Harding Street Generating Station, Indianapolis, Indiana. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Democrats know they have a problem with working-class voters but don’t agree on the cause. Commentators chalk Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss to high prices, an unusually short campaign cycle, or voter resentment against the possibility of having an African American woman as president. But the Democratic Party’s working-class woes have much deeper roots.

Many voters in key battleground states feel burned by decades of Democrats’ unrealized promises to improve the lives of working people, failure to reign in obscene economic inequality, and support for economically disastrous policies — from NAFTA to the entrance of China to the World Trade Organization — that led to the loss of countless jobs and futures in their states.

A new study from the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), with the Labor Institute and Rutgers University, uses a 3,000-person YouGov survey in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to test whether economic populism — tapping into resentment and insecurity from decades of corporate excess and bipartisan neglect — can win back voters who’ve turned away from the Democratic Party.

Let’s start with the good news. Economic populism is popular among Rust Belt voters — particularly when it explicitly calls out corporate greed and mass layoffs. Strong economic populism — as opposed to “populist-lite” messaging that acknowledges there are few bad........

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