… Per our Jan. 2-4 Winning the Issues survey, our first of the year, what we’re seeing isn’t a “failure to communicate” on the part of Biden, his administration and congressional Democrats, but a failure to connect with the reality most Americans are facing and the priorities people want addressed. […] Read more »
Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA
Why have white, less educated voters left the Democratic Party over the past few decades? Scholars have proposed ethnocentrism, social issues and deindustrialization as potential answers. We highlight the role played by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In event-study analysis, we demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment […] Read more »
Biden’s economic plan bets on blue collars, from infrastructure to child care
The bipartisan infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden signed into law Monday marks a milestone in his effort to reorient Democratic economic policy away from the strategy of his party’s past two presidents. The sweeping infrastructure plan — which funds some $550 billion in new spending on roads, bridges, ports, […] Read more »
Commonsense Solidarity: How a working-class coalition can be built, and maintained
In 2021, Jacobin, a New York-based socialist magazine with a print circulation of 75,000 and an online audience of three million a month, collaborated with YouGov to survey working-class voting behavior in the United States. The work was done in conjunction with the newly formed Center for WorkingClass Politics. … […] Read more »
Biden has reached a critical moment in the battle for blue-collar voters
Just as Democrats face another round of hand-wringing about their erosion among working-class and rural White voters — after last week’s daunting election results in Virginia and New Jersey — the long-delayed congressional approval of a historic infrastructure plan will test President Joe Biden’s central theory on how the party […] Read more »
Who Will Show Up To Vote Next Year?
One significant piece of conventional wisdom that got turned on its head in 2020 was that higher turnout — especially among voters of color in states like Texas, Floria and Nevada — would solely benefit Democrats. Instead, many of these new voters, often younger and not typically engaged in politics, […] Read more »