The Dubious Theory That Working-Class Voters Want Candidates Who "Look Like Them"

Like many other center-left parties across the Western world, the Democratic Party has experienced a significant decline in support among working-class voters over the past two decades or so—whether class is measured by household income, occupational status, or educational attainment. This trend has confronted Democrats with a particularly acute electoral challenge in parts of the country where blue-collar white citizens constitute a majority of the voting population, including much of the Midwest and interior West as well as small towns and rural areas across most of the nation.

This partisan realignment is primarily driven by the rising salience of cultural conflicts, Compared to citizens with socioeconomic advantage, working-class voters are more patriotic, nationalistic, traditionalist, and skeptical of social change; they also consistently hold more conservative preferences on subjects like abortion, LGBT rights, gun control, environmentalism, and immigration. As the public image of the Democratic Party has become more associated with cultural liberalism, it has lost its formerly durable popular reputation as primarily concerned with representing the political interests of the working class.

If winning a greater share of the working-class vote in the future requires the party to become more moderate on cultural issues, liberal Democrats would be forced into an unappetizing choice between ideological purity and electoral success. But if another path exists to reverse the party’s growing unpopularity among this key voting bloc, such a dilemma might be happily avoided. Thus an alternative hypothesis has attracted considerable acceptance among progressive activists and primary voters in recent years: Democrats can appeal to blue-collar Americans by nominating performatively “working-class” candidates who nonetheless champion progressive issue platforms.

This idea has a long history, but its most prominent recent manifestation was the Senate campaign of Pennsylvania lieutenant governor John Fetterman in 2022. Fetterman became nationally famous for dressing casually and speaking plainly, with his tattoos, hooded sweatshirts, and running shorts featuring prominently in press coverage of his candidacy as supposed authentication of his Everyman identity. To some observers, especially supporters on the left, Fetterman’s victory served as proof of concept for the claim that liberalism in a Carhartt wardrobe was a formula for success in a critical battleground state.

Unfortunately. it’s very difficult to analytically isolate Fetterman’s presentation of self from the other factors that might have contributed to his election in 2022; he faced a weak carpetbagging opponent, and Democrats nationwide performed better than the president’s party usually does in a midterm election (probably due to the Supreme Court’s unpopular Dobbs ruling issued that summer). But another test of the theory arrived two years later with Kamala Harris’s selection of Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate. Democratic supporters and sympathetic media figures celebrated Walz as a “regular midwestern dad” who wore flannel shirts, went pheasant hunting, and had coached high school football, and was therefore an ideal ambassador to blue-collar and rural voters.

It didn’t work. The Harris-Walz team was the worst performing presidential ticket in rural America in modern history, receiving just 32 percent of the total vote in non-metropolitan counties nationwide. Vice presidential nominees usually don’t matter much to electoral outcomes, and this was likely true in 2024. But it’s fair to say that Walz did not electrify the campaign trail or dominate in his debate against J. D. Vance.

This year, Graham Platner is the leading test case for the dress-down-and-win hypothesis. Platner’s profile as a bearded and tattooed military veteran turned oyster farmer with a sharp-edged speaking style and strongly progressive political views attracted early support from Bernie Sanders and several labor unions. While his actual “blue-collar” credentials are somewhat arguable (he attended two private prep schools and has received regular financial assistance from his attorney father), Platner’s candidacy caught fire among Maine Democrats. He succeeded in driving Maine’s sitting governor Janet Mills from the primary race and now stands as the presumptive opponent to five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins. But the relative political novice has had some skeletons emerge from his closet since he declared his candidacy; even the tattoos turn out to be a bit of a problem.

While we wait to find out whether Platner’s flaws render him unacceptable to the Maine general electorate, it’s worth considering how much of the strategic argument for candidates like him is founded on assumptions that working-class voters respond very powerfully to superficial signals of “blue collar” identity (like personal appearance or language style), and that nominating candidates with these attributes is a more effective path than ideological repositioning on substantive policy matters to winning elections in competitive constituencies. After all, the most popular politician in our lifetimes among small-town Americans is a super-wealthy business tycoon from New York City who only takes off his neckties when he’s playing golf on the courses that he owns.

