How Dems lost the working class

In the wake of Trump’s election victory last month, Democrats would do well to re-examine their 2016 presidential primary and how it laid the groundwork for the party’s fall from grace with key groups of voters. That was the year when Vermont’s Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders tossed his hat in the presidential ring one day in a short off-the-cuff speech, and almost instantly caught fire with working class voters who wholeheartedly agreed with his diagnosis and prescription for breaking up America’s oligarchy and returning power back to the people.
It was a warning shot that the Democratic Party establishment failed to heed and it led directly to the election of Donald Trump, both in 2016 and again in 2024. Even David Brooks, a longtime conservative critic of Sanders, acknowledged in a recent op-ed in the New York Times that Sanders was probably exactly what the Democrats needed— a “disruptor” who would make the establishment uncomfortable.
Indeed, had the Democratic establishment not blocked Sanders’ path to the nomination in 2016, Trump would have never been president. With Clinton, who along with her husband had become a defender of the free-trade status quo and a hawkish foreign policy, Trump had a wide-open path to peel off working class voters who had long been the base of the Democratic Party. Sanders would have made Trump’s play for the working class untenable because, unlike Trump, Sanders is a true populist who has held steadfast to his principles and ideas for improving the lives of average Americans throughout his political career.
Sanders, who voted against trade deals like NAFTA negotiated by Clinton, appealed in particular to white working-class voters in places like the Upper Midwest, where the Democrat’s purported “blue wall,” of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, first collapsed in 2016. Here on the Iron Range, the precinct caucuses in 2016 were jammed with new participants, of all ages, who turned out to back Sanders.
Across Minnesota, Sanders easily swept every congressional district in the caucuses and did the same in Wisconsin. It was no surprise. Poll after poll show that most Americans see the economy as rigged in favor of powerful corporations and the wealthy, and they back the kind of progressive economic policies — like fairer taxes, a higher minimum wage, and union protections — that Sanders has long pushed for in Congress.
The nervous Nellies in the Democratic Party wobbled at the prospect of a Sanders’ campaign, telling themselves that Americans would never elect someone who identifies as a socialist. Yet, many of those same working-class voters who were ultimately denied the chance to vote for Sanders in the general election, turned around and voted for Trump over Clinton. And the Democrats lost Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and nearly lost Minnesota.
We saw it all repeat again last month. Given the opportunity to elect a cautious, qualified, law-abiding president and a convicted felon and sexual predator who promised to blow things up, the working folks opted for the explosion and letting the chips fall where they may. That, more than anything, is a sign of just how frustrated Americans are with the status quo. As long as the Democratic Party is seen as the defender of more-of-the-same they will continue to lose ground to Trump and the oligarchs who dug deep to cash-flow his campaign this time around.
The irony is that Trump’s economic policies will hit the working-class hardest of all. His policies will extend tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and offer “hardship,” in Elon Musk’s words, to average Americans. That reality will soon dawn on many of Trump’s voters, laying the groundwork for the Democrats’ resurgence — but only with a messenger who is willing to buck the center-right, neoliberal orthodoxy that has come to dominate the Democratic Party in recent years.
It was the Clinton wing of the party, in a bid to tap big donors, that began promoting policies — traditionally the purview of the Republicans — that favored the country club set. Over time, regular Americans realized that the party had strayed, even as they generally saw the Democrats as a slightly less onerous alternative to the harsh GOP medicine.
Then along came Trump, who recognized that both parties had abandoned a traditionally leftist economic message that had long appealed to working Americans. And he jumped in with rhetoric largely stolen from Sanders combined with a social policy that played to Americans’ fearful impulses.
A Sanders’ campaign in 2016 would not only have prevented a Trump presidency, it would have reset the terms of political engagement in the U.S. and re-established the Democrats as the party of working people. The Iron Range, and other labor strongholds throughout the Midwest, would still be solidly blue. While hindsight is usually 20/20, it is clear looking back that the Democratic establishment’s decision to block a Sanders nomination in 2016 was a monumental blunder that will take years to overcome.