What Working-Class Folks Need From the New DNC Chair
We are off to the races to pick a new leader of the Democratic National Committee, with a couple of incredibly exciting candidates from the ranks of Midwestern party chairs: Ken Martin from Minnesota and Ben Wikler from Wisconsin. Former Maryland Governor and chair of the Democratic Governors Association Martin O’Malley and New York state Senator James Skoufis have declared bids, and there are others who might yet enter the race.
It’s critical that whomever we choose as the next DNC Chair has a robust working-class strategy, and that strategy should be at the absolute heart of what Democrats need to be focused on in the years -- and decades -- to come. Blue-collar voters are ⅔ of the electorate, and they used to identify much more with the Democratic Party than with the Republicans. They obviously no longer do, and that needs to change in a big way and right away. The new DNC Chair and leadership need to be focused like a laser beam on winning those good folks back.
We will know more about what happened in the election when the voter files come back early next year, but I think it is very safe to say that most of the several million Democrats who voted in 2020 and didn’t in 2024 are working-class people; and most of the swing voters who decided on Trump in the campaign’s closing days were working-class folks as well. Most base voters are working class, most swing voters are working class. That is clearly where we ought to be focused as a party.
‘Working class’ can be defined in multiple ways. Some analysts use ‘people without a college degree’ and ‘working class’ interchangeably, but that leaves out all the nurses, social workers, teachers, and others who work hard for a living out of the group, which I think is wrong. Working class is a broad, diverse category for sure, but the kinds of people I am thinking about are people who work their asses off serving people and making things, without getting the financial rewards that the bosses and stock traders and highly paid professionals get. People like health care workers without a doctor’s degree, home care workers, child care workers, folks from the building and construction trades and road crews, people who drive trucks and taxis, folks who work in factories, people who work in offices but are not the bosses, workers in the gig economy, waitresses and other restaurant workers, farmworkers and meatpackers, firefighters and cops, members of the armed forces but not high ranking officers, people who fix your cars and appliances, people work at call centers. I would also include the hard-working local small business owners and family farmers who provide food, goods, and services to their communities, and become pillars of those communities.
That’s not an exhaustive list, but you get the point. With those kinds of folks in mind, here is what the Democratic Party -- not just the DNC, but starting with the DNC -- should be doing over the next four years:
A big, aggressive, groundbreaking strategy to deal with the disastrous media landscape, especially outside of the biggest metro areas.
Democrats have been mystified at the fact that no one in working-class America seems to know all the great things the Biden-Harris administration did to benefit them in the last four years. Part of the reason for this is that the White House didn’t talk enough about these things, and the Harris campaign didn’t talk about them much at all because they didn’t want to be associated too much with Biden.
But the biggest reason by far that voters didn’t know about our accomplishments is the utterly ravaged media landscape outside of the biggest cities. Newspapers are gone or are shells of their former selves. Local radio stations are gone or part of big media conglomerates that don’t cover the news much. Half of local TV stations are owned by far right media companies like Sinclair.
Meanwhile, more and more people are getting most of their news through social media, which is awash in rightwing disinformation.
This Jupiter-sized problem will not be solved overnight, and can’t be solved by the DNC alone. Democratic investors should be buying up media properties so that rightwingers don’t own such a high percentage of them. Progressive donors need to fund publications and programs like The American Prospect, Courier News, Lever News, The Majority Report with Sam Seder podcast, The Nation, Rick Smith’s radio show, and yes, this is biased, but the work of my partner, Lauren Windsor, who is doing important investigative journalism with her webshow The Undercurrent. The progressive movement needs to invest far more into social media, especially building local social media echo chambers that build community and share information helpful to our side.
But there is plenty the DNC can and should be doing in the media space beyond buying ads two months before Election Day. The new DNC Chair should appoint a task force and give it some serious money to build a media strategy that reflects the modern media era. The Chair should be pulling key Democrats together to get them to invest in some of these other efforts. And as Simon Rosenberg wrote recently: “The DNC has to become the central communications hub of the new opposition, and produce high quality, modern, social and YouTube content both advancing our ideas and leaders, and challenging theirs.”
The DNC and Harris campaign’s social media operation produced great numbers of impressions, but we also need to focus on how to reach people who are not easy-to-reach Lefty internet activists. We need to build a network of locally based Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts where people can get to know and trust each other, where they can share news with each other and talk over issues. These kinds of sites can be both media and organizing hubs.
Rebranding by focusing on the economic issues that matter the most to working families and fighting for economic wins that reflect those values.
We need to create content about the economic issues that matter to people every day. The right wing and Republican Party social media operations are out there every day and the impact they have made is large and palpable. We need to engage in the same way, everywhere and every day.
I want to spend a moment here to tell you why I am so focused on economic issues. I absolutely believe that other issues matter as we build back the Democratic brand, and I also believe that we as a party have to think through how we talk about some of the toughest issues we face -- immigration, crime, and trans rights. But at the heart of every conversation we have with blue-collar voters needs to be the message that Democrats really do care about making their lives better -- and what these voters are mostly focused on are economic issues. They want good jobs, higher pay, and lower costs for groceries and gas; they want better, more affordable health care and housing options; they want to be able to start a new business without the fear of being crushed by monopolistic competitors. They are working their asses off, just to scrape by, disillusioned by the broken promise of the American Dream, and then seeing – rightly or wrongly, and often shaped by disinformation – immigrants receive government benefits that they themselves do not receive. We must figure out how to combat this disinformation and explain our defense of immigration in a more compelling way to voters, or else we will continue to suffer losses with this voting bloc.
