Democrats Need an Economic Plan

By Celinda Lake and Mike Lux

It happens after every election loss, and it’s worse than usual this year: the finger pointing and the blame game are in full gear. But the fight over moving to the center, whatever that means, or moving to the left, whatever that means, matters less than moving to where the voters we need are.

What we want to do instead of talking about who to blame is talk about the strategy going forward that we think has the best chance of success. Based on the research we have done for the Factory Towns project, as well as other research we have done and reviewed, we are convinced that the path to a governing majority lies squarely through working class communities and neighborhoods. We know what Democrats have to do to start making real progress with these voters, because the numbers just don’t add up for us otherwise – not in the House, not in the Senate, and not in the presidential battlegrounds. 

What is also 100% clear from our research is that the way to win back more working class voters is for Democrats to convince them we have an economic plan that truly helps raise their standard of living. Fundamental to doing that is that we keep bad corporate actors from taking money out of their pockets every time they turn around. Voters are tired of corporate power dominating their lives.

Here’s what Democrats need to understand about working class voters, especially those who live outside of America’s biggest metro areas.

These folks have hard lives. 

In some of our survey work, we asked people a series of questions about what they had been experiencing in their lives. We asked whether they or an immediate family member had recently experienced job loss, loss of health insurance, loss of a pension or retirement income, home foreclosure, physical disabilities, mental health or addiction problems. Well over half of these people said yes to at least one of these things, and many answered yes to more than one.

Hearing from Democrats that the economy is the best in the world is not helpful, and neither is talking a lot about other issues before you talk about the economic issues that are hitting them hard.

These voters are populist as hell. 

They are not big fans of either political party, and think most politicians are liars and phonies. They hate the DC establishment that they feel has sold them down the river. The people they are maddest at are the wealthy and powerful corporations who have moved good jobs overseas, haven’t paid their fair share in taxes, made big profits off of price gouging, and gotten special favors and bailouts from politicians. The only kind of political institution that these folks trust are labor unions, which are at their peak of popularity right now.

Culture war attacks from Republicans hurt us more if we aren’t leading with the economy. 

Democrats need to come up with better ways of talking about immigration, transgender rights, and crime. However, our research shows that if we lead with and drive home a populist economic message, we can be very competitive with working class voters in spite of all those Republican attacks. And if we are not talking about a plan to help them on economic issues, these voters assume we care more about the culture issues than we do about their lives. That does not help us.

What’s the path forward?

Based on these facts and on our research, we have two big recommendations for Democrats going forward.

The first is that Democrats and their progressive allies need to be listening to and talking to these voters in their neighborhoods and communities all the time, not just close to the election. We need to be doing the old fashioned work of community organizing, focused on the economic issues that matter the most in working people’s lives. We need to be building community in these places, including organizations that can sustain people and help them in their daily lives. Local unions, community organizations, and nonprofits that deliver tangible benefits all matter. So would locally based social media pages and groups that bring people together to talk about topics they care about in their daily lives. We need to invest in these people’s lives and communities now, not wait until the fall of an election year.

Secondly, we need a damn plan. Voters don’t want vague slogans – they had no idea what phrases like “opportunity economy”, “a new way forward”, or “turn the page” meant for their lives. They didn’t care that Harris had a to-do list while Trump had an enemies list because they had only the vaguest idea of what was on the to-do list, or what it would mean for them.

We are not policy wonks, but from our polling we can tell you that the Democratic plan for the economy needs at a minimum to include:

• Passing legislation against price gouging on groceries

• Building more affordable housing so the price will go down, and some form of rent control

• Lowering prescription drug costs and other health care costs

• Vigorous antitrust enforcement

• Vigorous enforcement and improvement of labor law

• Raising taxes on wealthy people and corporations to pay for child care and elder care

• Creating more factory jobs in the solar and wind energy industry, with strong Made in America provisions

These provisions should be packaged together under a populist title like “For the People, Not the Powerful” as the Democratic Plan to rebuild the economy for working families. And the entire Democratic Party should stop messing around and get behind this plan and promote it in every way they can. 

Here’s the deal: mushy economic messaging does not work. What works is a practical populism grounded in working families' real life experience. Democrats need to be united in a populist message where we take on wealthy corporations that don’t pay their fair share of taxes and do take money out of people’s pockets in a thousand big and small ways. We need to be defining ourselves as fighting for working folks and against an economy rigged in favor of billionaires and corporate power.  

If we could do something like this, Democrats could become the party of working people again, and could win the contrast with the Trump trickle down agenda.

There’s an old labor song called “Which side are you on?” Democrats need to take a side – show working families that it is Democrats who will go into battle for them. That’s when we go from narrowly losing and barely winning elections to becoming the long term majority party of this country again.