It’s been a good week for Democrats.
They won gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey and gave New York City its first truly socialist mayor. Californians overwhelmingly approved Prop 50 to empower Governor Gavin Newsom to carve out new districts and alienate even more Republican voters, while Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court will have a Democrat majority for years to come.
Although what’s good for Democrats isn’t so good for the rest of the country, many political analysts think Democrats now have momentum that will carry over into next year’s midterm congressional elections. At the same time, Republican strategists are wringing their hands and looking for encouraging signs in the aftermath of a Democrat sweep.
Taking a step back, it’s important to realize that these elections occurred in deep-blue states and there weren’t any political earthquakes. The fact that New Yorkers elected a socialist mayor is only shocking to people living in America’s heartland, not in the Big Apple, where one-third of its citizens are foreign-born, and the only other viable candidate resigned as governor of New York over twin nursing-home and sexual-harassment scandals during COVID.
While Democrats are celebrating the fact that their highest elected official in the country vows to replace police officers with community safety responders, protect illegal criminal aliens from prosecution, and provide government freebies for everything from daycare to bus passes, there are signs that the party continues to lose critical elements of the American electorate.
A recent study conducted by American Bridge 21st Century provides key takeaways that raise red flags within the Democrat Party, which working-class voters call “woke, weak, and out-of-touch.”
As Elena Schneider writes at Politico, “American Bridge’s project focused exclusively on working-class voters, shedding light on a once-core constituency for Democrats that’s drifted away from the party over the last decade. And the initial feedback is grim: Working-class voters don’t see Democrats as strong or patriotic, while Republicans represent safety and strength for them.”
It’s not surprising, then, that Donald Trump shocked the pundit class by winning the popular vote and reclaiming the White House. Democrats, as it turned out, abandoned the very people who built their party in the 20th century. In any event, American workers no longer think the Democrat Party represents their interests.
“It doesn’t matter if you define the working class by income, by education, or both — Democrats have been losing ground among these voters for years now,” Ezra Klein opines at The New York Times. “In 2024, Donald Trump won both voters making less than $50,000 a year and voters without a college degree. And the way Trump won these voters wasn’t just to rack up a giant majority among the white working class. First in 2020, and then even more so in 2024, Trump made huge gains among working-class Hispanic voters, significant gains among Black voters. Republicans are building the multiracial working-class coalition the Democrats imagined themselves speaking for.”
A significant factor in the shift of the working class from Democrat to Republican is that the Left has empowered its most extreme elements. Blue-collar Democrats who work for a living and still believe in traditional American values are nowhere to be found in the party. As Dustin Guastella points out at The Guardian, “By the mid-1990s, non-profits and thinktanks replaced labor unions as the major source of political influence on the left. With unions taking a backseat, politicking within the Democratic Party took on a more elite character. Fights over slices of the economic pie shifted from the vertical axis — between labor and big business, between the rich and the poor — to the horizontal, between cross-class ‘groups,’ unfailingly represented by well-staffed professional advocacy organizations.”
In other words, the party was hijacked by its most extreme elements, embracing wokeness over workers. Democrats “lurched toward the trans-loving, radical hugging, anti-American, illegal, and illiberal lauding elite progressivism they are now thoroughly wrapped in,” observed Beege Welborn at Hot Air.
Socialism and identity politics may be appealing to half of New York City voters, but that’s not enough to save the party nationwide.
What’s working in favor of the Democrats right now, though, is that Trump is underwater on key issues related to job growth and the economy. Too many people are still hurting, finding it hard to put food on the table and pay their bills. It’s not Trump’s fault we’re in this situation, but there’s a general sense that the White House and congressional Republicans are out of touch with the working class. This sets the stage for what’s coming in 2026. If the GOP wants to hold on to disenchanted Democrats and Independents, they’ll need to deliver sooner rather than later. As for Democrats, they’ll need to put aside their obsession with identity politics if they hope to win back the blue-collar workers they’re losing.
