What the Working Class Really Believes

[Passages]

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/

[cachukis]

1. It adds to the confusion as to why we lost the presidency.

[somsai]

2. Jacobin one of the orgs doing the study also did a good write up about the thing.

https://jacobin.com/2025/07/cwcp-jacobin-working-class-attitudes-report

and a much more detailed report here

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/20091032/CWCP-Jacobin-report-20250721.pdf

I especially liked the bar graphs showing relative support for various egalitarian policies. I keep running across the word pre distribution. The working class much prefers higher wages while the wealthy prefer higher taxes and then they will give handouts. I'd assume so all of those Sociology majors can get work at with the groups.

Towards the end of both the article and the study, Jacobin gives some ideas of how various policies can attract 10% of Trump voters, which would be enough for a huge bellwether shift in electoral power. Unfortunately the upper and middle class make policy in our party.

[Skittles]

4. "the wealthy prefer higher taxes and then they will give handouts"

that sounds like......trickle down

[Gum Logger]

3. Thanks to the creation of WMDs, anybody can kill everybody

Prudence would suggest we create the social contract the God told Abraham was needed

[myohmy2]

5. I don't know...

...I see many disgruntled working-class MAPA believers (Make America Progressive Again) out here that often feel alienated and ignored...

...they see themselves as being belittled and marginalized in our system while they know they make up a huge chunk of it...maybe the largest chunk of it...

...IMO, who ever grabs the heart, mind and soul of the MAPA supporter will win elections...

...I hope it's us...

[Passages]

6. Me too.

[JustKay]

7. What the working class aspires to is a fantasy.

I think what is unique to the United States is the concept of "pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps." Self-reliance is a cornerstone of the American identity, deeply rooted in individualism and Manifest Destiny. The concept is that if one works hard enough, they will achieve the American Dream.

Ben Franklin was a celebrity in his day, and his writings, including Poor Richard's Almanack, were hugely popular. He believed that virtuous, hardworking people would achieve financial prosperity. It was inevitable. And for a long time, America was the land of opportunity - as long as we were slaughtering the native peoples and raping the pristine land they lived on.

For a brief time during and after WWII, the United States was very prosperous, experiencing unprecedented growth, thanks to the industrial war complex. Everyone (meaning white men) could get a free education through the GI Bill, buy a house, work for decades for the same prosperous company, and retire comfortably. Let the good times roll! This is the American Dream many still aspire to, but those days are over.

The point is (finally, right?) that hard work in and of itself no longer equals the level of financial prosperity that our parents attained, or that we perceive they attained. It's easy to look back on the 40s, 50s, and early 60s as an idyllic time, full of security and prosperity. It's huge, turquoise cars, pink tiled bathrooms, two-ton TV sets easily diverted attention away from the systemic oppression of women, people of color, and the homosexual community.

Many in this country chase after a fantasy.

Kay

[TBF]

8. You covered everything except the tax tables -

the reason folks could remain in their fantasy is that the tax tables were doing their job by redistribution of some of that excess profit at the top, not to mention the fact that the social security cap is wildly regressive.

Then what happened? Reagan, Bush, Trump - all fighting hardest for lower taxes on the very highest earners/and recipients of inheritances, not to mention corporate greed. Lower tax rates on corporations, dozens of loopholes, and pretty soon secretaries are paying a higher proportion of taxes than the CEO's. There's a reason that Trump hides his taxes even more securely than the "Epstein" files.