Dems’ Populism Paradox

Working-class voters don’t seem impressed by the candidates Democrats think will appeal to them.

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock, Getty)

COMING OUT OF THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, Democrats had no shortage of ideas for how the party could win back working-class voters.

Moderates wanted to move to the middle on social and cultural issues. Self-identified reformers preached the merits of embracing heterodoxy on some social issues or typical Democratic policy positions. Others talked about getting tougher on immigration. And more than a handful of consultants pitched new policies and messaging designed to bring back those working-class voters who had drifted away from the party’s tent.

Progressives had a different vision.

As they saw it, winning back working-class voters required elevating working-class candidates (or, at least, candidates with a working-class aesthetic¹) who embraced populism and eschewed the caution they believed to have been detrimental to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. They rallied around a cluster of candidates—including Zohran Mamdani, Graham Platner, and Abdul El-Sayed—who they believed could steer the party in the right direction.

But so far, the bet on a combination of populist politics and a hardscrabble persona has not paid off—at least according to the polling. Before Platner dropped out of the Maine Senate race, a New York Times/Portland Press Herald/Siena poll found that Republican Sen. Susan Collins led among non-college-educated voters by 21 percent while Platner led with college-educated voters by 34 percent. Although Mamdani won over some Trump voters—67 percent of them in the 2024 election had no college degree—exit polls show that the mayor’s strength was still with college-educated voters.

And last week, the Detroit News/Glengariff released a new poll showing Rep. Haley Stevens winning non-college-educated voters by 22 points in the Michigan Senate primary against Abdul El-Sayed, who carried college-educated voters by seven points.

Polls are just that—snapshots of an electorate, not actual voting results. But the data has given fodder to moderate and establishment Democrats to argue that the left’s case for winning back working-class voters is not all it’s made out to be.

“It has been a pretty big lie people [have] told themselves on here that working class people are closet leftists,” Neera Tanden, the president of Center for American Progress, posted on X. “They are in fact much more moderate than college educated folks.”

Tanden is a longstanding combatant in the online intraparty wars that Democrats have long waged. But as the Michigan primary approaches, she and other moderate operatives have begun amplifying their warnings, insisting that progressives aren’t just misreading the electorate but actually exacerbating the very class divide that the party is trying to address. “They’re making [the divide] worse by picking these people who they think are going to appeal to non-college voters,” Matt Bennett, cofounder of the center-left group Third Way, told me. “They somehow think that their people are the right people, and it’s pretty evident that they’re not at all.”

Considering the weight of the charge—and the recent polling data—I was curious how operatives on the populist and progressive left are thinking about this dynamic. Did they look at these same polls and worry that their preferred politics aren’t resonating with the voters they are intended to appeal to?

The answer was clear: not really.

Many progressive strategists told me that moderate and establishment Democrats were wrong to imply that only the left flank of the party is struggling with working-class voters, saying that it is instead a broader branding problem facing candidates across the ideological spectrum. There was little appetite for second-guessing on this point.

“When you look at the data, what you see is that the Democratic party, moderate or progressive, is struggling with working-class voters. It’s not a progressive problem,” said Mark Longabaugh, a top strategist for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. “If a guy that looks like Platner was struggling with working-class voters, you can see the [enormousness] of our problem.”

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THE INABILITY OF ANY SIDE of the Democratic party to consistently reach voters who did not attend college is a problem for the party’s long-term health. Outside of some affluent coastal and suburban congressional districts, there simply aren’t enough college graduates to be a potent electoral force nationally. But times have changed since the weeks immediately following the 2024 election: Unlike back then, when Democrats of all kinds seemed eager to figure out why the party has this problem, the people I spoke with gave few signs that they’re interested in grappling with why this dilemma exists. Instead, the various Democratic factions seemed more focused on pointing fingers.

Some of the progressive operatives I spoke with argued that moderate Democrats were cherry-picking poll numbers and ignoring progressives’ successes in House primaries in Maine, Colorado, and New York—victories, they argued, that could not have happened without support from working-class voters. Nearly everyone I spoke with pointed to Harris’s presidential race—during which she lost working-class voters—as evidence that it was misguided to think that establishment candidates universally did better among these voters.

