Democrats Are Missing a Huge Opportunity to Win Working-Class Voters

A new poll shows that these Americans are worried that AI will eliminate their jobs—and they want the government to do something about it.

Working-class Americans are worried that AI will eliminate jobs, including their own, and they want the government to step in with a massive retraining program for affected workers—funded in part by a tax on large corporations that replace workers with AI.

That’s one of several key takeaways from a new poll commissioned by Working Families Power, an organizing, advocacy, and research group that partners with the Working Families Party. The survey, released exclusively to The New Republic, also shows that people are suspicious of data centers, particularly their impact on energy costs, and they support temporary limits or even moratoriums on new centers. That isn’t so surprising given the protests against data centers around the country, but it’s yet another reminder of the huge opportunity for the Democrats in the rising populist rage against Big Tech.

So far, they’re largely missing it.

Working Families Power partnered with the Justice Research Fund to contact 2,511 working-class registered voters, oversampling in swing districts. To identify those voters, they used a rigorous definition of working-class that includes family income, education level, type of work, homeownership status, and whether someone has financial security to fall back on if they lose their job. It’s a far more exacting definition of working-class than simply sorting out voters without a college education, as many surveys and analyses do, and one that identifies voters who are suffering most from the affordability crisis.

The poll shows that 73 percent are........

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