If You Want to Win Working-Class Votes, Run On Working-Class Issues
A new report lays out how to bridge the educational divide to bring non-college voters into the progressive fold.
Mindy Isser
If the Left is serious about winning elections across the country, working-class voters must be at the center of this project. And yet, too many campaigns don’t make these voters’ priorities their focus. In a new report from The Center for Working Class Politics (where I am a research associate), scholars Joan Williams and Jared Abbot analyze the results of a recent Class Gaps Poll, which compares the political attitudes of working-class people with those of liberal upper-middle-class voters, who, like it or not, have steered the modern progressive movement and its agenda.
While the definition of working-class has been debated since Karl Marx himself began writing about it back in the mid nineteenth century, for the purposes of their report, titled “The Left’s Coalition Crisis: Understanding the Massive Divide Between Working Class and College Educated Voters, and How to Bridge it,” Williams and Abbott define the working-class as non-college educated, middle income workers (with incomes ranging between $40,000-$100,000 per year), and the liberal upper-middle-class as Democratic-leaning college graduates with a household income in the top 25%. Williams and Abbott found that “precarity, not poverty, drives far-right populism,” and focused their study on working-class voters who “are playing by the rules – budgeting responsibly, providing for their children’s futures, paying their taxes, giving back to their communities. But they’re losing ground in a rigged economy and corrupt political process.”
This failure to secure the American Dream despite doing everything “right” has caused resentment towards “elites,” which, for some, may include college graduates with different political priorities. While many college graduates are downwardly mobile and would describe themselves as working-class, they are culturally distinct from the non-college-educated working class — and their political focuses differ, too.
Williams and Abbott found that the priorities of working-class and liberal college graduates diverged significantly. While both groups ranked affordable basics — groceries, housing and utilities — as their biggest political priority, 10 out of 12 working-class respondents’ priorities are economic in nature: seven focus on the cost of goods, and the other three focus on wages and jobs. Liberal college grads’ top political issues include economic concerns, too, like #6: lower rents and housing costs, and #7: affordable childcare. But they also highly rank issues not even seen on the list of working-class priorities, like “resist authoritarianism,” “prevent gun violence,” “end racism,” and “protect abortion access.”
While these issues certainly have economic components, on their face, they can read as social and cultural issues, growing the divide between the non-college-educated working class and college-educated liberals. These educational, aesthetic, and social differentiations impact electoral politics. If non-college workers believe that college graduates are elites, and the issues they support are elite issues, they are more likely to reject them.
For those of us concerned about climate change, abortion rights, immigrants’ rights, and protecting democracy, our most important task is to learn to talk across the diploma divide, or else we may have very little hope of making progress on our goals. And perhaps the priorities of working-class people — like personal security and lowering the crime rate — are issues the more educated group of progressives needs to expand their thinking on. After all, college-educated liberals shouldn’t assume their positions are always correct by virtue of their credentials — this is exactly the class bias that can lead to feelings of condescension.
Crucially, liberal college grads live in a bubble of other college graduates, and are often in agreement on many social justice issues. Are we correct in our beliefs? Perhaps, but being right doesn’t make us win elections or give us the power needed to transform our society. Just like 2020 brought a moment of racial reckoning, it’s time for us to have a reckoning around class. Less than 40% of U.S. adults aged 25 and older hold a Bachelor’s Degree or higher. While it doesn’t always feel like it (and while we certainly aren’t represented by politicians that are anything like the average American), most people in this country are non-college-educated, middle-income workers (or at least closer to them than to those with college degrees). If we want to win elections, we need to center the issues that matter to them — not just because they matter, but because they have the numbers to be able to win elections.
Luckily, there is common ground here: both liberal college grads and working-class respondents rank affordability as their biggest political priority. Working-class respondents’ next highest priority is protecting Social Security and Medicare, which was ranked fourth by liberal college grads. Big fights over affordability, protecting our social safety nets, and jobs and union rights — issues workers across the board agree on, no matter our education level — could help progressive candidates win. This is not to say that these candidates shouldn’t also support abortion rights and fighting climate change, just that they should not necessarily be the public cornerstones of their campaigns. While platforms aren’t zero-sum, the way voters hear messaging often is.
This isn’t about the issues that candidates support, run on, and build their platform with — it’s about the issues they lead with. And as we’ve seen with big wins for the Left, like Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City, you can run with affordability and economic issues at the front, while still having a platform filled with other priorities that aren’t at the top of the list for working class voters, and still get their votes.