A common touch is surely an asset in politics; this is one reason why Elizabeth Warren underperforms other Democratic candidates in Massachusetts elections. But it’s not the only thing that’s important to voters, even those of modest social status. We should be suspicious of the implication that working-class citizens care more about vibes than policy, especially when such suggestions come from well-educated white-collar activists who themselves hold very strong ideological commitments. Whether or not it’s offensive condescension in the guise of sympathy, there’s just not much evidence that it’s true.

One person who has come to agree is John Fetterman himself. Fetterman has continued to insist on maintaining his casual fashion style while serving in the Senate, but he responded to Donald Trump’s 2024 victory in Pennsylvania by starting to break with other Democrats on multiple issues. His constituents have noticed, now perceiving him as significantly more moderate than the rest of his party. This reinvention may doom Fetterman in the 2028 primaries—if he indeed runs for a second term as a Democrat—but it’s a tried-and-true method for winning general elections in a competitive state. Just ask Susan Collins.

Honest Graft Podcasting with Chris Hayes and FiveThirtyEight

Along with Matt Grossmann, the co-author of my new book Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, I've recently appeared on two major podcasts devoted to American politics. You can hear our discussion with MSNBC's Chris Hayes on his podcast Why Is This Happening? here, and our talk with Galen Druke of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast here. Both episodes are also widely available on popular podcast apps.

New Interview at The Signal on the Generation Gap in American Politics

 I recently spoke to Michael Bluhm at The Signal about the uniquely pro-Democratic skew of millennial and Gen-Z voters, and how this trend fits within larger demographic changes within the American population. An edited transcript of our conversation is now available.

Some Lessons and Questions After the Kansas Abortion Referendum

1. Since the Roe v. Wade decision, the typical American's position has been "abortion should be legally permitted for some reasons but not others." This remains true even in many conservative-leaning states, like Kansas, where a majority of elected representatives are pro-life.

2. Neither party fully represents this view, but the Dobbs decision has abruptly shifted the terms of political debate from whether abortions should be made modestly harder to get (a somewhat popular position) to whether they should be banned almost entirely (much less popular). This puts Republicans in a riskier position than they were in before Dobbs.

3. Republicans could partially mitigate this risk by moderating their abortion positions. But the trend within the party has instead moved toward greater ideological purity. Not only are there fewer pro-choice Republican candidates than there used to be, but a growing number of pro-life Republicans now oppose carving out exceptions to legal prohibition (e.g. to protect the woman's health) that were once considered standard doctrine within the party.

4. The abortion issue will almost certainly work to the net advantage of Democratic candidates this fall compared to an alternative timeline in which the Dobbs ruling did not occur. Dobbs forces Republicans to defend a less popular position than before, and it also provides an extra motivator for Democrats to turn out in a midterm election when they otherwise might have felt some ambivalence. How much of an advantage, however, is unclear; odds are still against it having a transformative effect on the overall outcome.

5. The overturning of Roe also makes abortion a much bigger issue in state and local politics than it ever was before. We will now start to find out what the effects of this change will be. They, too, are difficult to predict with confidence.

6. By increasing the electoral salience of abortion, an issue on which higher levels of education are associated with more liberal views, Dobbs will probably work to further increase the growing "diploma divide" separating Dem-trending college graduates from GOP-trending non-college whites. The best-educated county in Kansas is Johnson County (suburban Kansas City), where 56 percent of adults hold at least a bachelor's degree. Johnson County voted for George W. Bush in 2004 by 23 points, for John McCain in 2008 by 9 points, and for Mitt Romney in 2012 by 17 points, but was carried by Joe Biden in 2020 with an 8-point margin over Donald Trump. It voted against the pro-life referendum on Tuesday by a margin of 68 percent to 32 percent.

7. After the unusual national focus on politics during the Trump years, it would be reasonable to expect a bit of a collective withdrawal—a "vibe shift," perhaps—as Americans adjusted to the less aggressively newsworthy Biden presidency by spending more of their time and attention on other matters. But the remarkably high turnout rate for the Kansas referendum (held at a normally sleepy time of year for politics) raises the possibility that mass political engagement will remain at elevated levels despite Trump's departure from office. It's another thing to keep an eye on as we head into November.

Why Disney Couldn't Stay Out of the Culture War

In late March, Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his fellow Republicans who control the state legislature enacted a law that prohibits “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity" in "kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." The bill, dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" law by liberal opponents, has attracted substantial national attention over the past few weeks. Given both DeSantis's potential national political ambitions and the prospect of parallel legislation passing in other Republican-governed states, it's likely that this issue won't fade quickly.

Activists on the left have achieved increasing success in persuading major corporations headquartered in red states to publicly oppose conservative legislation in the areas of race, gender, and culture—such as the decision by Delta Air Lines and the Coca-Cola Company to criticize a Republican-enacted law changing voting practices in Georgia after Donald Trump's narrow defeat there in 2020 (the passage of which also resulted in the relocation of the 2021 Major League Baseball All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver). Since the Walt Disney Company is surely the major American corporation best identified with the state of Florida, Disney was destined to become a similar target of pressure once the anti-"Don't Say Gay" effort became a national liberal cause. As a result, the company has found itself in a partisan entanglement that it had very much wished to avoid.

Regardless of where one might personally stand on this issue or any other, it seems natural to expect major corporations to avoid taking sides on controversial political topics—especially those that don't directly affect the financial bottom line. Isn't it just smart business to avoid alienating even one potential customer? And yet the trend of companies weighing in on culture-war issues—and, crucially, on the left side of these issues—is on the rise, even though they have faced threats of reprisal from conservatives for doing so. Disney offers an illuminating case study that demonstrates why this is happening.

Since the locus of conflict here is a law passed in the state of Florida, we might be forgiven for thinking of Disney in this particular case mostly as a theme-park company—albeit a theme-park company that operates the largest single-site employer in the United States. But Disney is really an entertainment conglomerate that, in addition to its famous company-branded tradition of animated features, encompasses ABC and ESPN television, several major film studios (including Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel Studios), and the streaming services Disney+ and Hulu. It makes most of its money not by selling tickets to the Magic Kingdom but by producing and distributing "content," to use the unpoetic term of the age.

The generators of this necessary content reside in an artistic and creative community that is both overwhelmingly liberal on cultural issues and increasingly attuned to day-to-day political developments via social media platforms and other channels of information. Disney needs to care about its reputation among these people, or it risks losing talent—both direct company employees and the outside writers, actors, producers, and directors with which it does business—to its industry competitors. And so any market pressure to avoid publicly opposing measures like DeSantis's law, lest it alienate conservative consumers, inevitably bumps against a different kind of market pressure: to avoid being perceived as unsupportive of the culturally liberal ethos that enjoys general consensus in Hollywood and, increasingly, among well-educated professionals elsewhere.

It's not surprising that Disney has handled this issue with palpable uncertainty and lack of ease. The company initially stayed quiet as the bill advanced through the Florida legislature, declining to join an open letter of opposition signed by 150 other corporations. But when some of its own employees began to protest against Disney's official silence, its CEO responded with an apologetic company-wide email message that called the legislation a "challenge to basic human rights." After DeSantis signed the bill into law, an official Disney statement announced that "our goal as a company is for this bill to be repealed by the legislature or struck down by the courts."

Yet the furious ensuing response from some conservatives confirmed Disney's instinct that the issue presented political risk in both ideological directions. DeSantis mocked the company as "woke Disney" while suggesting that various state-level exemptions and tax breaks that favor its financial interests might be repealed in retaliation—a threat echoed by some of his legislative allies. Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute accused Disney of a "campaign to embed left-wing sexual politics into its children's programming" and even suggested that it was a haven for sex criminals. Disney is now a frequent target of criticism from conservative media outlets, which seem to be taking particular delight in ridiculing the company's well-guarded "family-friendly" brand reputation.

The Disney case is not unique. As the culture war continues to rage, corporations, like other major institutions led by well-educated professionals with progressive social sensibilities, will increasingly align with the values of the Democratic left. This development, in turn, is bound to introduce new tensions into the relationship between big business and its traditional political allies in the Republican Party—especially as Republican politicians continue to take a more populist tack in the era of Trump. While it may be good business sense to proclaim that "the customer is always right," corporate leaders are finding out that in politics, "you can't please everybody" is a much more fitting axiom.