The Working Class Is More Left-Wing Than You Think

A new survey shows that even Trump’s working class coalition is moving leftward on social issues.

https://newrepublic.com/article/198127/working-class-liberal-trump-poll

https://archive.ph/NFKF0


Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz speaks at Macomb County Community College Robert E. Turner Advanced Technology Center in Warren, Michigan.

I’m as delighted as the next guy that the MAGA cult is tearing itself apart over an Epstein client list that probably doesn’t exist. But only about half of all Republicans identify as MAGA, and within the entire voting population it’s more like 20 percent. The Trump constituency that interests me is his working-class supporters, of which MAGA is but a subset. Now, some fresh research suggests this critical group of voters is more liberal than you think.

A new report by the nonprofit Center for Working Class Politics, published today in Jacobin, suggests that about 20 percent of working-class voters who supported Donald Trump in 2020 support left-leaning economic policies such as imposing a millionaire tax, raising the $7.25 hourly minimum wage, and increasing spending on Social Security and public schools. Indeed, working class voters overall hold some economic views that are further left than the Brahmin left that’s forever despairing of the proletariat’s reactionary politics. “While these economically progressive Trump voters hardly represent a MAGA majority,” the authors write, “they represent a meaningful slice of the electorate (5 percent) that could easily tip elections in key working-class-heavy swing states” in the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

Looking at American political history over the past decade, it’s tempting to conclude that the electorate—and especially the working class that represents 57 percent of it, according to 2024 exit polls—has gotten more conservative. (I’m defining “working class” here conventionally as those who lack a college degree.) After all, this country elected Trump president twice. But according to the Center for Working Class Politics survey, when you compare political attitudes during the period from 1990 through 2007 and the period from 2008 to 2022, you find that working-class Americans moved leftward on economic and social issues, with the biggest leftward shift since 2007 on immigration and civil rights—Trump’s two biggest bugbears. (The survey defines “working class” as those lacking a college degree but also excludes any who are situated in the top one-third of the income distribution.)

The reason nobody noticed the working class’s leftward shift was that it was dwarfed by a much bigger leftward shift among middle- and upper-class Americans. Thus, relative to these groups, a leftward shift by the working class registers as a growing gap, with the working class ever-more conservative than the middle and upper classes. Paradoxically, “the same working-class coalition that elected Obama is now likely even more progressive than it was eighteen years ago.” But it’s also more alienated from the college graduates whose views have changed more rapidly, and who dominate the Democratic Party more than they did in 2008. The biggest gap, unsurprisingly, is on immigration, with “social norms” (i.e. wokeism) coming in second.

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