The reasons for the erosion of Democratic Party support within the American working class is a topic on which seemingly everyone has an opinion. It has renewed the debate between the left and the center of the party in the wake of the 2024 election defeat. It’s been an occasion for Republican schadenfreude, which certainly beats their turning a mirror on themselves. It’s been the subject of polling, of polling analysis, of exegesis of polling analysis. But nobody had sought to clarify these issues by assembling a numerically informed view of the evolution of public opinion during the past 65 years until the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), along with Jacobin, undertook a study that they’re releasing today.
What CWCP did was to look at the answers to 128 questions about social and economic issues posed by three rigorous academic surveys—the American National Election Study, the General Social Survey, and the Cooperative Election Study—from 1960 through 2022. They then tabulated the answers from working-class Americans and from middle- and upper-class Americans (lumping these two classes together), compared working-class answers to the other combined classes’ answers, and tracked those answers, and those comparisons, over time.
Any methodology inherently includes and excludes. Obviously, the racial composition of these classes changed considerably over this six-decade span, as did the native-born and immigrant composition, the status of women, the rate of family formation, and Americans’ median age. But inasmuch as the 2024 election made clear that the Democrats’ working-class problem had become cross-racial, and that a major gap was widening between the voting patterns of different classes, the CWCP study makes a much-needed contribution to our understanding of our changing political landscape.
Its most valuable finding, I think, concerns the attitudinal changes not of the working class, but of the middle/upper class over the past 65 years. That’s the class (I’ll speak of it as a single class, since that’s how the study presents it) that’s moved the furthest left on social and economic questions. On economic issues, both then and now, the working class still holds more progressive positions than the middle/upper, but that middle/upper has closed much of that gap since 1960. On social issues, both classes hold more progressive positions than they did in 1960, but the middle/upper has widened its lead over the working class during the ensuing six decades. As the study reports, “working-class Americans have become moderately more conservative relative to middle- and upper-class Americans since the Obama administration, this is largely due to the latter group’s increasing progressivism rather than a rising tide of reaction among workers.”
The report also compares the 2020 to 2022 responses of the two classes to a host of social-issue questions. Even on questions where the working class embraces egalitarian positions, their response still lags that of the middle/upper class. Asked, for instance, if gays and lesbians should be protected from job discrimination, 86 percent of working-class Americans said they should be, while 92.6 percent of middle/upper-class Americans answered affirmatively. Of the 37 questions on social issues to which CWCP compared the answers, the one with the greatest gap between classes asked respondents if they favored trans people in the military: 35.9 percent of working-class Americans said they did, compared to 57.1 percent of their middle/upper class compatriots—a gap of 21.2 percent.
The one issue on which working-class Americans took a position that CWCP labeled more progressive the middle/upper class was whether they believed that “police often use more force than necessary,” which 27.6 percent of the working class said they believed, as against just 15.8 percent of the middle/upper. It’s likely safe to infer that working-class Blacks, as well as working-class Latinos, had had more experience with police brutality than any components of the middle/upper class.
On immigration issues polled between 2020 and 2022, there were no questions on which middle/upper class Americans weren’t more progressive than their working-class counterparts, even when the working class heavily embraced progressive positions. For instance, 85.6 percent of working-class respondents opposed “returning undocumented minors”—I presume this was posed, or interpreted as, undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children—even as middle/upper class Americans opposed that by 92.4 percent. A much larger gap came in answer to the question as to whether immigration is good for the economy, with which 51.5 percent of working-class Americans agreed, far fewer than the 76.3 percent of middle/upper class Americans.
On most economic issues, the working class was consistently more progressive than the middle/upper class, but not on all economic issues. In general, working-class Americans favor specific policies they see helping American workers and their families more than their middle/upper counterparts, but their middle/upper counterparts prove to be more supportive of spending and taxes generally, both historically and in the aggregation of polling from 2020 to 2022. While the working class favored limiting imports to protect jobs at a 62.1 percent rate during that latter polling period, for instance, only 47.6 percent of the middle/upper class supported that policy. Conversely, while 43.8 percent of the working class favored financing jobs programs with tax increases (I’m the one who added the italics), 52.7 percent of the middle/upper class favored that. Similarly, 72.4 percent of the working class wanted to expand Medicare, while only 63 percent of the middle/upper class wanted to expand it; but on the other hand, just 51.8 percent of the working class wanted the government to increase spending for health care costs, while a greater number of middle/upper Americans—57.4 percent—wanted the government to do that.
In general, the middle/upper class is more inclined to accept those egalitarian changes to the nation’s economy that involve tax revenues than the working class, though the working class is more inclined than its counterpart to expand egalitarian government programs. That certainly presents an obstacle to some progressive economic policies; clearly, working-class Americans feel that broad-based taxes for broadly shared prosperity are going to stick them with the taxes but not the prosperity.
But Democrats have overcome those obstacles before, as when they enacted the Affordable Care Act, which did have new taxes. Should he win New York’s mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani will test his skill in persuading voters, and his fellow Democrats in Albany, that universal child care, among other programs, is worth the higher taxes to the rich.
The other takeaway that I find most striking from this study is how much more liberal middle- and upper-class Americans are today than they were throughout most of the 20th century. Some of that is due to the declining levels of acceptance of bigotry, which was once routine in social settings. Some is due to the increasing awareness of the widening economic gap between the working and middle class, on the one hand, and the rich, particularly the very rich, on the other.
I’ve only skimmed the surface of this very rich study here; if you’re interested in where America has been and where it could be heading, you should check it out.