The 5-point advantage for Republicans reflects a preference for a party that knows how to use its power to get things done and seems to have a plan to restore working class prosperity.
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This card was made by dues-paying union members
to express their resentment against fellow workers
who refused to pay dues in "right to work" states.
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Around the time that Republicans were passing a budget that was giving tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and cutting $1 trillion from health insurance for the least affluent Americans, a Democrat member of the County Commission where I live was announcing her defection to the Republican Party.
In explaining her decision, Wendy Piper wrote:
When I was growing up, the Democratic Party supported middle class and working families, such as the one to which I belonged… I was raised primarily by a single mother, and our homes included trailers and trailer parks. My mother worked hard for her money, and I knew at the time that any tax dollars taken from her pocket to support those perceived to be worse off economically impacted her ability to put food on our table. The class divide has only become sharper.
Apparently, the class divide she is concerned about is not between the rich and the working class, but between the working class and people who qualify for welfare benefits. She added:
My former party continues to advocate for the growth of government and redistribution instead of boosting the growth of the economy, which benefits all. Rather than onshoring jobs that provide a living wage (what FDR used to call a “family wage”), they propose nominal increases to the minimum wage.
OBBB & the two parties
While Commissioner Piper was expressing outrage about offshoring of manufacturing, Democratic Party leaders were trying to stoke outrage about cuts to Medicaid in the Republican budget alongside regressive tax cuts.
They think they have an issue they can ride to victory in next year’s congressional midterms.
They may be right. A CNN poll taken in the wake of passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill showed that 33% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party and only 51% have a positive view.
A week after I read about Piper’s resignation in the
Caledonian-Record, the paper printed an op-ed by Nathan Meyers, a graduate student in the sociology department at UMass Amherst, citing the Congressional Budget Office’s and Joint Committee on Taxation’s prediction that by 2033 “the bottom 20% will pay more in taxes while the top 0.1% receives $43 billion in cuts” as a result of the bill.
But this outcome, Meyers wrote, is just the latest manifestation of 50 years of transferring wealth toward the rich and away from wage earners. Since 1970, the share of national income going to workers has fallen 14% and the share going to the “business surplus” increased 18%. Corporate profits have “outpaced economic grown by 193% since 1970.”
So what makes Republicans think the working class will swallow this latest policy aimed at punishing welfare recipients and transferring wealth upward? Do they think that the “false consciousness” of the “poorly educated” will lead them to vote against their own self interest? That’s the condescending theory the highly educated people who lead the Democratic Party—and their highly educated loyal voters—trot out after every election the Democrats lose, most notably after Bush’s 2004 re-election.
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This image was all over the internet after the 2004 election.
You can still buy the sticker on Amazon!
The book-length version of the sticker was written
by Thomas Frank: What’s the Matter with Kansas.
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And it is surely the theory they would use to explain that
CNN poll, which ranked the Democratic Party even less popular than the Republicans, at 28%.
Elite failure
Here’s a theory: The low ranking of
both parties reflects an accurate assessment of the current state of America’s political leadership. The 5-point advantage for Republicans reflects a preference for a party that knows how to use its power to get things done and seems to have a plan—however iffy
—to restore working class prosperity.
It may be that voters like Wendy Piper are willing to roll the dice on Donald Trump’s economic schemes. At least he has a plan to “onshore jobs.” Meanwhile, the Democrats can't seem to agree on a way to help working people who don’t qualify for welfare benefits but are still struggling to make ends meet.
Bill Clinton captured the White House in 1992 by saying he would govern on behalf of Americans “who work hard and play by the rules.” Ms. Piper seems to think her former party no longer cares about those people.
Democrats oppose cuts to welfare programs, but what is their plan to pull all working Americans out of the 50-year hole they’re in and revive the working class? Ms. Piper thinks they are motivated by other things. Democrats, she wrote, care more about gender identity and undocumented immigrants than “kitchen table issues” of working class voters.
What Republicans/MAGA are offering to working class voters
So what might Piper think Trump’s Republican Party will do for anyone outside of the “billionaire class”?
