“WWe now know that rule by organized money is just as dangerous as rule by organized mobs. Never before in all of our history have (its) forces been so united against a single candidate as they are today. They are unanimous in their hatred of me – and I salute their hatred.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt – cousin of a beloved former president and scion of two prominent New York families – was an unlikely tribune of economic populism. But amid the devastation wrought by the Great Depression, he realized that the only way to show millions of American workers that he truly supported them was to target his own class, the economic elites.
Today, in a new period of turbulence and facing the strong threat of Donald Trump’s antidemocratic right-wing populism, Democrats have forgotten their history. A recently published study by the Center for Working-Class Politics reveals that Democrats are not taking advantage of a powerful weapon in the fight against Trump: economic populism.
Political candidates who modeled themselves more on Roosevelt’s anti-elite model, however, were successful. Our study found that 2022 Democratic congressional candidates who appealed to economic elites while celebrating workers outperformed other candidates in places where Democrats struggled the most: majority-white, non-college-educated districts. college and those with disproportionately higher percentages of people with degrees. working professions.
The average vote shares of economic populists were 12.3 and 6.4 percentage points higher than those of other candidates in these regions, respectively. Economic populists also performed better than other candidates in rural and small-town districts, where their average vote share was 4.7 percentage points higher. These results are in agreement with Previous search from the Center for Working-Class Politics which tested the impact of economic populism and also found that working-class voters prefer economic populists.
Yet even though we know that economic populism can help Democrats win back working-class voters – of all races – that recent polls indicate While Democrats are quickly moving away from Democrats, the report also finds that Democrats are generally allergic to running against Roosevelt’s economic royalists.
Indeed, fewer than 10% of Democratic candidates have denounced Wall Street, billionaires, millionaires or CEOs on their candidate websites, and a related analysis by the Center found that only about 20% of television ads run by Democrats in competitive 2022 House races did so. Less than 5% of ads mentioned billionaires, the rich, Wall Street, big business or price gouging.
Nor, despite the efforts of the Biden administration focus on industrial policy and job creation, it’s Democrats focusing on core economic issues that resonate with the working-class voters they need to stop Trump in November. Indeed, only 30% of television advertisements Releases by 2022 Democratic candidates in competitive districts have focused primarily on critical economic issues, from high-quality jobs to containing drug and consumer costs.
The remaining 70% prioritized abortion, resistance to Trump and Republican extremism or the individual qualities of the candidates. Only 18% of these ads talked about jobs, fewer than 2% talked about the need for high-quality, well-paying or union jobs, and virtually none talked about specific policy proposals aimed at creating better jobs – such as creating new jobs. manufacturing positions or expanding job training programs.
As a result, despite Democrats’ progressive economic policy goals, many voters simply don’t associate them with ideas that will improve their lives. They believe that Trump — with his constant barrage of rhetorical attacks on the rich and powerful — understands their pain better than the elites who write Democrats’ campaign checks.
Quite simply, the Democratic Party is facing an image crisis among working-class voters as severe as any we have seen since the 1960s.
This is not to say that there are not anti-elite Rooseveltian populists in the Democratic camp. Indeed, candidates such as Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Tim Ryan have embraced this kind of rhetoric and outperformed President Biden’s margins in 2020 in tough races with a significant working-class electorate. But there are very few candidates who have combined all-out economic populism with the ambitious economic policies that Democrats need to send working-class voters a credible message that they truly understand and care about the issues that matter to them. to heart.
Why are Democrats so reluctant to attack economic elites? There are many reasons – both ideological and political – but the party’s anti-populist bias is likely linked to the changing class dynamics of its voting base and donors. Search for Sam Zacher shows that the Democratic Party is increasingly relying on affluent, highly educated voters to compensate for its declining support among the working class. Zacher points out that Democrats’ increasingly wealthy base is reflected in the party’s policy priorities – which carefully avoid proposals that could directly challenge the interests of economic elites.
Without a major course change, the bias of Democratic elites means they will continue to resist rhetorical class warfare against the plutocrats and the bold economic reforms needed to overcome the crisis. decades of perceived neglect among working-class voters.
In the short term, if Democrats don’t change course, the Republican Party will look increasingly attractive to working-class voters, and the electoral math for Democrats in working-class swing states like Michigan and Texas. Pennsylvania will become more and more disastrous.
In the long term, unless Democrats can make credible appeals to working-class voters through policy and rhetoric, we face the prospect of long-term class realignment with the wealthy and the poor on the Democratic side and the working class on the Republican side. This would destroy any chance of forging a majority coalition to implement the economic reforms that working people so desperately need, and ensure that culture war rather than class war will define American politics for the foreseeable future.
To solve this problem and defeat Trumpism, progressives must take a leaf from President Roosevelt’s playbook and point to economic elites as the primary obstacle to rebuilding working-class communities.
Jared Abbott is the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics
Bhaskar Sunkara is president of The Nation, founding editor of Jacobin, and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities.