Many election postmortems diagnosed the Democratic Party with a case of elitism, which proved fatal to its image among working-class voters. The party’s language, policy positions, institutional allies, and media strategy all reflected the preferences of white college graduates. Trump, meanwhile, harnessed a frustration with the establishment that solidified the sweeping electoral realignment he began with his first campaign in 2016.

“Democrats are going through an ideological identity struggle that can’t be reconciled,” Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, told the Washington Examiner. “Their only unity is opposition to Trump.”

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Some Democrats have tried supplanting their identity-based worldview with class-based rhetoric. Others have advocated dropping positions that are unpopular outside of coastal liberal circles, such as allowing biological boys to compete in girls sports.

Still others have suggested responding to the populist vibes of the moment by adopting a deregulatory agenda aimed at allowing the construction of more housing and energy projects in an effort to answer the demand from voters, evident in exit polling after Election Day, for politicians to focus more on their economic concerns.

And while Democrats have sensed an opening amid the economic turbulence caused by Trump’s tariffs, their fierce defense of the status quo in the federal government, academia, foreign policy, and beyond has complicated those competing efforts to remake the party in a populist mold. 

Class warfare clashes

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have led perhaps the most visible foray into populism with their successful “Fighting Oligarchy” tour in stadiums and schools across the country.

Their rallies feature rhetoric that blames the ills of society on America’s most powerful and wealthy citizens, dividing society less by race and gender and more by class.

“The destruction of our rights and our democracy is directly tied to the growing and extreme wealth inequality that has been building in America for years,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a recent rally. “It is not a coincidence that billionaires like Elon Musk have dumped billions into this election to support Donald Trump. He sure as hell is not doing it for charity.”

Musk, the technology billionaire who helped Trump get elected, is frequently villainized on the stages of the progressive duo’s rallies. Other Democrats have taken aim at Musk as well, finding early in Trump’s presidency that polls reflected a deeper skepticism of Musk than any other people or policies from the Trump administration. 

But not all Democratic criticism of Musk is driven by a pivot to populism, said University of Chicago political science professor emeritus Charles Lipson.

“AOC and Bernie are fighting Musk because he’s an oligarch. Elizabeth Warren and the senators from Maryland and Virginia are fighting Elon Musk because he’s the poster boy for cutting back bureaucratic employment and the regulatory state — two different purposes,” Lipson told the Washington Examiner.

“They coalesce in this case as what looks like populism, but it’s not quite populism,” Lipson said. “Half of it is to preserve the state that was essentially built by Lyndon Johnson, but which has not reduced poverty much at all.”

Democrats who have framed Trump primarily as an oligarch who is driven by a desire to enrich himself and his wealthy friends have accomplished one goal of the Democrats’ intraparty critics, but not a crucial second one. The approach fulfills a demand from the base for its leaders to be seen as fighting the Trump administration, and it does so without as much of the hyperbolic and racially charged rhetoric that twice failed to keep Trump from the White House. But it does not address the stances on social issues that have alienated the party from working-class voters.

The strategy involves “what party leaders have started calling ‘economic’ or ‘authentic’ populism, defined by a Sanders–esque criticism of ‘oligarchy’ that de-emphasizes cultural politics rhetorically without actually abandoning the party’s cultural commitments,” Manhattan Institute fellow Park MacDougald wrote in City Journal.

Despite taking aim at the country’s most economically elite, Democrats may struggle to convince working-class voters that the party’s values align with theirs when Democrats have become so closely associated with the highly educated and affluent.

“[Voters] are also painfully aware that the professional-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power is overwhelmingly Democratic,” Ruy Teixeira, a political scientist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a recent Substack. “To working-class voters, the professional upper middle class may not be the super-rich but they are elites just the same — junior oligarchs if you will.”

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The election results showed a striking partisan split along education and income levels. Voters with less education were more likely to vote for Trump, as were voters with smaller paychecks.

Democrats may sense a chance to capitalize on those fault lines by paying more attention to the class dynamics splitting the electorate, especially given that their focus on racial and gender identity dynamics failed to keep together a winning coalition.

But the realities of who the Democratic Party has catered to in recent years could make the shift to class warfare tactics difficult for Democrats.

“The failure to understand that they themselves are targets of populist anger is a central reason their populist pitch fails — and will fail — to get traction among the working class,” Teixeira wrote. “Call it the ‘old wine in new bottles’ problem — these voters hear the economic populist words but they sense that behind them is the same old Democratic Party with the same old elites and the same old cultural priorities.” 

‘Weak and woke’

Some Democrats have attributed their drift away from working-class voters, who once made up the heart of their base, to the party’s embrace of liberal social issues that feel more at home in Manhattan than Michigan.

One of Trump’s most successful campaign ads of the 2024 race accused then-Vice President Kamala Harris of being more focused on transgender rights than on commonsense policies.

“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” the narrator in the ad said.

Some Democratic strategists have urged the party to learn lessons from the exodus of blue-collar voters.

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville, for example, suggested that “pronoun politics” could split the Democratic Party. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who has been critical of fellow Democrats for what he sees as an insufficient effort to take stock of what went wrong in November, has acknowledged the “deeply unfair” nature of allowing biological boys to compete in girls sports. 

Rahm Emanuel, the former Democratic mayor of Chicago and Obama White House alum, said Democrats have allowed fringe issues to distract them from their “core” message.

“I will just tell you we looked mighty strange having some of these arguments,” Emanuel said on a recent podcast. “We’re having frivolous arguments about things that didn’t matter to people. We became not a party that was built on the culture of acceptance, but a party that became an advocate for certain things that, in my view, were just nuts.”

The push to drop left-wing social positions from the party platform has met fierce resistance from some Democrats. Progressive Democrats see the retreat from culture war fights as a capitulation to Trump and a betrayal of the activists who are deeply passionate about those issues.

But proponents of the strategy fear Republicans will maintain their hold on working-class voters as long as the Democratic Party’s brand is so closely associated with liberal cultural pieties.

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), seen as a rising star in the party, unveiled this week a vision for Democratic revival that included ditching the “weak and woke” image of the party and embracing patriotic imagery. 

Her tone and rhetoric, which reportedly included some profanity, also appeared to mimic the brash speaking style Trump used to build his populist movement.

Deep Democratic divisions remain

Some Democrats have continued to embrace positions and promote messages that avoid playing into the populist moment, however.

On perhaps no other issue did Democrats misread their multicultural working-class base more dramatically than on immigration. While the party’s conventional wisdom for years dictated that permissive immigration policy would keep Hispanic voters in the fold, the election results demonstrated that Democrats’ “Latinx” coalition had little appetite for open borders.

Trump’s brand of populism treated immigration as an economic issue — one that affected working-class voters’ ability to buy or rent a home, find a job, and ensure their children got a decent education in public schools that were, in some areas, strained by an influx of Spanish-speaking children.

But the Democrats treated immigration as a humanitarian issue — one that had no direct impact on their supporters’ day-to-day lives. Welcoming illegal immigrants was more an act of charity, in the Democrats’ telling, and those who opposed doing so were motivated by racial animus or were simply misinformed.

Democrats who bucked the party line on immigration, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, faced the wrath of Democratic leadership. 

And even though Trump’s victory revealed the public’s strong desire to see immigration laws enforced, some Democrats have gambled that opposing the Trump administration’s immigration agenda is still a winning strategy.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), for example, made international headlines last week when he visited Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant and suspected gang member who was deported back to El Salvador due to an administrative error, and demanded the Trump administration return him to the U.S. 

The focus by Van Hollen and other Democrats on lax immigration enforcement could undermine efforts elsewhere in the party to refocus Democratic messaging away from framing top issues in ways that feel out of step with working-class voters.

So too could their overwhelming focus on lawsuits against the Trump administration.

“A politics that leads by injunction, however, isn’t grounded in persuasion and popular mobilisation,” Justin Vassallo, a writer and researcher in American political development, wrote recently for Unherd. “And it disregards the problems Trump exploited to win the election, from soaring living costs and rising consumer debt to progressives’ ill-conceived policies on migration and public safety.” 

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Democrats’ inability to settle on a path forward after Trump’s populist victory has left the party’s stars moving in different directions.

“​​I think there is too much of a fundamental tension among Democratic voting blocs for them to settle this,” Fleischer said. “Different candidates in different districts and states will do different things.”