Maybe she and other working class Republican voters are buying the warmed-over Reagan-era supply side arguments put forward in the
Wall Street Journal’s opinion podcast,
Potomac Watch. Their claims:
Tax breaks for business research, development and equipment purchases are likely to boost productivity and spur economic growth (and onshore jobs?).
Medicaid provisions are aimed at saving the program. COVID era expansions made sense during that crisis, but making them permanent is not sustainable.
Eliminating the state medical provider taxes will end a scam through which hospitals and state governments conspired to milk the federal government for more matching funds.
In contrast to the liberal argument that the bill will bankrupt rural hospitals, the podcasters claimed that hospitals have been the fastest growing employers in the country, outpacing per capita GDP grown in every decade since 1970. (Doesn't everyone agree that US spending on health care is excessive and needs to be curbed?)
They praised the bill’s prohibition of state-funding of health care for undocumented immigrants. This point contradicted what I assumed was true, that illegal immigrants pay taxes but don’t get welfare benefits. In fact, the Associated Press recently reported that three states that have been providing Medicaid benefits for undocumented immigrants since 2020—California, Illinois, and Minnesota—are curtail them, even before the OBBB takes effect, for budgetary reasons. “The programs cost way more than officials had projected at a time when the states are facing multibillion-dollar deficits,” AP reported. DC and at least three other states have also offered Medicaid coverage to immigrants since 2020.
They claimed the work requirement is necessary to force able-bodied men who have no reason to be out of the work force. (They seem to have read the work of Nick Eberstadt whose 2016 book, Men Without Work, found that a whopping 16.1% of men age 25-55 have withdrawn from the workforce—compared to 6.2% in the 1960s. It's not clear how many of them are on Medicaid.)
The work requirement’s paperwork burden will not be as onerous as the anti-OBBB press has made it out to be, and work requirements are routinely required for many welfare programs, they claim. One of the WSJ pundits summed up the Democrats’ position on this point: “even if you don't work at all you should be able to get free health insurance for life even if you have no children or if you are a 35 year old man.” (About 60% of Americans tend to support work requirements. But this Pew poll seems to support the Democrats' argument that Medicaid recipients are already working or have good reasons not to be.)
Of course the
Wall Street Journal reflects views of the pre-MAGA Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan. I checked in on MAGA chieftain
Steve Bannon, who has been critical of elements of Trump II that haven’t been sufficiently populist. It seemed reasonable to assume he would be opposed to the upward transfer of wealth and budget cuts likely to disproportionately effect the MAGA base. But he was even more enthusiastic than the
Journal about the “supply side elements” of the bill, predicting a “coming economic boom.” He thinks the CBO estimate of a 1.8% GDP growth rate is wrong and predicted the bill would lead to a growth rate between 2.8 and 3.5% which will lead to more tax revenue and reduce the deficit.
But Oren Cass,
crowned by
Politico as “the MAGA movement’s top economic guru,” skewered the Bill as “warmed over Reaganism” that doesn’t address the “actual political preferences of their constituents and the country.”
He contested Bannon’s rosy memory of the 2017 tax cut (that it boosted GDP growth to 3.4% by 2019). “If you go back and look at what happened after the passage of the 2017 tax bill and whether the economy somehow is performing better under those rates, the evidence just is not there, particularly when you look at what’s happening on the deficit side,” Cass said.
(Cass's assessment of the impact of the 2017 tax cuts is supported
here and
here and in the graph below from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)
Cass defended the cuts to Medicaid and thinks that despite flaws of the Bill, the GOP is more likely than the Democrats to advance policies that will to create an economy that fosters working class prosperity. He said:
On trade, obviously, things have already substantively swung massively, and on competition and antitrust issues, things have been completely transformed. On labor issues, you’re seeing the administration and the folks they’re appointing and folks in the Senate shift directions.
