Ainsley in Bloomberg: Keir Starmer Builds a Big UK Election Victory on a Volatile Base

Posted on by Alex Terr

Starmer has also boxed himself in by saying he doesn’t plan to increase any taxes beyond those already announced. That risks angering voters if Labour reneges on its tax-and-spend pledges to balance the books.

“There’s a real challenge to be the party of stronger growth again, when the policies they might want to effect — state and private — feel outwith the capacity they have when they get there,” said Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former director of policy and now a director at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Read more in Bloomberg.

UK General Election Bulletin – 2 Weeks Away

Posted on by Max Sherrill

This is the third of PPI’s weekly bulletin charting the course of the UK General Election, from PPI’s Claire Ainsley.

Claire is based in the UK, directing PPI’s project on center-left renewal, and is former director of policy to Labour leader Keir Starmer. She is supporting the Labour campaign, as a media commentator, as well as on the ground ahead of polling day on Thursday 4th July.

With less than two weeks to go before voters go to the polls in the UK, a change of governing party for the first time in 14 years is looking more and more likely.

It is important to note that any kind of parliamentary majority for the Labour Party would be a huge achievement. When Keir Starmer was elected leader of the Labour Party in April 2020, Labour were 26 points behind the Conservatives who had just won their fourth successive election and an 80-seat majority in parliament. Labour was a long way behind, and Starmer’s turnaround to the point where Labour looks electable again is nothing short of remarkable.

With a change of government looking closer in the UK, international attention on the election has increased. I’m writing this bulletin from Berlin with PPI, where European centre-left parties, and Democrats, are hopeful that a change of government in the UK will bring fresh energy to the global center-left and vital cooperation on international possibilities and challenges.

If UK voters do put their faith in Labour at the coming election, the party would do well to seek counsel from the center-left parties who have found that winning the war of an election campaign does not mean winning the peace in government. The SPD in Germany became the leading party in the governing coalition at the last federal election in 2021, but have seen popular support ebb away as their programme hit fiscal constraint and cost of living reality in post-Covid crisis times. And of course in the US, the strong performance of the US economy is eyed with envy this side of the Atlantic, but as Democrats well know, it is not as yet translating into support for Biden ahead of his re-election campaign.

PPI will be hosting a webinar this coming Tuesday on the electoral politics behind the UK vote, and what a change of government in the UK could mean for the US. We will be joined by leading commentators Professor Rob Ford of the University of Manchester, one of the UK’s foremost political scientists, and Kiran Stacey, Political Correspondent at the Guardian and former Washington correspondent for the Financial Times. This is a unique opportunity to hear the insiders’ view on this potentially game-changing election, and you can sign up here.

Ainsley for LabourList: Labour manifesto shows a new centrism – with the state key to driving growth

Posted on by Max Sherrill

By Claire Ainsley

If Labour’s manifesto for the 2024 General Election reads more like a strategic plan for Britain than a political sales brochure, that’s because it is. Labour has used its poll lead well to resist the temptation to pack its manifesto with gimmicks and giveaways, instead setting out a serious programme for the country.

The goal of the programme is achieving Labour’s five national missions; the means to get there is stronger economic growth. The first chapter is devoted to wealth creation, and sets out a distinct departure from the economic philosophy we have been used to under the Conservatives.

Gone is the failed old orthodoxy of leaving the vital task of generating widespread prosperity to the market. In comes the new centrism of a dynamic and strategic state that partners with the private sector to drive stronger, more sustainable economic growth across the country.

Just because there were no big policy surprises on the day the manifesto was launched, does not mean there are no big policies. In fact the manifesto is packed full of major structural reforms to the UK economy.

Keep reading in LabourList.

UK General Election Bulletin – 3 Weeks Away

Posted on by Max Sherrill

This is the second of PPI’s weekly bulletin charting the course of the UK General Election, from PPI’s Claire Ainsley.

Claire is based in the UK, directing PPI’s project on center-left renewal, and is former director of policy to Labour leader Keir Starmer. She is supporting the Labour campaign, as a media commentator, as well as on the ground ahead of polling day on Thursday 4th July.

