The Working Class Wants Policymakers To Reward Work and Listen to Their Values

For years, working-class families have been struggling with high costs and with jobs that do not adequately reward hard work, and in 2024, working-class voters made their dissatisfaction with the status quo clear: 56 percent of them voted for Donald Trump, while only 43 percent voted for Kamala Harris. This outcome made the steady decline in working-class support for the Democratic Party—previously seen as the champion of working people’s interests—impossible to ignore and prompted a renewed debate on how policymakers can represent working-class interests.

In 2025, the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress Action Fund published research and hosted events bringing together policymakers and researchers studying the issue of working-class representation in American politics. This column synthesizes findings from the AWP and elsewhere relating to the working class, including:

• Nearly two-thirds of the workforce, and roughly the same proportion of the electorate, is working class.
• The working class is more racially and ethnically diverse than the college-educated workforce.
• Working-class people struggle economically, burdened with high costs while working primarily in service jobs that do not offer decent wages.
• Working-class voters want progressive economic policies, especially those that reward work.
• Winning the working class requires more than just a strong economic message: Many working-class voters feel policymakers are out of touch, fail to address or even acknowledge cultural divides, or are more focused on the preferences of elites rather than prioritizing fights that will make the most difference to working people.

These findings make clear that anyone who wants to represent working-class Americans must prioritize a progressive economic agenda that strengthens worker power; ensures families can support themselves with decent pay and benefits; addresses skyrocketing costs for rent, groceries, and health care; and addresses the concerns of working-class voters on cultural issues.

Who is the working class?

The working class—defined as workers without a four-year college degree—makes up almost two-thirds of the workforce and a similar proportion of the electorate and is more racially and ethnically diverse than the college-educated workforce. While roughly two-thirds of the college-educated workforce is white, white workers make up just more than half of the working class.

More than three-quarters of working-class Americans work in the service sector, and the jobs most commonly held by working-class people tend to offer far lower wages than the jobs held by workers with college degrees. As shown in Figure 1, the median worker with a high school diploma earned a weekly income of $960 in the second quarter of 2025, compared with $1,732 for the median college-educated worker. Even after controlling for demographic factors such as age and gender, college-educated workers earn about 75 percent more than similar workers without a college education.

Working-class people also struggle with high costs. Figure 2 shows how many households are “rent burdened,” or pay more than 30 percent of their monthly income in gross rent (rent including other costs such as utilities). More than half, or 58 percent, of working-class households struggle with high rent, while 38 percent of households with at least one college graduate are rent burdened. Former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) summed up the problem facing working-class people at an AWP event in March: “We have an economy today that does not reward work, that does not value the work of Americans without four-year college degrees.”

Working-class Americans want progressive economic change

The economic challenges faced by working-class people likely contribute to their progressive attitudes on economic issues. Working-class people want economic policies that reward hard work, including stronger unions, a higher minimum wage, and strong overtime standards, as highlighted in Figure 3. The working class also supports higher taxes on the rich and wants Medicaid to be expanded to cover more families.

Many policymakers hosted by the AWP spoke about the need to support pro-worker economic policies. At a June event on working-class voters, Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, explained that workers responded positively to policies that made housing in his hometown more affordable. Reps. Casar and Nikki Budzinski (D-IL), vice chair of the New Democrat Coalition, similarly made clear the need to strengthen organizing rights by passing the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would dramatically enhance workers’ ability to come together in unions.

However, it is not enough to simply support progressive economic policies: The working class wants policymakers to deliver meaningful improvements. Working-class people also want representation in government from lawmakers who share their backgrounds and understand the challenges they face. During a June event hosted by the AWP in partnership with State Innovation Exchange Action, Colorado State Sen. Julie Gonzales (D) described voters’ “increasing frustration” with their elected representatives’ “inability to get things done.” Similarly, former Maine State Sen. Troy Jackson (D) remarked, “It’s hard to explain to people why [aren’t] things changing as quickly as they need to? … In my mind, it’s like the same people for 50 or 60 years have been sitting around the same table making the same decisions, and no wonder nothing changes. It’s because a lot of everyday working-class people are not actually in the legislature or don’t get the opportunities to actually make the big decisions.”

Policymakers cannot ignore the working class on cultural issues

Delivering on economic priorities is necessary to represent working-class interests, but policymakers must also represent the positions of the working class on other issues.

The working class and college educated have similar views on progressive economic policies, but their preferences on other policies differ more frequently: Indeed, members of the working class oppose many of the cultural policies they associate with progressives and the Democratic Party, including the state of the immigration system in 2024, discomfort with patriotism, and others, as Brookings Institution scholar Bill Galston explained. Other research published in 2025, including University of California professor Joan Williams’ book Outclassed and an analysis of polling data from The Center for Working-Class Politics, reaches a similar conclusion and highlights that cultural differences are often class based.

Indeed, Rep. Budzinski and Rep. Casar, representing different wings of the Democratic Party, said that the party needs to deliver both an economic agenda that helps working families and immigration reform. As Casar put it, Democrats need to “establish a broader, more thoughtful, legal, humane, and orderly immigration system”; otherwise, “we are just dooming ourselves.”

Differences on cultural issues have contributed directly to the loss of working-class voters among Democratic candidates. Suresh Naidu, a professor at Columbia University, highlighted at an AWP event that around one-half of the shift from working-class voters away from the Democratic Party since the 1970s can be explained by the lack of strong pro-worker policies from Democratic elected officials—meaning the other half of the working-class retreat is likely due to noneconomic issues.

AWP research found that as former President Joe Biden and former Vice President Harris leaned into union economic issues, union members increasingly voted for Democratic candidates, highlighting the importance of economic policy. But this shift was led by union women, who are more in tune with Democratic Party positions on noneconomic issues, while working-class union men voted very similarly to their nonunion peers, indicating that other issues also play an important role in working-class voting behavior. In addition, Center for American Progress research found that Biden’s infrastructure and job creation projects improved electoral outcomes for Harris in 2024 by only a very modest amount, suggesting that lawmakers who successfully implement significant pro-worker policies must also succeed at showing how they achieved meaningful gains in the lives of working people.

Conclusion

Working-class voters today are struggling economically and want political change that not only reflects their need for decent jobs that pay family-supporting wages but also ensures their perspectives on other issues are not ignored.