Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education and politics at Third Way, a centrist think tank, contended in an email:
The great class inversion in the Democratic Party is a huge driver of this shift in dynamics. Even as recently as 2008, Democrats were a working-class party, as seven in 10 voters in our coalition didn’t have a college degree. By 2024, that share fell by 16 points, corresponding with equal growth in the proportion of college-educated voters in our tent.
The result?
Erickson:
Today’s white Democratic voters bear little resemblance to the white Democrats of Jesse Jackson’s era. They are wealthier, more highly educated and more socially liberal. Meanwhile, the Black voters who make up the consistent base of the party have held steady while the rest of the coalition has shifted around them.
Jackson used to say that parties need two wings to fly. He was right, but it turns out that voters of color are now leading the moderate wing of the modern Democratic Party.
At the same time, Erickson’s analysis points to a Democratic split with the so-called post-material wing dominated by white liberals and a Black-Hispanic minority wing more concerned with bread-and-butter issues:
According to 2024 A.P. VoteCast Data, when asked to rank their level of concern on top issues in the 2024 election, white progressives expressed the most concern about “the effects of climate change,” at 75 percent, while nearly 70 percent of Black, Latino and white noncollege voters were most concerned about the cost of food and groceries.
Similarly, there was a nearly 30-point gap between white progressives (45 percent) and Black (71 percent), Latino (75 percent) and white noncollege voters (83 percent) who viewed the situation at the border as an important factor in their vote. When it came to the issue of crime, Black (57 percent) and Latino (55 percent) voters were nearly twice as concerned as white progressives (28 percent).
The shift from the downstairs party of the last century to the upstairs party of today, which I have written extensively about in the past, complements and reinforces this ideological reorganization.
The racial, ideological and class alterations of the Democratic Party have created a damaging dynamic both internally and in competition with the Republican Party.
Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution, described this process in an email:
The Democratic Party has definitely moved left. It is now dominated by college-educated and relatively affluent elites who have given disproportionate attention to cultural issues such as immigration, abortion, D.E.I., guns, gender identity and race.
This has helped to drive less-educated working-class voters with more traditional values into the Republican camp. Although racism persists, many Trump voters are not racist as much as they resent the emphasis that Democrats have given to this issue.
The white working-class voters who favor Republicans are struggling economically but don’t feel that their struggles are given the same attention as racism and other cultural issues. They are a large group that feels disrespected, distrusts government and feels like their own economic challenges are being ignored.
The ascendance within Democratic ranks of culturally liberal well-educated whites has, in turn, intensified tensions with Black, Hispanic and other minority Democrats, Sawhill wrote
As for Black Americans, they remain a mainstay of the Democratic Party but they do tend to be more moderate than well-educated whites.
For example, a majority of them, especially those under 40, supported the Supreme Court’s ending of affirmative action in higher education in 2023. Many Black men, for both cultural and economic reasons, voted for Trump in 2024 although some now seem to regret that decision.
Democrats, Sawhill contended,
have a huge opportunity to unite the working class across racial lines, but to do so, I believe they will have to focus much more on inequalities of wealth and power, and put a stronger emphasis on economic issues such as work, wages and the cost of living while simultaneously embracing more mainstream or less-contentious cultural values in many areas.
Will Marshall, the president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, has been a leader in the struggle to strengthen Democratic centrism for four decades. His take on the evolution of politics over those years:
In 1988, Jesse Jackson campaigned for the Democratic nomination on a coherent and comprehensive social democratic platform. It thrilled readers of The Nation and would easily have found favor on the European left. But it made Jackson the wrong answer to the big strategic question facing his party then: how to halt the steady defection of more socially traditional blue-collar voters that was unraveling the New Deal majority.
They didn’t see a place for themselves in Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. That’s why he won mostly Southern states with lots of Black voters but struggled in the Wisconsin primary.
Over the last two decades, Marshall continued in his email, “Democrats essentially have been trading working-class voters for white college grads,” noting “that between the 2012 and 2024 elections, the party’s performance among nonwhite working-class voters fell by 37 points, while improving among white college grads by 17 points.”
Now, Marshall added,
the nonwhite working class has emerged as a force for moderation in U.S. politics. They are leery of the left’s cultural agenda — open borders, permissive prosecutors, the obsession with identity politics and “equity.” They express higher levels of national pride and patriotism. And they aren’t agitating for the replacement of a market economy with democratic socialism.
The problem for Marshall and others who would like to shift power within the Democratic Party from liberal white elites to more moderate constituencies is that the white elites hold power and won’t give it up without a fight.
They vote, donate and participate heavily in party organizations more than any other major bloc. They dominate or exert disproportionate influence among party activists, primary voters, campaign staffs, advocacy organizations, the media, nonprofit leadership and donor networks.
It may well be that the internal power lies with those who are happy campers just where they are, and that the party as currently constructed cannot and will not dig itself out of the hole it’s in.
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