The Democrats Must Regain the Working-Class Vote in 2026
To win back the House, the party needs an economic agenda that offers a viable path to a sustainable future.
With the Trump administration gradually altering the form of US government from a “flawed democracy” to an emerging dictatorship, the 2026 general midterm election becomes especially important for the future of the country. And for the future of the Democratic Party. The sad and unfortunate reality is that, with the United State being a two-party system, the Democratic Party is the only political alternative to a Trumpian dictatorship. But whether the current Democratic Party is able to fight Trump’s neofascism and actually save America is a dubious proposition at best.
For President Donald Trump to be able to remake everything and thus fulfill his dystopian vision of the United States of America, Republicans know that they must retain control of both chambers of Congress in next fall’s midterm election. For the Democrats to upset Trump’s plans, they need a gain of just three seats to flip the House of Representatives from Republican control and to flip a net of four seats to take control of the Senate.
Trump himself is fully aware of the significance of the outcome of the 2026 general midterm election and has already embarked on a series of strategic moves designed not only to ensure that both chambers of Congress remain under GOP control but that they have wider majorities. First, he has called on GOP-led states to redraw the electoral map in favor of the Republican Party; second, he is using his role as GOP kingmaker to shape the primaries; thirdly, he is trying to change the way people vote by eliminating mail-in ballots and making voter identification a requirement; fourth, he is trying to rebrand “The One Big Beautiful Bill,” which is not popular with voters, and the law’s tax cuts overwhelming benefit the wealthiest Americans, as “a working families tax bill;” and, finally, he has announced on his social media platform, Truth Social, that the Republican Party will hold a convention ahead of the 2026 midterm election in order to show the American people the “great things” that his presidency has done since the presidential election of 2024.
Various polls have shown over the past few months that Trump’s popularity is declining, especially with independents but also, however slightly, with Republicans. Whether this drop will last or not is hard to predict. That said, it is important to underscore the point made by political scientist Larry Bartels and author of such path-breaking works as Unequal Democracy and Democracy Erodes from the Top that, when we discuss the Trump phenomenon, we need to “separate the electoral process from the outcome.” As Bartels states, “The outcome of the election is certainly aberrant and hugely consequential, but the electoral process.… operated in much the same way that it usually does, and in particular, in much the same way that it has over the past quarter century or so.”
In the current political climate, the leadership of the Democratic Party should be able to recognize on its own the urgency of adopting an aggressive class-based approach in order to bring back the working-class vote.
Trump received 49.9% of the popular vote, which is actually less than what George W. Bush received in the 2004 presidential election, and not that different from what other Republican presidential candidates received over the past 20 years. The political landscape is fairly evenly split between Democrats and Republicans and has been so for many years. As such, all is not yet lost. The tide can turn. The only question is whether today’s Democratic Party has what it takes to shift the balance of power in the House and the Senate in 2026. To do so, it needs vision, strategy, and boldness. It needs an economic agenda that offers a viable path to a sustainable future. It needs to fight back against plutocracy and thus put class at the center of politics because it needs to regain the working-class vote.
Most white working-class voters cast their ballots for Trump in all three elections that he ran as president. But this is not a new development related specifically to Trump’s appeal. Working-class voters have been shifting toward the Republican Party over the past few decades, according to data collected from The Vanderbilt Project on Unity & Democracy. Yet, some Democrats did not seem to mindthe defection of the working class to the Republican camp. The great strategist Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) asserted back in 2016 that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” The fact that this lifelong politician with his long ties to the finance industry is now senate minority leader presumably leading the fight against Trump and his extreme agenda speaks volumes of what has gone so terribly wrong with the Democratic Party.
In saying that the Democrats needs to bring back working-class voters if they expect to regain control of the government, one does not miss the irony that today more Republicans identify themselves as working class than Democrats do. An even bigger irony of course is that neither party is the home of the working-class people.
The truth is that the American working class is trapped in the two-party system. The country needs a mass working-class party, and it is not realistic to expect that it can be built through the Democratic Party, which is a capitalist party. By the same token, building a workers’ party may be a noble and necessary undertaking, but it needs to be recognized that such a political project cannot be completed in a short span of time and that it is very difficult anyway for third parties to tip the electoral scales in the United States. As such, progressive and radicals cannot afford to abandon struggles for the type of reforms that might make an immediate improvement to the lives of working-class people by devoting all their energies to building a new party.
What this suggests is that those aspiring to radical change have to necessarily work mostly outside the system but also do what they can to support the progressive left inside the Democratic Party and cast their votes for progressive candidates running for public office like New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. It is through such activism that the Democratic Party was pushed a bit closer to the left during the last few years.
In the current political climate, the leadership of the Democratic Party should be able to recognize on its own the urgency of adopting an aggressive class-based approach in order to bring back the working-class vote. This is clearly what Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are trying to do. Those of us on the sidelines should give them a helping hand. It’s the only way that the tide will turn. And take very seriously next fall’s general midterm election. If the Democrats fail, at the very least, to flip the House, Trump’s dystopian vision for the United States will come ever closer to becoming a reality.
