When Bernie Sanders looks at the Democrats today, he sees a party that has abandoned the working class. One that has prioritised social issues while ignoring festering economic concerns.
“I think the Democrats fail to understand the extent of pain that working families are experiencing, and offer an agenda that addresses that reality,” the Vermont senator, 83, told The Sunday Times last week.
Five months after the Democrats lost the presidential election, it’s a message being espoused everywhere from the left wing to the right — where President Trump and his allies have heralded the Republicans’ coronation as the party of the working class.
And Democrats of all stripes, from Sanders — a democratic socialist — to moderates, believe that winning back working people is their way out of the political wilderness.
The question is how to do it. Sanders and the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 35, are pulling large crowds with their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, which has passed through the Midwest and will restart next week in Los Angeles. They say they are working to reach voters angry about seeing their lives deteriorate while the 1 per cent gets richer.
“I think that all over the country, people, whether they’re Democrats, Republicans or independents, are extremely unhappy about seeing a handful of billionaires running the United States government,” Sanders said.
They’re betting that voters are hungry for anyone to fight back against Trump and Elon Musk — and for new ideas that go beyond the more cautious formula that lost the Democrats the last election under first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris.
Opponents of their approach argue that the party should be listening to undecided or disengaged voters in swing districts, not spreading a message crafted for safe liberal seats such as those held by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.
Everyone agrees, though, that the party has to do something.
Last month its favourability rating among all Americans fell to 29 per cent, according to an SSRS poll for CNN, the lowest since at least 1992.
In another poll, published last week by Harvard Caps/Harris, 71 per cent of respondents said that the party needed new moderate leaders.
After a bleak, long winter, last week brought the first stirrings of good news for the Democrats. A liberal candidate won an important election in the Wisconsin Supreme Court against a conservative candidate backed by Musk, who pumped $21 million into a campaign that he said would “affect the entire destiny of humanity”.
Democrats also cut into Republican margins in two special elections for House seats in Florida (which the Democrats still lost).
The day before Cory Booker, a New Jersey senator, energised some core Democrats with a fiery 25-hour speech on the Senate floor, the longest on record, in which he denounced Trump and Musk’s policies and invoked the legacy of civil rights leaders.
Across the party, ideas of how the Democrats should shape their fightback range from denouncing the administration and its allies as an oligarchy to deregulating government and vastly increasing the supply of housing, infrastructure and green energy (the main thrust of a new book, Abundance, by the liberal journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson), to staying quiet and hoping that Trump destroys himself.
Closer to the political centre, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has begun a podcast with guests including Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, in which he has suggested he agreed with Maga figures on the issue of transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, while calling the Democrat brand “toxic” and “judgmental”.
Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and former vice-presidential candidate, has launched a “Real America” tour, speaking in town halls in red districts across the country, in an attempt to draw a contrast with Republicans, who have been warned not to hold town halls due to concerns over confrontations with constituents.
James Carville, the legendary political consultant who helped bring Bill Clinton to victory in 1992, called in an article in The New York Times for Democrats to “embark on the most daring political manoeuvre in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us.”
Trump’s growing unpopularity has created an opportunity. According to an AP-Norc Center poll released last week, the president has a net unfavourability rating of minus 14 points, and six in ten disapprove of his handling of the economy.
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That is why Democrats of all stripes are turning away from narrow issues of social justice to economic issues — particularly as anxiety spreads over the impact on American consumers of Trump’s tariffs. In particular, nearly every solution proposed emphasises the need to win back the working-class voters who were for decades the backbone of the party.
Exit polls after November’s election showed that Trump had won 55 per cent of working-class voters (defined as those without a college degree), compared with about four in ten who chose Harris. Four years earlier the gap was much closer: Biden won 47 per cent of their vote compared with Trump’s 51 per cent.
John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster, said that while last week’s gains in Wisconsin and Florida were a “great psychological boost”, the party had to find an economic agenda that rebuilt trust in working people.
“Otherwise we only win when they screw up,” he said.
Rob Flaherty, deputy campaign director for Harris’s campaign, said that the battle ahead would be for disengaged voters, who did not show up to cast their ballot in special elections like the ones held last week in Wisconsin and Florida.
“We lost in 2024 because of voters who don’t pay attention,” he said. “We have to get their attention. And we have to have something to say.”
Voters who think that the system is broken, he said, were “harder to reach, but they also think we’re full of shit”.
Greg Casar, a Democratic congressman from Texas, said that a left-wing economic populist message could unite working people across political boundaries. To win back young men, minorities and working people, he said, the Democrats needed to give them a fight to believe in.
The answer, he said, lies in the kind of ideas Sanders was pushing when he ran for president in 2016 and 2020: billionaires are cheating the working people of America, and they need to fight back.
“Now there’s not billionaires running the government behind the curtain. We’ve got the richest man on earth bragging about it in public, on social media, every single day,” he said.
An Ipsos poll in January showed that 68 per cent of Americans believed that the economic system in the country unfairly favours the wealthy, including 52 per cent of Republicans and 83 per cent of Democrats. According to last week’s Harvard poll released last week, Musk’s favourability ratings are plummeting.
“You have a guy cutting healthcare and education to fund tax breaks for billionaires and people don’t like it,” said Mark Mellman, chief executive of The Mellman Group, a Democratic polling firm. “The economy is in a bigger mess today than when [Trump] took office.”
Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic strategist, said that the party needed to fight back so that they engaged young voters, rather than rely on them not liking Trump.
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“Democrats lose because they don’t stand for anything and young people know it,” he said. “You can’t win elections if you don’t stand for anything. People don’t read your minds and think, ‘Oh he is against Trump, so he is great’.”
Bashing billionaires, he said, might be popular among some parts of the electorate, but to win, Democrats would need something “more substantive, with fire to the issue”.
Sanders is not convinced that the party’s current leadership has the appetite to take on Trump. Rolling over and playing dead “is what the Democrats have done for the last many years”, he said.
“If you want to do more of the same and ignore the pain that the working class is feeling … I think you’re going to fall further and further behind. I think it’s time for the Democrats and for any serious people to have the courage to take on the oligarchy, take on the billionaire class, and fight for an agenda that works for a struggling working class in America. I think if you do that, it’s the right thing to do from a public policy point of view. It’s also the right thing to do politically. I think that’s how you win elections. Stand for the working class. Take on the billionaire class. That’s how you win.
“I’m not sure that the Democratic leadership is capable of addressing the major crises facing this country. They have very weak links to the grassroots in America, and that’s just the sad reality.”
