The daunting task facing Democrats trying to win back the working class

It’s perhaps the most urgent reason Democrats lost in November: The party has solidly lost the support of working-class voters across the country and doesn’t have a solid sense of how to win them back.

Now, a group of Democratic researchers, strategists, and operatives are launching a renewed effort to figure out — and to communicate to the rest of their party — what it is that these voters want, where they think the party went wrong, and how to best respond to their concerns before the 2026 election cycle.

Led by Mitch Landrieu, former Democratic lieutenant governor of Louisiana and former mayor of New Orleans, the Working Class Project plans to offer guidance over the next few months on how to build “a more sustainable majority” in future elections.

Their challenge is daunting. In November 2024, Trump not only rallied the white working-class base of voters that first got him elected in 2016. He also cut into Democrats’ working-class support among voters of color: Nearly half of Latino voters and a historic share of Black voters backed Trump (anywhere from a tenth to nearly one in five). Exit polls from November also show that Trump won over new support from both lower-income and middle-income voters — those who make less than $100,000 per year, and particularly those who make less than $50,000 per year. Last year marked the first time in nearly 60 years that the lowest-earning Americans voted for the Republican presidential candidate over the Democratic one.

Some of this can be explained away by pointing to the confluence of factors that made last year’s election unique: the historic age and unpopularity of the incumbent president, the late-in-the-game candidate switch-up, high inflation, post-pandemic malaise, and Trump’s specific appeal. But Landrieu and the Working Class Project want Democrats to resist these excuses — and to accept that their decline with these voters predates Trump.

“Since President Obama was first elected in 2008, Democrats have seen over 25 percent in net loss of support among working class voters,” Landrieu explains in the project’s launch announcement. “In other words, for two decades, Democrats have been on a downward slide among the very voters whose interests we champion and who benefit most from our policies.”

What this effort looks like

Housed within the liberal opposition research firm and Super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, the Working Class Project is primarily focused on research, polling, and focus group works. They’re focused on reaching and listening to voters in 21 states: the traditional seven battleground states, seven safely Democratic states with large shares of white and nonwhite working-class voters (which drifted right last year), and seven solidly Republican states.

Some of these focus groups have already been conducted — the group began this work in February after Trump’s inauguration — and they plan on interviewing labor, faith, and local leaders as well. The group is also planning a longer-term study with an in-depth focus on a handful of dynamics unique to the 2024 election that most of the party still seems adrift on. That includes following and finding out the motivations of young white, Black, Latino, and AAPI men who Trump won over, and what their media consumption habits look like. They also say that they’ll conduct longitudinal research on working-class people in these states to track their behavior over the course of Trump’s second term to track their reactions to things like tariffs, taxes, and immigration.

“With this deep listening to working class voters across 21 states, we’ll identify messages, messengers, and new mediums to rebuild the Democratic brand and write a blueprint for victory that we’ll deploy using every tool in our toolbox,” the group said.

Their effort, of course, isn’t the only one on the left trying to discern and solve the party’s branding, messaging, and policy problems. But their framing is a bit different.

Democrats face a numbers problem in 2028 and beyond

The group’s memo says they chose those 21 states because they are the fastest-growing and stand to gain the most from congressional reapportionment in 2030. They include seven “growth” states where Democrats are no longer competitive at the statewide level: Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas. And it’s those states where Democrats will need to seriously compete if they hope to win the presidency or hold the Senate after 2030.

It’s also in those states where Trump’s 2024 gains — if they hold — would make it impossible for Democrats to be competitive without winning back more working-class voters. To be sure, Trump himself is already doing some of this work for his opposition. His approval ratings have swung sharply away from him in at least nine of those 21 states, according to polling estimates conducted by data journalists at The Economist. And his chaotic handling of tariffs, inflation, and the economy in general is likely contributing to this discontent among his 2024 coalition.

But Democrats will have to do more to take advantage of this skepticism with Trump. The Brennan Center for Justice’s reapportionment projections for 2030 suggest that with population losses in solidly Democratic and swing states, a future Democratic presidential candidate will face difficult odds for an Electoral College win after those votes are reallocated to match census estimates. After 2030, the Center estimates, “even if a Democrat in 2032 were to carry the Blue Wall states and both Arizona and Nevada, the result would be only a narrow 276–262 win” making Democratic gains with men, working-class voters, and voters in the South and the Heartland an existential challenge.