"We Need to Talk...": How Democrats Lost the Working Class and How They Might Find Their Way Back

The working class, a term more often invoked in rhetoric than properly defined, is the backbone of the American economy and has long occupied a central place in both popular imaginaries and scholarly accounts of American political development. As their relationship with partisan coalitions has shifted, working-class voters have steadily remained a focal point of recent electoral analysis. This thesis investigates the causes of this realignment by examining whether shifts in economic policy preferences can explain contemporary working-class defection, or whether alternative explanations rooted in culture, race, and political communication offer greater analytical leverage. Drawing on data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) and the General Social Survey (GSS) from 1992 to 2024, the analysis proceeds in three stages. First, it establishes that working-class defection is genuine and consistent across five definitional approaches: education, income (bottom one-third and bottom two-thirds), occupation, and self-identification. Second, it examines working-class economic attitudes toward government spending, labor unions, trade protection, and inequality reduction, as well as the perceived ideological distance between working-class respondents and presidential candidates on economic intervention. The results reveal a paradox: working-class voters hold broadly liberal economic preferences and perceive Democratic candidates as closer to their positions than Republicans, yet they have increasingly supported the Republican Party. Finally, the thesis adjudicates among cultural, racial, and alternative economic explanations for this disconnect. The most compelling explanation centers on the Democratic Party's shift away from predistributive policies, job guarantees, union strength, minimum wage increases, and trade protection, toward redistributive policies that were never the primary basis of working-class loyalty. This policy reorientation, combined with rhetorical framing that fails to resonate with working-class experience, has produced a durable perception that the party no longer represents working people. The thesis concludes by considering what these findings mean for a party that can no longer afford to avoid the conversation.