What the Working Class Really Believes

A new study tracks the evolution of working-class beliefs, and those of more upper classes, over the past 65 years.

by Harold Meyerson July 21, 2025

The reasons for the erosion of Democratic Party support within the American working class is a topic on which seemingly everyone has an opinion. It has renewed the debate between the left and the center of the party in the wake of the 2024 election defeat. It’s been an occasion for Republican schadenfreude, which certainly beats their turning a mirror on themselves. It’s been the subject of polling, of polling analysis, of exegesis of polling analysis. But nobody had sought to clarify these issues by assembling a numerically informed view of the evolution of public opinion during the past 65 years until the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), along with Jacobin, undertook a study that they’re releasing today.

What CWCP did was to look at the answers to 128 questions about social and economic issues posed by three rigorous academic surveys—the American National Election Study, the General Social Survey, and the Cooperative Election Study—from 1960 through 2022. They then tabulated the answers from working-class Americans and from middle- and upper-class Americans (lumping these two classes together), compared working-class answers to the other combined classes’ answers, and tracked those answers, and those comparisons, over time.

Any methodology inherently includes and excludes. Obviously, the racial composition of these classes changed considerably over this six-decade span, as did the native-born and immigrant composition, the status of women, the rate of family formation, and Americans’ median age. But inasmuch as the 2024 election made clear that the Democrats’ working-class problem had become cross-racial, and that a major gap was widening between the voting patterns of different classes, the CWCP study makes a much-needed contribution to our understanding of our changing political landscape.


Its most valuable finding, I think, concerns the attitudinal changes not of the working class, but of the middle/upper class over the past 65 years. That’s the class (I’ll speak of it as a single class, since that’s how the study presents it) that’s moved the furthest left on social and economic questions. On economic issues, both then and now, the working class still holds more progressive positions than the middle/upper, but that middle/upper has closed much of that gap since 1960. On social issues, both classes hold more progressive positions than they did in 1960, but the middle/upper has widened its lead over the working class during the ensuing six decades. As the study reports, “working-class Americans have become moderately more conservative relative to middle- and upper-class Americans since the Obama administration, this is largely due to the latter group’s increasing progressivism rather than a rising tide of reaction among workers.”

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-21-what-the-working-class-really-believes/