The UK is now in the astonishing position that the governing political party is now polling third – or close to it – in a two-party system. Such is the Conservatives’ unpopularity amongst the electorate at large, and the threat from new party Reform UK so great, that the dominant political party in British politics is facing a real crisis.

However there are still three weeks to go until polling day, and not a vote has been cast, as Labour leader Keir Starmer and his Shadow Cabinet have been at pains to point out. We know from recent elections how much more volatile the electorate is, with tribal loyalties weakened, so we just cannot be certain of the outcome. There is no complacency in the ground operation of the Labour party, which is fighting for a large number of battleground seats across England, Wales and Scotland before voters go to the polls on 4th July.

This week saw the publication of the party manifestos, with more pressure on the Conservatives to produce a game-changing offer given the state of the race. Despite eye-catching promises of tax cuts, the manifesto doesn’t appear to be shifting the dial in their direction. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has had days of negative coverage after he left the D-Day commemorations early to return to the UK for an election interview, a decision widely condemned and one he later apologised for. Labour played it safe with their “no surprises” manifesto, essentially re-announcing much of the programme for government they have already set out, which I have written about more extensively for Labour List here [add link when live]. The manifesto is light years away from the high spending promises of the Corbyn years, but is clearly inspired by the ambition of the Biden administration to harness the dynamic power of the state to fuel private enterprise.

Gratifyingly for PPI, Labour leader Keir Starmer placed remaking the deal whereby if you work hard you can get on, at the centre of the manifesto, which we argued for in our publication ‘Roadmap to Hope’ last year.

In the end much of the political debate is coming down to the parlous state of the UK’s public finances. Independent experts the Institute for Fiscal Studies have taken a sceptical view of all the parties’ plans, saying they do not adequately cover public funding commitments without tax hikes or further cuts to services. With another three weeks to go, we should expect the parties to come under intense pressure to demonstrate how they can deliver on their promises without leaning into one or the other.

Marshall for The Hill: Could US and UK voters spark a global center-left revival?

Posted on by Max Sherrill

By Will Marshall

In this year of high-stakes elections, none are likely to tell us more about the health of liberal democracy than the marquee contests in the United Kingdom and the United States.

All signs point to a crushing defeat for British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his Conservative Party after 14 tumultuous years in power. Poised for victory is a renovated Labour Party, ably led by Keir Starmer and leading the Tories in polls by more than 20 points.

On Wednesday, Sunak surprised the country by announcing a snap election on July 4 rather than wait until the end of the year.

A Labour victory would cap a remarkable turnaround for a party that suffered a devastating rout in 2019. That year, Boris Johnson and the Tories breached Labour’s “Red Wall” across England’s industrial heartland, winning over working class voters with promises to “get Brexit done” and “level up” economic conditions in the less prosperous north.

Labour’s return to power also would be a major morale boost for Europe’s center-left, which hasn’t had much to celebrate lately.

Keep reading in The Hill.

Lewis for Chicago Tribune: Saving President Joe Biden’s infrastructure agenda from itself

Posted on by Max Sherrill

By Lindsay Mark Lewis

When an Interstate 95 overpass collapsed in Philadelphia in June, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, responded with a master class in executive leadership.

Slashing through thousands of pages of red tape with a stroke of his pen, Shapiro focused solely on rebuilding as fast as possible and refused to let interest group politics or bureaucratic inertia slow things down. Shapiro stunned the world by cutting the ribbon on a fully rebuilt span just 12 days later.

This “Philadelphia Miracle” should have been top of mind when President Joe Biden travelled to Baltimore recently with a promise to “move heaven and earth” to rebuild the destroyed Francis Scott Key Bridge. but then the coda: “And we’re going to do so with union labor and American steel.”

One might dismiss this sop to organized labor as a typical election-year throwaway line. But it actually holds a clue to the riddle of why Biden’s infrastructure agenda is drifting and why skeptical voters aren’t yet giving the president full credit for his legislative wins.

Keep reading in the Chicago Tribune.