Democrats claim to be the party of working Americans, Cass said, but they don’t
prioritize policies addressing working class issues. Instead, he said, Biden prioritized measures that hurt working class interest. His green energy legislation replaces good-paying working class jobs in the energy sector, with lower-wage green energy jobs (He might have a point; UAW President
Shawn Fain said: “the EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom.”) Cass also pointed to Biden's failure to stem the tide of illegal immigrants who drive down working class wages, or to fight harder to protect American jobs from competition from cheap Chinese imports.
We loyal Democrats shouldn’t completely discount the notion that the Republican Party might end up being the more working class-friendly party. Some reasons:
1. I’ve been disillusioned with the Democratic Party throughout my whole voting life, for a number of reasons, but largely because they embraced free trade without a plan to make up for the lost jobs, they never fought back against the right’s war on labor unions and they didn’t protect public universities from the budget cutters. They’ve always just been the lesser of two evils from my working class perspective.
2. In his first campaign for the presidency, Obama embraced labor’s “Card Check” proposal, but in office he didn’t make it a priority and it didn’t happen. That failure is a fitting bookend to the neoliberal era that began with Carter, who basically sabotaged similar legislation, paving the way for 45 years of de-unionization of the American workforce (Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade, 180-190; and Jefferson Cowie, “The New Deal that Never Happened,” in Stayin' Alive, 261-312).
3. Speaking of the neoliberal order, it seems to be coming to an end, thanks in large part to Donald Trump. What follows might be worse, but it needed to die. Thanks, Donald.
4. Actual working class people have been fleeing the Democratic Party over the last 40 or 50 years, especially post-Obama. If they come to make up the Republican base, the party can’t completely ignore their interests . . . can they?
5. When Ezra Klein and Derick Thompson’s book Abundance, explaining why Democratic-led governments have been so ineffective at following through on promises to solve problems where they reign—housing shortages, for example—and offered sensible ways to do better, they were met by a “buzz saw of opposition from the left.” And while Democrats are having a debate over whether to remove the obstacles that have prevented them from building high speed rail or rural internet or EV charging stations, Trump and the Republicans are getting things done. Deregulation in the OBBB, Bannon asserts, will make it possible “to build things in America again.”
6. Democrats have invested a lot in building a base of suburban, college-educated constituents of the "professional-managerial" class, and the leaders of the party are part of that strata. The cultural gap with the non-college-educated working class might be unbridgeable.
7. Patrick Ruffini makes a somewhat compelling case that Republicans are more likely to become a working class party than the Democrats in his book Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. It would not be the first time in our history that the parties switched roles.
Democratic priorities
In the last presidential campaign, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris began with a focus on economic policy relevant to workers, but then pivoted to the issue Democrat have been hammering to little effect since 2016: democracy.
Wall Street Journal campaign reporter Josh Dawsey said Harris ignored her aides’ pleas not to make her final campaign address—delivered on the Ellipse where Trump had riled up the crowd before the J-6 attack on the Capitol—about Trump’s threat to democracy.
When Trump aides heard about the speech, Dawsey says, they were “gleeful; they, were like: can we get her to do it again tomorrow night?” Meanwhile, Dawsey says, Trump’s message “was just about inflation and immigration and prices.” All the polling had suggested that voters were motivated by economic issues, not Trump’s crimes and saving democracy; but the Harris campaign ignored that.
She must have been listening to all the
liberal pundits and economic “experts” who were saying that voter’s economic anxiety was misguided because statistics showed the economy was in great shape. “America’s glorious economy should help Kamala Harris,”
The Economist Proclaimed shortly before election day.
But according to the
Ludwig Institute, and some others, it was the government statistics that were misguided—they underestimated inflation and unemployment and overestimated working class income.
Prices of the necessities that make up working class budgets rose 9.4% annually during the peak inflation years of 2022 and 2023, not at the official 4.1 rate, which includes luxury goods that only the well-healed can afford and which did not see much price-rise.
The real unemployment rate as of June 2025 is closer to 24% than the official 4.1% rate cited by experts. To arrive at a true rate of unemployment,
Ludwig argues, you have to include as unemployed people working only part time and not earning a living wage. The official rate includes them as employed, and it totally ignores people who have given up on looking for work and have withdrawn from the workforce.
