Class and Worldview
In 2023 and 2024, Working Families Power engaged in a year-long research project to better understand the values and priorities of working class voters across race. The research defines the working class, and describes seven different values-based voter clusters, from Next Gen Left to Core MAGA, with several cross-pressured groups between.
Introduction
Long gone are the days when “soccer moms” were the constituency that would decide American elections. In 2024, working class voters hold the balance of the country in their hands. Across the ideological spectrum, this claim has taken on the status of received wisdom. The shift in the Democratic Party’s coalition towards more affluent, highly educated voters is now widely documented.1 And many in the Republican Party believe that their party’s future lies with working class voters, who are drawn to the party’s social conservatism, if only the GOP can overcome its fealty to a small government ideology that has much less appeal to working class voters.2 Donald Trump’s “populism” is believed by many to have a special appeal to working class voters. Moreover, in 2024, “working class” is not simply pundit and pollster code for white working class: poll after poll shows an alarming softening of support for Democrats among younger Latinos and Black men. Nevertheless, many questions remain unanswered.
In particular, we observe three major shortcomings in how class is understood and how it is used to explain contemporary political alignments.
First, the discussion of class in America now takes place overwhelmingly through what is in fact a proxy for class – and a crude one at that – namely, the presence or absence of a four-year bachelor’s degree. Second, the widespread belief that the working class is more socially, culturally, and perhaps even more economically conservative than the middle and upper classes is assumed more often than it is convincingly demonstrated, as is that claim’s main implication, that the greater social and cultural conservatism of the working class explains the working class’s drift away from the Democrats and towards the GOP. Finally, by any sensible definition, the working class represents a gigantic share of the electorate. Yet ideological differences within the working class are almost never explored in any systematic way, except by relying on other demographic categories like race and age.
Working Families Power, a sister organization of the Working Families Party, has the mission of building power for and with the multiracial working class. We believe that the working class is structurally underrepresented in our political system, and that this underrepresentation directly contributes to inequality and injustice in our society. Overcoming that underrepresentation requires building progressive political majorities anchored in the broad working class. Any program for doing so must begin with a clear map of the ideological diversity of working class voters.
Key Findings:
#1: The middle and upper classes strongly favored Biden over Trump in 2020, while the working class was split, with high abstention rates.
#2: We see large differences between classes on topics relating to class, economic fairness, and distribution, in which the working class is uniformly to the left of the middle and upper classes
#3: Differences between classes are much smaller on social and cultural questions compared to economic fairness questions, and they do not uniformly point to a working class that is more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes. #4:
The multiracial working class is large and diverse, representing approximately 63% of registered voters. We identify seven distinct ideological profiles within the working class: Next Gen Left, Mainstream Liberals, Tuned Out Persuadables, Anti-Woke Traditionalists, Secure Suburban Moderates, Diverse Disaffected Conservatives, and Core MAGA. Bringing more working class voters into a progressive coalition requires understanding the particular ways in which different groups of working class voters are cross-pressured.
Read the full report: Class and Worldview: A Report on the Multiracial Working Class