To win over working-class voters, Harris and other Democrats should embrace economic populism

Every presidential campaign reveals the direction in which a candidate’s party is moving. This year’s choices of running mates are a good example. Donald Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his running mate shows that the Republican Party wants to reinforce its image as a populist, working-class party. And Kamala Harris shunned a centrist in Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania in favor of a progressive populist in Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota. The fact is that on policy, Walz’s populist credentials are quite real, while Vance’s are largely manufactured. But this much is clear: Both campaigns seem to recognize that the key to winning in November will be building trust with an electorate that increasingly sees both parties as elites out of touch with the concerns of ordinary working people.

Certainly, Americans’ distrust of elites is at a fever pitch. Institutions of power — from Congress to the media to the corporate sector — retain little of the public’s trust. Among voters of both major parties, trust in government is at its lowest level since the 1950s. More Americans than ever have negative views of both Democrats and Republicans, and a quarter do not feel represented by either party. Instead, most now believe that lobbyists and big donors, as well as corporations, have too much influence on politics. And an overwhelming majority of the American public believes that corporations are becoming too powerful in our economy.

This rupture in the relationship between the general public and elites is occurring alongside the march of class decline. That is, the Democratic Party’s base has shifted steadily from the working class to the upper-middle class of the suburbs — to the point that Republicans, for the first time in half a century, can challenge the Democrats’ claim to be the party of working America. After all, the wealthiest areas of the country are now blue, and the wealthiest voters are divided roughly across the aisle. Unfortunately, at a time when public contempt for elites is at its peak, the Democrats are likely to become as much of an elite party as the GOP.

In many ways, the Democratic Party is uniquely positioned to capitalize on anti-elite attitudes. While populist sentiment has found perceived champions on both sides of the aisle, not all of these calls have been genuine. While Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, has pushed to raise taxes on corporations and the wealthy, Donald Trump has signed a historic freebie for America’s wealthy and corporate America. While the Biden administration has bolstered organized labor, Republican judges and lawmakers have chipped away at labor. Looking beyond rhetoric and campaign promises, the party with the most credible claim to economic populism may still be the party of the New Deal.

But Democrats can’t assume that voters will see the party that way. For that to happen, they must embrace their role as defenders of ordinary workers against the predations of a wealthy upper class. And so it’s worth asking: Are Democrats embracing this role? How many Democrats are using populist rhetoric, either by explicitly appealing to workers or by appealing to economic elites? And is it working?

In our latest report, the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) attempted to answer these questions and more. To get a sense of where the Democratic message stands, we conducted a comprehensive quantitative analysis of the campaign rhetoric of Democratic candidates for Congress in 2022.

While our full study contains a wealth of important findings, our results on economic populism are not particularly encouraging. We find that while anti-elite rhetoric is effective in winning over working-class voters, few Democratic candidates actually deploy it. Overall, Democratic rhetoric is not suited to our moment of mass distrust of elites.

To examine Democrats’ communications strategies, the CWCP collected text from the websites of nearly 1,000 Democratic candidates running in the 2022 House or Senate elections. Our analysis provides an important insight into the promise of economic populism. We looked for two components of populism in candidates’ rhetoric. The first component puts workers forward, portraying them as the engine that keeps the economy going and as people who deserve a decent standard of living. This was common: more than 70% of candidates spoke positively about employees. That said, less than half mentioned unions, so even here there is still a lot of room for improvement.

The second strand of populism, on the other hand, points the finger at economic elites as responsible for ​“ruining the engine — that is, for massive economic misery, for standing between workers and the quality of life they deserve. This kind of rhetoric was much rarer: Less than 20% of candidates went after big corporations, billionaires, Wall Street or high prices in this way. Less than 15% attacked corporate money in politics, and less than 5% of candidates went after the top 1%, corporate or big bank greed. A separate analysis of television commercials found that only about 15% of candidates mentioned economic elites in any way, even in competitive races, where such rhetoric proved most effective. This result is perhaps not surprising: After all, it is easy to speak positively about one group, but harder to actively antagonize another — especially if the other group makes up a large share of the donor pool.

The lack of anti-elite rhetoric wouldn’t be so troubling if it weren’t for another important finding: Candidates who use such rhetoric outperform other candidates in heavily working-class districts—by as much as two to three percentage points. Crucially, this relationship holds after we account for relevant candidate and district factors that influence elections, across a range of statistical specifications. This is consistent with findings from our previous experimental research, as well as those of other pollsters.

But rhetoric alone will not be enough: as we have shown elsewhere, politicians’ words must be backed up by ambitious policies that address working-class grievances so that they are taken seriously.

If Democrats hope to win back working-class voters in an environment of elite distrust, as they should, more of them will have to acknowledge and validate that distrust. That’s a tall order, given the vast forces working against them. Party messaging is inherently grassroots, so deploying anti-elite rhetoric has only become harder as Democrats have begun to transform into a party of the upper class. Wealthy elite and corporate donors continue to bankroll Democratic campaigns. And the upper class is also working overtime to make populism the object of widespread fear: in the media and intellectual circles, a flood of ideological currents are feverishly sounding the alarm against mob rule, against anti-intellectualism, against ​“the “paranoid style” of the masses – in short, against a gang of bogeymen who have been conjured up since the 1970s to smear populist movements 1890S.

But unlike these imagined ills, the dangers of chasing away economic populism are all too real. The GOP is Embracing populism, at least in name — in the selection of Vance, in hosting Teamsters President Sean O’Brien at the Republican National Convention, and in the party’s changing language. Ceding that ground to Republicans, in this moment of fluid coalitions, could cement Democrats’ role as the elite party — and potentially help usher in a second Trump term that promises to be disastrous, especially for working people.

Harris and other Democrats should instead recognize populism for what it is — a powerful egalitarian sentiment that promises to elevate the many over the few — and give it a voice. It would be a grave mistake to miss this opportunity.

​​Disclosure: The opinions expressed are those of the author. If a 501©3 non-profit organization, In these times does not support or oppose any candidate for public office.