One Reason Democrats Are Struggling With the Working Class

 New Republic -  Voters trusted President Donald Trump to handle the economy, but after eight months of wild and costly tariff policies, attacks on independent institutions like the Federal Reserve Board, and massive government layoffs, even some members of his base are unhappy with him. Why did they trust him in the first place, though? Recent history shows that Democratic administrations preside over much better economies than Republican ones, yet voters continue to trust the GOP more on the issue. It’s been one of the top reasons voters without college educations have defected to Trump’s GOP: They think he’s better for the economy, and therefore better for them.

Melissa Morales, the founder and CEO of Somos Votantes, an independent Latino voter outreach and engagement group, thinks she knows why. Her organization has canvassed Latino voters, many of them working class, since its founding in 2019. What she hears is that the Democratic Party supports programs that help the poor and the needy; and voters who work one, two, or even three jobs and struggle to make ends meet don’t think of themselves that way.

“I always use the example of the Child Tax Credit, which was game-changing for families,” Morales said of the program that was temporarily extended under President Joe Biden during the pandemic. “The Child Tax Credit did an incredible amount to uplift working-class people in this country. But the way that Democrats talked about it was that [it] was going to lift 40 percent of children out of poverty.… So when people hear that frame, they hear, ‘This is a program for poor people.’”

At this moment, with voters increasingly dissatisfied with Trump’s governance—including the first government shutdown since he was last in office—Democrats need to think about how to reframe their economic policies so they resonate more with those voters. Because while it’s true that Democrats support programs that help low-income families, and their base supports those policies, the truth is that many working-class voters don’t see themselves represented in Democratic rhetoric even when it applies to them. More