This year’s Democratic primaries look and sound a lot more populist than usual. Brian Poindexter, a union iron worker running on a “workers first” message, won a House primary outside Cleveland. Sherrod Brown is mounting a Senate comeback in Ohio on the same “rigged system” message that has allowed him to outshine other Democrats in Ohio. Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation logger who built his career fighting corporate landowners, is the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine. And Josh Turek, a self-described “prairie populist”, is on the Senate ballot in Iowa.

In fact, according to research we’ve conducted through the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), more than 70% of 2026 Democratic candidates now rely on populist rhetoric in their campaigns, laying the blame for our broken system on rich elites of one kind or another.

It seems after decades of bleeding working-class support, Democrats are converging on a solution to win them back: run populists.

The real question, then, is not whether Democrats should embrace populism, but rather what kind of populism they should embrace. To settle that argument, CWCP teamed up with the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI) to conduct a new survey.

In polling fielded by Verasight between late June and early July, we asked more than 6,000 Americans to rate 13 different kinds of messages commonly deployed by Democratic candidates to see which pitch would draw the strongest support. We also randomly presented each respondent with one of two Republican attack messages modeled on actual Republican campaign rhetoric in order to see how well Democratic messages hold up under attack.

The top-performing messages we tested have a simple formula. They focus on Americans’ day-to-day struggles to pay for rent and groceries, and the widespread........

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