Political scientists Robert Saldin (University of Montana) and B. Kal Munis (Utah Valley University) authored the report, which focuses on rural and working-class whites, for Niskanen Center. The executive summary follows:
The Democratic Party finds itself in a highly precarious electoral position. Although the party performed historically well in 2022, its central weaknesses – those which threaten its ability to govern both nationally and especially at the state level – were still very much in evidence. Even in “good” election cycles, Democrats struggle to translate their typically impressive aggregate vote totals across the country and within states into seats in government. Core to the party’s struggles are its weaknesses with rural and working-class voters. If left unaddressed, the party will not only become irrelevant throughout many states in the country, but it will also continue to face difficulty – and maybe increasing difficulty – in winning the presidency and congressional majorities.
To effectively address these problems, like-minded activists, donors, and others in the broader Democratic ecosystem must come together to form and institutionalize a proper faction within the party that has a platform and brand that differs from that of the big city and college campus-dominated national party establishment. This new faction needs to be capable of recruiting, financing, and otherwise supporting candidates to run on a platform and brand more appealing to the rural and working-class voters that the party has been hemorrhaging in recent decades. While this new faction will emphasize different issues than the national party, it need not alienate most voters within the current Democratic base. From a policy standpoint, the faction should pursue strategic moderation on social issues paired with progressive economic populism and championing, on a district-by-district basis, local issues that are not amenable to politicization in the national discourse.
The authors explain "faction":
The term “faction” is commonly used to refer to all sorts of political groupings and subgroupings with varying levels of coherence and organization. But we employ the term to refer to entities that are, essentially, parties within a party. By faction, we mean an institution within one of the major parties that has an affiliated team of politicians, political professionals, activists, interest groups, donors, and intellectuals. A faction is characterized by its formal organization and its grounding in ideas (as opposed to, say, the charisma of a single politician). There’s more structure to factions than a “wing,” or a “bloc” or a “Gang of X.”
(p. 11)
Regarding working-class Americans, the authors opine that Democrats face three chief problems:
1. distrust due to widespread perceptions, particularly in current and former manufacturing and natural resource extraction centers, that Democrats turned their backs on workers by advancing free-trade agreements and aligning with environmental groups;
2. umbrage over perceived disdain directed at them by national Democrats;
3. feelings that Democrats are increasingly foreign to and don’t care about working-class cities and towns.
Democrats should turn to Ohio for two excellent models—U.S. Representative and 2022 Senate nominee Tim Ryan and Senator Sherrod Brown—of how to make headway in addressing these difficulties. To address their working-class woes, Democrats need to focus on making incremental progress, not necessarily on winning these communities outright. Indeed, the Democrats have fallen out of favor among wage workers at such a rapid rate that focusing on cutting their loss margins is a necessary and ambitious first step.
* * *
Race is a topic that many in the working class, regardless of racial and ethnic background, feel alienated from Democrats on, Ryan navigated it well by adhering to the approach that other class focused candidates such as Brown and Bernie Sanders follow by emphasizing the racially crosscutting nature of class. The effectiveness of this approach has been borne out in empirical social science research. Emphasizing class, as opposed to focusing on inequity and privilege through a racial lens, works because it binds larger numbers of people together. Research into the “race class narrative,” however, has found that it can be most effective to discuss the two in tandem by pointing out that racism is a weapon that the rich use to divide the working class against itself. Appreciating that the racial composition of the working class varies substantially from one community to the next, Democrats should adopt the race-class narrative approach in areas where there are substantial proportions of nonwhites, while emphasizing class (and generally avoiding the topic of race if possible) in communities that are overwhelmingly white.
To recap, Democrats running in heavily working-class districts can do the following:
• Recruit authentic candidates, ideally those with working-class roots within the district.
• Elevate policies that activate voters’ class identity, such as by focusing on trade policy and supporting tariffs.
• Adopt a populist disposition, both in terms of policy and style. Stylistically, speak directly and avoid political correctness.
Break with the national party where needed. Don’t be afraid to be critical of the party in terms of its treatment of the working class and make clear that you will be a force for change in that regard.(pp. 18-19)
Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism (where the post focuses more on rural issues).
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