Wendy Piper’s Free Rider ProblemAs I mentioned before, Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, has done admirable work in revealing the largest group of non-working people, the 16% of men in the prime working years of 25-54. His data suggests that most of them are not doing something productive, like civic engagement or education; only 2.6% are caring for children, compared to 39% of non-working women (110). Eberstadt argues that men were lured out of the workforce by generous Great Society welfare programs.
As another writer summed up his theory, these men are “slackers gaming a too generous system” (194).
Like dues-paying members of unions, no normal person likes a free rider. But to people like Wendy Piper, the liberal opposition to the work requirements for Medicaid in the OBBB suggests that liberals love them.
I don’t love free riders, but I don’t love the work requirements, either, if, as some critics claim it will cost states more to implement than any money it will save and if the paperwork burden really is as onerous as the left claims. Anyone who has filled out financial aid forms for college students can certainly believe that.
My Take
I’ve lived and worked mostly in the Democratic-liberal-cosmopolitan-elite-academic bubble for most of my professional life. But I share Wendy Piper’s lower class origins as well as some of her frustrations with the Democratic Party of 2025, though not to the point of joining the Republicans—at least not yet. But I think her letter should be reprinted and shared with any Democrat who wants the Party to win elections.
We should meditate, in particular, on the words I italicized, bolded and underlined in this sentence:
My former party continues to advocate for the growth of government and redistribution instead of boosting the growth of the economy, which benefits all.
We all know the Republican recipe for policies that “benefit all”: cut taxes and regulations to spur investment that will create jobs and lift all boats. The MAGA wing throws in some tariffs to bring back manufacturing.
The Democrats used to have a “benefits all” recipe that worked. It was called the New Deal. There is no means testing for Social Security. Everyone who works for wages qualifies. Since they abandoned that "benefits-all" approach, beginning in the 1970s, the party switched to a complicated goulash of separate programs, one for each constituency, but that left out broad swaths of the working class during an era of de-industrialization.
Notes:
On Wendy Piper, see Robert Blechl, “County Commission adopts inclusion resolution, commissioner defects to GOP,” Caledonian-Record, July 7, 2025. The Caledonian-Record is behind a paywall, but you can read Piper’s full op-ed in the Manchester Union Leader.
Josh Dawsey was interviewed by Mike Pesca on his podcast, The Gist, July 9, 2025. “The Loyalty Trap: Inside the 2024 Biden-Harris Collapse.”
Oren Cass interviewed China shock economist David Autor here. It explains a lot about the MAGA revolt against free trade.
According to David Leonhardt, among the western liberal democracies there’s only one liberal party that has been able to defeat the populist right. Here’s what they did. “In an Age of Right-Wing Populism, Why Are Denmark’s Liberals Winning?” New York Times, Feb. 24, 2025.
Lessons from Piper’s letter are echoed in Daniel Martinez HoSang, “Inside the Rise of the Multiracial Right,” New York Times, July 24, 2025. The defection of ethnic/racial minorities from the Democratic coalition illustrates the failure of the Democrats' “appeal-separately-to-every-group” strategy.
I was surprised that Cass thinks Trump II is doing a good job vs monopolies. I’d just read this piece on the great anti-monopoly Substack of Matt Stoller and came away with the impression that Trump II is squelching anti-trust enforcement that had ramped up under Biden.
Eberstadt's book, Men Without Work, includes essays by two writers with "dissenting points of view," who argue that men weren't lured out of the workforce by generous welfare benefits, but were pushed out by de-industrialization.
Just before I posted this, I read, again in my local newspaper, an article that also tries to understand working class support for Trump. Alex Hinton writes, for example, that Trump supporters aren't ignorant to the possible downsides of the OBBB:
Sure, their reasoning goes, bumps in the road are expected. But they think that most of the criticism of Trump and this latest bill is ultimately fake news spread by radical leftists who have what some call Trump Derangement Syndrome, meaning anti-Trump hysteria.
