Donald Trump’s presidential election victory this month proved that his 2016 victory was no fluke. Like the populist right in Europe, Trump is fomenting a working class revolt against the ruling elite. This is a spreading fire that the Biden-Harris administration does not understand and has failed to respond to effectively.
Trump, who lost the national popular vote in his previous two White House runs, won this time by about 2.5 million votes, putting him on the borderline between an outright majority victory and a majority victory. As he made inroads into blue cities, suburbs and states, he made significant gains among independents and traditionally Democratic-leaning groups: young voters, blacks and especially Latino voters without a college degree.
The convergence of white working-class and non-white working-class voting behavior shattered the progressive myth that “voters of color” thought and voted alike along credible Democratic lines. Currently, class, defined primarily by level of education, appears to be overshadowing the country’s deepest political fault line: ethnicity.
Harris, under the yoke of an unpopular incumbent, could not withstand the powerful public appetite for political and economic change that was pushing the country to the right. Her defeat confirms the Democratic Party’s status as a diminished party now in the minority because it has lost touch with working families across Central America.
For decades, the party has chased the alluring mirage of a “new progressive majority” comprised of left-wing activists, minorities, college graduates and professionals. On the streets were working families who made up about two-thirds of the electorate.
Since Barack Obama left office in 2016, the trend line has been consistently bad for Democrats. Analyst Ruy Teixeira reports that Harris underperformed Obama among black voters (26 points), Latinos (27 points) and young voters (19 points). Even more surprising are the numbers for non-white working-class voters (down 30 points for Democrats). And the party continued to lose ground among non-college white voters (down 10 points).
Harris did well with white college graduates. But this only highlights the strange class reversal that has made the Democratic Party the party of upper-class college graduates, while the Republican Party increasingly represents a multiethnic working class.
This problem has been decades in the making, so minor tweaks won’t fix it. The Democratic Party now needs a fundamental reorientation to prevent a political realignment of the United States around a new populist right-wing majority.
To regain competitiveness, the Democratic Party must reinvent itself. It’s a daunting task, but we can draw inspiration from many precedents.
A recent example of a successful electoral turnaround for a major centre-left party came from the UK. On July 4, the Labor Party, led by Keir Starmer (now Prime Minister), won a decisive victory, ending 14 years of conservative rule.
It capped a remarkable rebound for Labor, which suffered a crushing defeat in 2019 under Starmer’s hard-left predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. Boris Johnson’s Brexit-backing Conservatives have sacked 28 traditionally working-class constituencies that were part of Labour’s “red wall” in the industrial Midlands and North.
Over the past four years. Starmer was single-mindedly focused on moving the party back to the centre, and winning back working class voters. In July, Labor increased its support among working-class voters by 5 percentage points, sweeping 37 of 38 Redwall seats.
Democrats can also look back on their transformation in the late 1980s and 1990s. At the time, the party was suffering from a long losing streak in the White House, recording only one victory since 1968 and averaging a dismal 42% of the vote.
Ronald Reagan’s 49-state landslide in 1984 sparked the rise of the “New Democratic Party,” a movement of elected leaders and thinkers determined to disrupt the party’s electoral momentum and inject new intellectual energy into it. (Full disclosure: I served as a co-founder of the Democratic Leadership Council.)
The New Democrats challenged tired liberal orthodoxy and the dominance of special interests over the party’s agenda, focusing instead on the aspirations and values of working families who, in Bill Clinton’s words, “work hard and play by the rules.”
This difficult but necessary effort to reform the party culminated in Clinton’s 1992 election on a New Democratic platform of government modernization. Four years later, he became the first Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt to serve a second term.
The main lesson Democrats should take from this experience is to put working families first. Mathematically, there is no way to build a sustainable governing majority with college-educated voters alone. Morally, the People’s Party should reflect the mainstream values of the American middle class, not the rarefied “luxury beliefs” of the upper-class elite.
The Democratic Party must develop a new governing blueprint based on center-left pragmatism rather than the demands of the anti-market and cultural left. Progressives occupy a prominent place in the larger Democratic coalition, but that doesn’t mean they are behind the party’s steering wheel.
Rather than elite notions of climate change and “social justice,” the party wants to raise the standard of living for working families, create better alternatives to college to acquire in-demand skills, lower tax and regulatory burdens, and make government better. It’s about getting things done, getting things done faster, and elevating our common American identity over our disparate tribal identities in the cultural realm.
But who has the authority and ability to do all this? The best answer was elected as a Democrat. Unlike activists, constituency groups, media professionals, think tanks, foundations and academics, they get a reality test of public sentiment when they face voters every two, four or six years.
Fortunately, the party is particularly strong among governors like Jared Polis of Colorado, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Andy Beshear of Kentucky, as well as rookie governors like Josh Stein of North Carolina and former governors like Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island. has a wealth of talent. There are also rising stars in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Democrats need a new leader willing to invest time and trust in a collective effort to return the party to its working-middle-class roots. Who will move forward?
Will Marshall is the founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute.