Working-class voters are living in a state of desperation. They have been battered by economic disasters for more than a generation. Deindustrialization and off-shoring have shuttered the factories in their communities. Wage levels declined for millions of workers. Large numbers of hospitals and doctor’s offices in non-urban communities have closed down. Waves of job losses and foreclosures hit working-class families after the financial crisis. The most recent round of inflation hit already hard-pressed families even harder. When my organization American Family Voices did polling of working-class voters, more than half answered 'yes' to a series of questions about whether they or an immediate family member had lost their job, health insurance, retirement income, or home in recent years.
There are other issues that matter to folks, but when we don’t start and end the conversation with core economic issues, with the things that will tangibly improve their lives and give them some economic security, we lose them because they think we don’t care about what is most important to their lives. Think about it as the ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Voter Needs.’ Economics is the foundation from which we must start and build our agenda.
So how does the party rebrand on these issues? We need to be sending out content, several times a week, starting very early next year, that provides compelling information in four areas:
What Democrats accomplished for people in recent years, both at the national level and in different states
What we are working to do in the future, both on national issues and on local issues
What Trump and congressional Republicans are doing wrong
Where and how to get practical help making things better in their daily lives: local groups that can help them, government programs that can help them, etc.
Memes and hashtags are fine, but what people really need to be getting from us are straightforward and persuasive videos, newsletters, and articles about the values and issues that matter to them. The focus of all this content needs to be how Democrats are going to fight for them in their daily lives. Again, not all of these need to be on economic issues, but economic issues should be front and center of whatever we do.
A great example of this is an ad the Trump campaign put out in the closing weeks of the race. It featured just three bullet points: No Tax on Social Security, No Tax on Tips, No Tax on Overtime. Are these things likely to be accomplished? No. But that’s not the point. This meme told a very simple and compelling economic message to working-class voters, and we did not have a similar counter proposal as a party. We need to be less concerned with what is politically feasible to pass and present to voters, and more concerned with painting them a clear picture of the values we are committing to fighting for and then fighting like hell to achieve them.
None of the message rebranding in the world will work unless voters see that Democrats are fighting for their values, regardless of whether they can actually win whatever particular political battle. Republicans are great at this. Despite not being able to actually get rid of Obamacare, they voted to end it more than 40 times, and nearly achieved it when they claimed a trifecta. Can congressional Democrats fight every battle? No. But they must be strategic and show voters that the party is willing to fight. Otherwise the party looks weak and not really committed to its values or its voters.
Year-round training and issue-based organizing that strengthens local party organizing everywhere.
Democrats have to reinvigorate local organizing everywhere, not just reliably blue states, but purple and red states, from urban to rural. We need to be building relationships with local activists, organizations, social media influencers, and voters everywhere.We will never win non-metro areas where we have been doing poorly over the last decade if we don’t invest in organizing there.
The DNC is not going to have the money to hire a staffer for every county party, but we should be able to:
Find local Democrats with respectable social media followings in many more counties than we have now, and feed them the content and news feeds we are creating through our communications hub.
Do a lot of online and regional trainings, with regular follow-up and information, for people who are or are interested in being county party leaders.
Have a pool of money for monthly grants to state and county parties that are experimenting with promising new local organizing projects.
Hire moderators for selected local and regional Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok sites. The moderators would lead discussions and move out content to the local pages.
Work out between the DNC, other party committees, and allied labor unions and progressive groups hiring field organizers hired right away in the most competitive congressional districts in the country. These staffers should work with local groups and organizers to organize earned media events around important issues, conduct trainings, identify local groups and social media influencers who can be helpful, and build local organizing capacity.
The DNC should have a far closer relationship with the key institutions doing working-class organizing.
Starting with labor unions, of course, but also working with other progressive organizations that are organizing in working-class, low income, and rural areas, the DNC should be making a far greater commitment to building a close working relationship with the groups who are doing real organizing on the ground.
Partisan politics is an instant turnoff to a lot of these voters, so the Democratic Party can’t be doing everything in these areas. They should, however, be far more helpful and, as much as they legally can, coordinate in terms of organizing strategy with those groups. These issue-based organizations can build activist and social media infrastructure, and do a major amount of issue education. The DNC can and should play a bigger role in helping these groups in all the ways they can, including working together on issue organizing and fundraising.
Returning to Our Roots
The DNC Chair has a huge job with many facets and a lot in their job description. The most urgent, the most central, the most fundamental of their missions is to return the Democratic Party to its roots as a voice and movement for working people. It needs a year round, every day media and organizing strategy that has the ambition to reach activists and voters in every corner of the country.
The DNC won’t be able to fund county Democratic Parties in every county in the country, but we can recruit and train good people everywhere, and through social media we can reach good people everywhere. The DNC can’t do everything, but it can be an institution that strengthens the entire progressive infrastructure in media and organizing.
The DNC as an institution doesn’t need to lead every issue fight, but its voice needs to be heard loud and clear on the fundamental issues that matter the most to working families. It needs a robust, muscular communications platform that drives a clear Democratic message out to real voters every day, making clear where the Democratic Party stands on those issues. But that message must be backed up with action taken by Democratic leaders – no message will ever stick unless Democrats show up to battle with Republicans ready to fight for their values.
If it succeeds at these core missions, the Democratic Party will win in 2026 and 2028, and lay the basis for a long-term governing majority in this country.
