Suddenly, Everyone Is Courting the Working Class

The demographic everybody ignored is being noticed now

Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash

I feel like the girl who couldn’t get a date to prom but is now being ardently courted by the captains of the football and basketball teams.

Until recently, everyone ignored the working class. The Democrats took us for granted. Who else were poor and lower-middle-class folks going to vote for? The rich-loving Republicans? Ha. 

But then the Republicans – the people most responsible for keeping down the poor and poor-adjacent in the first place – began scrounging around for votes and discovered there was a giant group of people who felt ignored by the Democratic party. And they scooped them right up.

The Dems regularly talked about doing things to benefit the non-rich – subsidized daycare, a better Earned Income Tax Credit, stronger unions, universal healthcare, student loan reform, etc. – but little of this ever came to fruition. That hasn’t always been their fault, of course. The regressive party has been very good at preventing progress.

But still – ask a truck driver what the Dems have done for him lately, and you are not going to like his answer.

You know what that guy does know, however? 

The popular perspective is that the Dems are cultural elites who care more about LGBTQ folks and racial minorities than they do people driving forklifts or picking up garbage (even though plenty of people of color and LGBTQ people do such work!) Furthermore, the blue party is unpatriotic and wants to get rid of all the cops.

You and I know that’s inaccurate and unfair, but that’s not the message the working class hears. It’s hard to fight against the highly emotional messaging the GOP sends out.

If you imagine a Democrat reading aloud a dense policy statement and a Republican flashing a meme, you won’t be far off.

I regularly shake my head at the memes I see people from my red hometown post on social media. They think Biden opened the border and invited immigrants to come right in. They fervently believe the country is full of lazy people who don’t work but who have higher incomes than they do. They’re upset when players take a knee during the Pledge at sporting events. They are convinced the Democrats are just seconds away from seizing all their guns.

For years, I tried to change minds

I posted citations. I explained I’m married to a legal immigrant and the process is very different from what they imagine. I reminded them that in eight years, Obama did not take their guns even once, nor did Biden. 

I have heard so many lower-income Americans complain about their high income taxes, when the truth is that they’re paying little or no income taxes at all. They are, however, paying high payroll taxes and not everyone understands the difference.

I don’t think my facts ever convinced anybody. No citation drills deeper than a meme that gives people the feels. I finally had to give up. 

To return to the dating metaphor, when your best friend is gaga over an abusive boyfriend, listing his faults almost never convinces her to break up with him. Not when he’s whispering to her all the comforting lies she wants to hear. 

The Democrats used to gain strong support from unions, but President Ronald Reagan helped break them up. Now Dems feel more like the party of educated professionals. Some working class people feel distrustful of them and view them as elites. When Democrats say, “Let’s make college affordable for all,” some working class people hear, “Let’s let kids run up huge bills learning useless crap and make the hardworking taxpayers cover the cost.”

Here again is a belief that needs to be busted: There are, in fact, lots of educated people in the working, lower and lower-middle classes.

I’m raising my hand here and waving it around. Here I am! I have a college degree, have worked many professional jobs and have never surpassed $40K per year in my life. I know many others like me.

When you think “working class,” you’re probably thinking of unionized men in factories, but you need to expand your vision. Think nursing home aides. Think women working as cashiers. Think low-level office jobs in which people are nicely dressed but badly paid. Think people who have never worked for a union and thus don’t understand what a union could do for them. 

Trump hurt the working class badly, even as they flocked to him. The working class is often unaware of the various useful measures the Democrats have put in place. Democrats don’t know how to get their message out. We try to talk about facts instead of emotions, and it seldom works that way.

The working class isn’t stupid

But they are often uninformed. The media does a poor job of telling the real story, and the real story is often complicated and would require significant background information to be understood. 

A great deal of the pain suffered by the bottom half of America has to do with complicated stories it’s not easy to tell. Deregulated business. Monopolies. Hedge funds. Private equity. Pharmacy benefit managers. A tax structure that benefits the wealthy. Citizens United. A beaten-down press. Algorithms that elevate comfortable untruths that make some people feel better.

Of course, the other classes are just as uninformed. I once heard an educated, wealthy business owner and Trump supporter explain to me that while the economy always does better under Democrats, that’s because every change shows up only when the following administration takes power. 

Therefore, he patiently explained to me, anything good that happens while a Democratic president is in office is due to the actions taken by the previous Republican, and anything bad that happens during a Republican administration is directly attributable to what the previous Democratic president did. 

I wish I were making this up. 

It isn’t just the working class that’s clueless. Please understand they are no more clueless than any other demographic. For proof, I offer Elon Musk and all the other rich, educated, ignorant Trump supporters. There are many. And you can’t blame their lack of education or opportunities for their incomprehensible choice.

But there’s some hope

The Dems’ messaging now is better than any I’ve seen in a long time, perhaps ever. Yes, MAGA is weird! No, we won’t go back! 

You could hardly come up with a better message for conservatives than “Make America Great Again.” It harkens back to a mythical time when things were better. 

“We are not going back” could not be more brilliant. It reminds us of the direction we want to go – forward, not backward. 

And it works for every single American.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.