It’s the Culture, Stupid

Politically coveted working class voters who helped send President-elect Donald Trump back to the White House feel unwelcome in the Democratic Party, a compound cultural fracture with the left that is complicating Democrats’ post-election efforts to revive their prospects with a bloc that is crucial in national elections.

Working class voters were a reliable Democratic constituency for decades. But Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris capped a slide that predated the incoming Republican commander in chief, as blue collar voters increasingly prioritized visceral issues like gun rights, abortion, immigration, and energy over a liberal economic agenda that included the strong backing of organized labor. This rift has grown so deep it’s no longer about policy. Working class voters believe the Democratic Party, now dominated by college-educated professionals, is intolerant of how they live—and often, how they make a living.

“Our party is full of elitists who pat the working class on the head and say: ‘Don’t worry, we know what’s best for you,’” Jeffrey Forbes, a Democratic lobbyist in Washington, D.C., told The Dispatch. “We’ve always been known as a big tent party. Right now, we’re a big tent party with a rope and stanchion out in front with a sign saying who’s welcome and who’s not.”

Economic hardship fueled by historically high inflation and housing affordability, plus worries about public safety, no doubt had a major impact on working class voters’ support for Republicans in November (including in the Senate).

But veteran Democratic insiders tell The Dispatch their party’s cultural break with the working class is a problem that looms larger in future elections. Indeed, healing this break is essential if Democrats hope to reclaim the White House in 2028—and doing so begins not simply with a fresh or reinvigorated economic agenda, but by becoming more culturally accepting of working class voters’ values and lifestyle.

“We’ve attracted support from college-educated voters but the numbers don’t work. Sixty-eight percent of the electorate does not have a four-year degree,” explained Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank in Washington. “Because they don’t relate to us, they don’t like us and they think we don’t like them. That’s a huge problem.”

Working class voters, Bennett added, “voted for Trump because of a vibe of who he is. Sure, they thought he would be better for the economy but it was because he was connecting with them. He didn’t make them feel racist for being born white or bigoted for wanting to control the border. … Those are things we need to address.”

The Democratic Party’s ongoing exercise of figuring out what went wrong last year comes as Trump is set to be inaugurated Monday and the Democratic National Committee prepares to elect a new chair roughly 10 days later. 

By the numbers, the Trump-Harris contest was close. Just 1.5 percentage points—2.3 million raw votes—separated the Democratic and Republican nominees nationwide, with Trump garnering 49.9 percent (77.3 million votes) and Harris receiving 48.4 percent (75 million votes.) But Trump’s victory was sweeping in other ways. He won the Electoral College decisively, 312 to 226, carried all seven swing states and made significant gains with typically core Democratic cohorts, among them white and nonwhite working class voters without college degrees.

The national exit polling data compiled by CNN in the last three presidential elections tell the story. 

In 2016, among voters without a college degree, Trump outpaced Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton 51 percent to 42 percent; in 2020 he barely edged Biden with this cohort 50 percent to 48 percent; and then in 2024 he scored his biggest win yet with this group, 56 percent to 43 percent. In 2016, among voters earning less than $50,000, Trump lost to Clinton 51 percent to 42 percent; in 2020 he fell to Biden 55 percent to 44 percent; and in 2024 he nearly closed the gap, losing to Harris 50 percent to 48 percent.

The shift toward Trump among nonwhite working class voters is revealed in exit polling of key swing states that, for instance, feature significant shares of Hispanic voters. In 2020, Biden outpaced Trump among nonwhite voters without a college degree 60 percent to 38 percent in Arizona, and 62 percent to 34 percent in Nevada. In 2024, Trump shrunk the gap considerably in each state, losing the same bloc to Harris just 54 percent to 44 percent in Arizona and 54 percent to 43 percent in Nevada.

Post-election, Democratic insiders have been reassessing the party’s agenda, messaging, and strategy. Elected officials, activists, political strategists, and media figures have been participating in this informal postmortem, drawing a range of conclusions.

Some Democrats believe the party has to course-correct on border security and illegal immigration to prove to voters that they care about the former and oppose the latter. Some, like former Senate aide Adam Jentleson, believe the party has become too beholden to political activist groups. “They don’t tend to represent a lot of people on the ground,” he told The Dispatch last month. Still others believe the problem is that Democrats have not offered working class voters a compelling economic agenda, as argued this month in Washington Monthly, a liberal political journal.

“Biden and Harris failed to address the biggest issues in a serious way—or they fell into the trap of saying the economy is already fine,” said an organized labor operative in a Midwestern swing state who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “Week one of the Harris campaign was all economics. It was exciting. People were interested. Sadly, they dropped that message immediately.”

But even this individual conceded the Democrats’ challenge in winning back working class voters is “a mixture of both culture and policy.” And some Democrats believe getting the policy right is irrelevant if the cultural chasm isn’t bridged. 

That’s because blue collar voters do not just feel as though they have differences of opinion with Democratic leaders and the party’s activist base. They feel belittled—especially for views that can include religiously motivated opposition to abortion rights, passionate support for the Second Amendment, and fervent opposition to illegal immigration. Another cause of this cultural friction can be working class skepticism of climate change and the fact that they are employed by the fossil fuel industry, including drilling for oil and natural gas, and fracking.

“Guns and oil, these are cultural keys,” said Dane Strother, a Democratic strategist who spends a lot of his time in Montana. “If you’re pro-gun, you’re assumed to have an entire set of values that may or may not be accurate. People vote with their guts, not their heads, and they have to feel like they’re appreciated.”

Mike Veon, a Democratic former member of the Pennsylvania Legislature who served for 22 years, recalls experiencing the downside of what was then a budding cultural disconnect as far back as the late 1980s while running for reelection in his Pittsburgh-area district, a ground zero of sorts for the working class shift to the GOP.

Veon, who backed abortion rights, was routinely re-hired by his constituents, many of whom were Catholic and opposed to the practice but also were union members. They supported Veon’s economic agenda, which included a commitment to policies that benefited organized labor. But as the union manufacturing jobs in western Pennsylvania began disappearing, fraying the social bonds created by labor union affiliation, voters began to pull the lever based on cultural issues like abortion and gun rights. And on those issues, then as now, they had more in common with Republicans.

Veon remembers attending regularly scheduled union meetings, often with hundreds in attendance, and getting an enthusiastic reception just for showing up. For years, his relationship with his working class constituents continued this way. But as the thousands of union jobs in a steel mill in the area dried up, so did enthusiasm for Veon. 

“I’d walk in and they’d give me a standing ovation, I didn’t say anything, I didn’t even do anything. But they understood instinctively that I was on their side and their decision process about politics was all economics. Fast forward—that’s 1984—by 1989, nobody worked at that mill,” Veon explained. “I’d knock on the same guy’s door four years later. He’d say, ‘Mike, I can’t be for you,’ and he would have a reason—it could be guns, it could be abortion.”

“The voters’ touchstone has become cultural rather than economic,” he added.