Which Political Party Will Represent Working Families in the Future? - Gary Sasse

Which Political Party Will Represent Working Families in the Future? - Gary Sasse

Do the results of the 2024 presidential elections portend a realignment of the nation’s two major political parties?

Throughout the 20th Century, the arc of American history has advanced economic opportunity and the upward mobility of working people. The goal was to make future generations more prosperous than the previous ones. This was reflected by a succession of mostly Democratic Administrations promoting agendas such as the New Deal, Fair Deal, Great Society, and New Frontier. These initiatives supported union and government programs to build and sustain a strong middle class. Articulating working people’s concerns gave the Democrats a formidable political base on which to build national campaigns.

Recently, the Party’s leftward pivot has frayed this relationship. By 2024, Democrats were losing voters that they traditionally counted upon to win elections. Exit polls indicate that President Trump won more than half of middle-income voters earning between $50,000 and $99,999; a cohort that strongly favored President Biden just four years earlier.

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Many of these voters are the ones who are getting hammered by rising housing, child care, and food costs, having their children trapped in failing schools, and witnessing the government’s inability to get things done effectively and on time.

Working-class voters expect elected leaders to address their everyday “bread and butter” concerns. Is my neighborhood safe? Do I have a good-paying job? Are my kids’ schools preparing them for a prosperous future? Can I get a dollar’s worth of public service for each dollar paid in taxes? Instead, progressives who gained significant influence in the Party were proposing that the way to end discrimination was more discrimination. The unprecedented entry of illegal immigrants was okay.  “Biden economics” worked for the middle class, and using identity politics was the way to build governing majorities.

As Senator Bernie Sanders observed, “It should come as no surprise that a Democratic Party which abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and co-founder of the Liberal Patriot, opined; “The left believed America was a white supremacist society, fully bought into climate catastrophism, prized ‘equity’ above social order, good governance, and equal opportunity, and thought ‘no human being is illegal’ was a good approach to immigration policy.”

Hoping that the Trump Administration will make unforced errors and fail is not a strategy for long-term political success. The future will center on which party puts forth a common-sense agenda that connects with the pragmatic middle class. The jury is still out on this.

Teixeria suggests that the Democratic Party need not die on hills where compromise could reassure working and middle-class voters. These hills are border security and deportation, identity politics, equity of outcomes versus equality of opportunity, transgender rights for juveniles, and regulations and mandates driving up the cost of living.

Democrats can start to reconnect with the middle by considering the deportation of illegal immigrants who have committed crimes.  Only twelve Democratic Senators and forty-six Representatives voted for the Laken Riley Act, which provides for the detention of illegals charged with crimes.

They can reassess their positions on matters that working-class voters see as conflicting with their cultural values. For example, only two-House Democrats voted for The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.

They should rethink how DEI is being enforced in a society that strives to be colorblind and merit-based. Martin Luther King’s dream was that people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

A strategy to win most of the working class needs to adhere to two best practices. First, articulation of a few key priorities and not try to echo the elites by being everything to everybody. The focal point should be programs to make the most productive use of people, capital, and natural resources. Second, gain control of the center by recognizing success depends on the goodwill and cooperation of others, not the advocacy groups that make-up the infrastructure of the political parties.

 

Gary Sasse served as the President of RIPEC, Director of the Rhode Island Departments of Administration and Revenue, and Director of the Hassenfeld Institute for Public Leadership at Bryant University.