Democrats still misunderstand working-class voters – to their peril | Dustin Guastella

Can moderate Democrats, plotting their path back to power, convincingly make a populist pivot?

Progressives have plenty of bad ideas that should be axed, but populism without an economic promise is a bloodless bleat.

It wasn’t long ago that Democratic party moderates expressed ambivalence toward the working class. In 2016, Chuck Schumer summed up the party’s attitude by predicting that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia”.

Dustin Guastella is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623.