The Democratic Party faces a whole mess of problems today. But if its post-2024 shortcomings could be reduced to any single thing, it would be this: We’ve become more concerned with those who shower before work than after. Many of the Biden administration’s priorities—forgiving student debt, banning exports of cleaner natural gas, placating protesters chanting about the “patriarchy”—made us look like tribunes of the nation’s liberal elite. No matter the pains we took to verbalize our love for the working class, our actions spoke louder than our words.
Now, I don’t doubt that many Democrats are eager to win back the working-class voters we’ve lost over the last decade. But, as many of my colleagues and friends agreed at a recent conference organized by the Progressive Policy Institute in Denver—titled “New Directions for Democrats”—our party’s failure to focus on issues that directly affect working-class voters opened the door for MAGAism. To win those voters back, we will need to focus anew on the guys who return home from work drenched in sweat, and the women who stagger back from their hospital shifts burdened by exhaustion. That means changes in both our style and our substance.
Too often, we try to skirt the hard work that entails by focusing exclusively on President Donald Trump. I don’t care for him any more than the next guy—but the hard truth is that we’ll never make inroads by ranting against the “oligarchy” alone. Instead, we need to make clear what the Trump administration is doing to undermine the working-class American Dream. The specters of fascism, racism, xenophobia, and transphobia might draw crowds to rallies, but if we’re going to reconnect with working-class voters, we need to make their cause our primary concern. And begins by highlighting how Donald Trump is affecting their communities directly.
