“We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have [its] forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hatred for me – and I welcome their hatred.”
President Franklin D Roosevelt – the 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 understood that the only way to show millions of working Americans that he really had their back was to put a target on the back of his own class, economic elites.
Today, in another turbulent period and facing a strong threat from Donald Trump’s anti-democratic rightwing populism, Democrats have forgotten their history. A recently released study by the Center for Working-Class Politics reveals that Democrats aren’t taking advantage of a powerful weapon in the fight against Trump: economic populism.
Political candidates who are drawing more on Roosevelt’s anti-elite playbook are, however, finding success. Our study found that 2022 Democratic congressional candidates who called out economic elites while celebrating working people out-performed other candidates in places where Democrats struggle the most: districts with majority-white, non-college graduate populations and those with disproportionately higher percentages of people holding working-class occupations.
Economic populists’ average vote shares were, respectively, 12.3 and 6.4 percentage points higher than other candidates’ in those places. 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 findings are in line with previous research from the Center for Working-Class Politics that tested the impact of economic populism and similarly found that working-class voters prefer economic populists.
Yet even though we know that economic populism can help Democrats win back the working-class voters – of all races – who recent polls indicate are bolting from the Democrats at a rapid pace, the report also finds that Democrats are generally allergic to running against Roosevelt’s economic royalists.
Indeed, less than 10% of Democratic candidates called out Wall Street, billionaires, millionaires or CEOs on their candidate websites, and a related analysis by the Center found that only about 20% of TV ads by Democrats in competitive 2022 house races did so. Less than 5% of ads invoked billionaires, the rich, Wall Street, big corporations or price gouging.
Nor, despite the Biden administration’s focus on industrial policy and jobs creation, are Democrats centering bread-and-butter economic issues that resonate with the working-class voters they need to stop Trump in November. Indeed, just 30% of TV ads released by 2022 Democratic candidates in competitive districts focused primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, from high-quality jobs to reining in drug and consumer costs.
The other 70% prioritized abortion, resistance to Trump and Republican extremism or individual candidate qualities. A mere 18% of these ads said anything at all about jobs, less than 2% talked about the need for high-quality, good-paying or unionized jobs, and virtually none talked about specific policy proposals to create better employment – like generating new manufacturing positions or expanding job training programs.
As a result, despite Democrats’ progressive economic policy goals, many voters simply don’t associate them with the ideas that will improve their lives. They feel 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.
Simply, the Democratic party faces an image crisis among working-class voters as severe as any we’ve seen since the 1960s.
This is not to say that there are no Rooseveltian anti-elite populists in the Democratic camp. Indeed, candidates such as Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Tim Ryan embraced this kind of rhetoric and overperformed relative to President Biden’s 2020 margins in difficult races with large working-class electorates. But there are vanishingly few candidates who combined full-throated economic populism with the ambitious economic policies Democrats need to send working-class voters a credible message that they really understand and care about the issues they care about.
Why are Democrats so loth to attack economic elites? There are many reasons – both ideological and political – but the party’s anti-populist bias is probably related to the changing class dynamics of its electoral and donor base. Research by Sam Zacher shows that the Democratic party has increasingly relied on affluent, highly educated voters to make up for their declining support among the working class. Zacher emphasizes that the Democrats’ increasingly affluent base has been reflected in the party’s policy priorities – which carefully avoid proposals that might directly challenge the interests of economic elites.
Without a major course correction, Democrats’ elite bias means they will continue to resist rhetorical class war against the plutocrats and the bold economic reforms needed to overcome decades of perceived neglect among working-class voters.
In the short-term, if Democrats don’t change course, the Republican party will look more and more appealing to working-class voters, and the electoral math for Democrats in working-class-heavy swing states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania will become increasingly dire.
In the long term, unless Democrats can make credible appeals to working-class voters through policy and rhetoric, we face the prospect of a long-term class realignment with the affluent and poor on the Democratic side and the working class on the Republican. This would negate any possibility of forging a majoritarian coalition to deliver the economic reforms working people so desperately need, and would guarantee that culture war rather than class war defines American politics for the foreseeable future.
To fix this problem and defeat Trumpism, progressives must take a page from President Roosevelt’s playbook and call out economic elites as the main obstacle to rebuilding working-class communities.
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Jared Abbott is the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics
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Bhaskar Sunkara is the 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
