A new study by Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams, of nearly 2 million 2024 Trump voters, shows that more than one in five are not planning to vote for the Republicans in 2028. That group, which they call the “waverers,” is disproportionately poor, non-white, and working class.

But neither are these waverers planning to return to the Democrats. According to the study:

Of the 20.1 percent who are wavering, only 3.4 percent plan to vote Democrat. The remaining 16.7 percent say they will vote for neither party or are unsure.

That poses a severe problem for anyone who believes that our political system should better represent the needs and interests of working people. And it should scare the hell out anyone who fears the rise of more authoritarians in the future.

These workers clearly are telling us that they don’t have a home. We’d better figure out how to help build one.

Run more working-class candidates in the Democratic Party?

That’s what most progressives argue for. They believe that such candidates can attract these disgruntled workers back into the Party. As one progressive campaign operative said to me, “Our goal is to once again make the Democratic Party the party of the working-class.” That’s also what the League of Labor Voters and the Working Families Party are trying to do.

But it’s an uphill struggle. According to the Guardian:

“Millionaires make up less than 3% of the general public but have unified majority control of all three branches of the federal government. Working-class Americans, on the other hand, make up about half of the country. But they have never held more than 2% of the seats in any Congress since the nation was founded.

For every former bartender like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there are thousands of ambitious candidates who are well-off members of the bar.

The Democratic Party brand is in big trouble. In the study the Labor Institute conducted with the Center for Working-Class Politics (again with Jared Abbot, that boy gets around), 70 percent of the 3,000 voters surveyed in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin had negative things to say about the Democrats. And a hypothetical Democratic candidate ran 8 percent behind an independent candidate even when they said exactly the same things.

That makes it next to impossible to launch Democratic working-class candidates in the 130 congressional districts in which the Democrats already lose by more than 25 percent. In those areas, the Democratic Party is not just dying, it is dead.

What are the odds, really, of the Democrats changing their stripes? Do the reformers really believe........

© Common Dreams