Portside

There’s good news for liberal economics today, as well as bad news for Democratic Party economics, and all-around confusion about the public’s take on economics. The good news comes from some polling analysis released today by the Center for American Progress (CAP). The bad news, along with a smidgen of good, comes from a new poll conducted for CNN. The confusion comes when you try to reconcile the two, though I’ll take a stab at it at the end of this On TAP.

The CAP study looked at responses to questions about economic policy from voters both with and without college degrees—from both sides, that is, of the increasingly paramount gap in American politics—and found cross-class support for a number of liberal economic positions. (The surveys they studied included those of both pre- and immediately post-2024-election voters.) Fifty-eight percent of working-class voters and 61 percent of the college-educated believed the decline of unions had hurt American workers; 67 percent of working-class respondents and 58 percent of college grads supported a $17 federal minimum wage; 63 percent of the working class and 64 percent of graduates favored higher taxes on those making at least $400,000 a year; and roughly 75 percent of each group supported expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income Americans.

But this cross-class concurrence didn’t have much effect on the actual voting of these two classes. Fifty-six percent of college grads cast their votes for Kamala Harris, while 56 percent of the non-grads (who greatly outnumbered the grads) voted for Donald Trump. At minimum, this suggests that despite voters having ranked the economy as their number one concern, the economic policies listed above didn’t figure very much in their economic assessments (at least, when compared to the cost of living), or weren’t identified as policies that Democrats favored and Republicans opposed, or, very probably, both.

This weekend’s CNN-sponsored poll highlights the Democrats’ inability to brand themselves as the party with economic policies that benefit the working and middle classes. To be sure, the public is not in a libertarian mindset: Asked whether they believe that “the government is trying to do too many things” or that “government should do more to solve problems,” they opt for more problem solving by a hefty 58 percent to 41 percent margin. So, advantage Democrats? No.

When asked which party better reflects their view on handling the economy, they prefer Republicans over Democrats by a 7 percent margin. That’s down from a 15-point Republican margin in 2022, when prices were soaring, so the Democrats’ disadvantage may still reflect public discontent with prices. Still, when you contrast Americans’ support for activist government with their discontent with the party that’s historically been the party of activist government, you’re almost compelled to reverse a venerable and fundamental rule of American public opinion: As propounded by Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril in 1967, it asserts that Americans are philosophically conservative but operationally liberal. For the moment, that seems to have been flipped on its head.

This topsy-turvy moment comes with some caveats, however. First, since Trump took office again, there’s no question that Republicans in general and Trump in emphatic particular have been the activists, while Democrats have scrambled to find ways to respond and counter him. Asked which is the party that can get things done, 36 percent said the Republicans, while just 19 percent said the Democrats. The GOP, of course, has trifecta control of government, while the Democrats lack even a recognized leader—and their last leader, Joe Biden, wasn’t up to the task of promoting even widely popular policies like building new factories, roads, bridges, and broadband.

In a larger sense, though, Democrats have yet to make a compelling story of the economic shifts of the past half-century—the shift of income and wealth to the upper classes and the mega-rich in particular, at the expense of everybody else. Public support for discrete policies that stand little chance of enactment—labor law reform, higher minimum wages, paid family leave—won’t have much effect on voting habits unless there’s a plausible chance for their becoming law, and until they’re fitted within a credible and compelling story of the changes to American life. What stands out about the efforts of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, what makes their talks different from those of most Democrats, isn’t their “radicalism” but rather their ability to place the thousand unnatural shocks that Americans regularly experience within an explanatory narrative about the shift in wealth and power that’s dominated the past 50 years of American life.

For their part, Republicans do have a story, whose implausibility hasn’t meant it’s ineffective. It’s the immigrants’ fault, and that of welfare cheats (never mind that welfare, as such, has dwindled to a trickle). The particulars of a progressive populist story are there for the taking, with the added benefit that the culprits—Wall Streeters and other wielders and champions of financialized capitalism—are already widely and justifiably loathed. But building a progressive populist movement requires Democrats to talk about the role that finance and kindred institutions have played, which most Democrats are still reluctant to do. If they’re going to benefit from the public’s anti-libertarian, anti-oligarch turn, however, they’re going to have to Bernie-fy themselves. That doesn’t mean they have to support Medicare for All, but they do have to go after the corporatization of medicine, the pernicious role of private equity, the pricing practices of pharma, and the way those institutions’ money dominates politics—and then invite the public to draw its own conclusions. If Democrats are ever going to reclaim the advantage that once came to them as the champions of pro-working-class economics, they’re going to have to go big.

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.

The American Prospect is devoted to promoting informed discussion on public policy from a progressive perspective. In print and online, the Prospect brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary to create good legislation. We help to dispel myths, challenge conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue.