Since 2016, when Donald Trump shattered the Democrats’ blue wall by winning working-class voters across the Midwest, a cottage industry has sprung up on the left dedicated to answering a single question: How can Democrats win back the working class?

The answers come in different forms.

Sometimes it is veteran Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, railing against “the oligarchs.”

Or it’s Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who after the 2024 election declared, “Democrats must reclaim our identity as the party of the working class.”

Or a new generation of candidates – tattooed veterans, mechanics, bartenders – whose biography is supposed to do the political work that policy has not.

Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who had become the left’s latest blue-collar savior until he ended his campaign in the wake of a sexual assault allegation, put the theory in its most unguarded form.

“We are in a form of class war,” he says. “And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people.”

The most recent high-profile progressive candidate to embrace those working people: Abdul El-Sayed, whose economic populism helped him win the 2026 Michigan Democratic Senate primary. Called a “working class” champion by the United Auto Workers, El-Sayed performed best in wealthier, higher-educated areas of the state. His opponent, Haley Stevens, drew more support from Detroit and working-class communities.

Still, El-Sayed’s victory has led to a familiar refrain: Somewhere out there is a latent working-class majority, held together by shared economic grievances, waiting to be politically reassembled to vote for Democrats. The New Deal did it – “economic populism” can do it again.

I’m a political scientist who has written extensively about rural and working-class communities. I believe it is an open question whether these reformist Democrats are really interested in understanding working-class voters on their own terms. Because working-class voters, as they tell us themselves, are not simply waiting to be activated by the right program, messenger or phrase. “Fight the oligarchy” probably isn’t going to do it.

Working-class voters have a worldview. For 50 years, it has been growing less compatible with the Democratic Party’s – not because working-class voters changed,........

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