“The Democratic establishment’s campaign strategy in 2024 was a campaign strategy that, by the results, lost more working-class voters than Democrats had lost in recent memory at the national level, and gained more of the wealthiest voters,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, which backed insurgent democratic socialist House candidates this cycle, such as Melat Kiros in Colorado and Claire Valdez in New York. “There’s only one side of this debate that is actually trying to lead with a vision that centers working-class communities, and it is the left.”

In the case of the Michigan primary, progressive operatives supportive of El-Sayed downplayed polls showing Stevens winning working-class and black voters, stressing that her success thus far was not a reflection of the popularity of her politics but of the millions of dollars in super PAC money that has been spent boosting her campaign.

“I don’t think you can talk about Haley Stevens’s poll numbers in any way, shape, or form, no matter the demographic, without stating first and foremost that she would be nowhere without $50 million from super PACs,” said Bill Neidhardt, a former 2020 Sanders presidential campaign staffer and a senior media adviser at the consulting firm Middle Seat, whose clients include Kiros and Darializa Avila Chevalier.

One of the few progressive operatives who was willing to be more candid about the challenge in reaching working-class voters was pollster Adam Carlson.

“It’s pretty inarguable that in Democratic primaries so far, working-class voters, particularly working-class voters of color, have been gravitating toward the more establishment, moderate, centrist candidates,” he told me.

Carlson, who has worked this cycle on behalf of progressive candidates including El-Sayed, said that the black working-class voters in particular had a lot of “skepticism of leftist candidates overpromising.”

“When you’re kind of living a little more hand-to-mouth, you’re just not looking for these big sweeping changes. You’re looking for things that can help you right now.”

With the Democrats out of power, questions about how the party can win back working people will remain paramount. There is always the possibility that it solves itself: with a backlash to Trumpism and all its harms to the working class ultimately driving these voters to Democrats regardless of any changes the party makes.

But if that doesn’t happen, then each side will have serious accusations to work through. For moderates, it will be a repeat of ’24: Does an approach defined by incrementalism and moderation simply fail to meet the moment? For progressives, it will be arguably more existential: If the left is the working-people faction of the party but working people don’t vote for its candidates, then what really are they?

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🫏 Donkey Business:

The White House Correspondents’ Association is scheduled to reconvene its annual awards dinner this Friday. The event, originally held in April, was abruptly canceled partway through dinner after a gunman stormed the Washington Hilton Hotel in an alleged attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump and members of his cabinet.

Before the originally scheduled dinner, I wrote about the danger of the press corps rubbing elbows and breaking bread at such a glitzy affair with an administration that’s at war with a free press. That tension hasn’t gone away. Trump is expected to attend Friday’s rescheduled dinner, and since April, we’ve gotten even more glaring examples of his seeming intent to undermine the First Amendment. On Monday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration sought phone records of several of its journalists and even those journalists’ relatives in an attempt to identify sources for a recent story. The FCC also threatened to punish ABC for its decision not to carry live a July speech Trump gave on election security.

Ahead of the first dinner, 300 former journalists sent a letter to the WHCA urging them to use their speeches to condemn those who threaten press freedom. Since then, the letter’s organizers told me that they’re up to 500 signatures. They are reaffirming their calls to the WHCA this week in advance of Friday’s dinner.

“Since the first dinner was canceled in April, President Trump has escalated his attacks on journalists and news organizations,” said Lisa Stark, a former ABC News correspondent who helped organize the letter. “The WHCA cannot normalize this behavior.”

My open tabs:

— Politicians Are Trying to Change What Chatbots Say About Them

— The Wingman

— How Democrats learned to embrace Native American land acknowledgments

1. For more on this question of whether a working-class aesthetic is necessary to appeal to working-class voters, see Sarah Longwell’s piece from earlier today. “I think there’s been too much emphasis on finding candidates whose looks and resumes are simulacra of their would-be voters,” she writes. “Voters don’t necessarily need candidates to resemble them.…(That heuristic made John Fetterman an enticing electoral prospect in 2022.)”