Kristof: Democrats must return to their working-class roots

By Nicholas Kristof / The New York Times

The other day I was supposed to visit a friend who had been released from prison. He had to cancel to rescue his sister, who is using drugs again.

Another old friend needed a ride: It turned out that his car had broken down again, and until his next paycheck came, he couldn’t afford a $2 bolt to fix it.

I think of friends like these here in rural Oregon, in an area that mostly supports Donald Trump, when people ask me why America’s working class rejected the Democrats on Tuesday. My neighbors, struggling to pay the rent and buying gas five dollars at a time, often perceive national Democrats as remote elites more eager to find them pronouns than housing. Election postmortems have been dissecting Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, but the challenge for Democrats goes far beyond any of that.

For several decades, voters have identified more with the Democratic Party than with the Republican Party. But in some polls this year, more people have affiliated with the Republican Party than with the Democratic Party. Looking ahead at the specific Senate seats that will be in contention in 2026 and 2028, it’s not easy to see when the Democrats will have a chance to recover the chamber.

I see the disenchantment with Democrats in my hometown, Yamhill, which traditionally was dependent on timber, agriculture and light manufacturing. But then good union jobs left, meth arrived and everything changed. Today, more than a third of the kids on my old No. 6 school bus are dead from drugs, alcohol, suicide and reckless accidents.

Here’s an astonishing statistic from Bureau of Labor Statistics data: Blue-collar private-sector workers were actually earning more on average in 1972, after adjusting for inflation, than they are now in 2024. So today’s blue-collar workers are on average earning less in real dollars than their grandparents were 52 years ago.

So of course people are angry at the establishment; which in this election was represented by a vice president who wouldn’t distance herself from the president.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said in a statement. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”

Look, I’m a liberal, and I wouldn’t go as far as Sanders. I think Democrats have far better policies for working-class Americans than Republicans do. It was Democrats who backed labor unions, who raised minimum wages, and who under President Joe Biden crafted a strategy to create manufacturing jobs and slash child poverty.

Trump talks a good game about manufacturing, but his administration presided over the loss of nearly 200,000 factory jobs (because of the pandemic) while Biden so far has seen an increase of nearly 700,000 manufacturing jobs.

Similarly, Trump promised restaurant workers during the campaign that they wouldn’t have to pay taxes on tips, but in 2017 his administration proposed a rule that would have allowed businesses to steal workers’ tips.

It’s not enough for liberals to proclaim that they have better policies, because Democrats increasingly are the party of university-educated elites, and they have an unfortunate knack for coming across as remote and patronizing scolds. This is compounded by the tendency of some on the educated left to scorn religion, which to many voters is a pillar of reassurance in difficult times.

Given that 74% of Americans believe in God, according to Gallup, while only 38% of those over the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree, condescension is a disastrous strategy.

To those who doubt this condescension, you should have seen my mail when I warned in August that we shouldn’t demean Trump voters. So many liberals responded with a variant of: But they deserve to be demeaned.

I worry that Democrats prize purity, even at the price of a smaller tent. Many on the left were furious with the periodic roadblocks created by Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, but in retrospect, they should have been endlessly grateful that they had in their ranks a senator from Trump country.

Democrats often have policies to redistribute incomes, but what many struggling Americans want is also a redistribution of dignity and some vision of increased opportunity. Instead, they got lectured about identity and insensitive language. Wokeness may seem a little thing, but it offended people viscerally and was taken as an emblem of a party run amok.

While many on the educated left live in a highly verbal world and perceived the push to tweak language and offer pronouns as an effort to be inclusive, it came across to my working-class friends as excluding them and generally confusing. They rolled their eyes at old video clips (stitched together, possibly misleadingly) of Harris favoring paying for gender-reassignment surgery for state prison inmates, when they can’t afford health care for themselves. And my friends who have been homeless didn’t yearn to be called “unhoused”; they just wanted housing.

I’m conflicted on immigration. I’m the son of a refugee, and I was horrified by Trump’s policy of family separation and his disdain for Dreamers. But it’s also true that America’s asylum policy was dysfunctional, and that ordinary Americans pleaded for years to strengthen border enforcement; and Democrats didn’t listen to those pleas until it was too late. Of course voters were ready to punish them.

So now we’re in a situation where Trump won almost half of Latino voters, a rising share of Black and Asian voters, and an increase in young male and even young female voters. Trump won roughly the same share of votes from people without a bachelor’s degree as Harris won among voters with a bachelor’s; but there are many more of the former.

If Democrats can keep the conversation on minimum wages, child care, unions, jobs, tax increases on the rich and access to health care, they can compete for working-class voters of all complexions. But the first step may be the most difficult: Democrats will have to swallow their pride and show more respect toward working-class voters who just rejected them and elected their nemesis.

Contact Nicolas Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, X.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018. This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.