David Catron of the American Spectator documents a key problem for America’s political left.
In a recent column published by the New Republic, Michael Tomasky asks, “Why don’t lefty candidates do better among working-class voters?” This shouldn’t be a mystery considering that Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in 2024 was delivered by a multiracial working-class coalition. He accomplished that historic feat by building his campaign platform around the things working-class voters care about. The real mystery is why anyone is still struggling to understand this obvious fact. …
… Part of the problem is that our friends on the left don’t understand how to define “working class.” Being intellectually lazy, they rely on the standard academic definition of the working class — adult workers lacking a four-year college degree. “By that measure,” writes José García of the Ford Foundation, “the working class constitutes over 60 percent of the U.S. labor force — more than 93 million people as of 2023. This group is not only large, but richly diverse: Roughly 53 percent are non-Hispanic white, 13 percent black, and 25 percent Hispanic.” Yet this academic definition of working class has little or no meaning to its actual members. Political scientist Nicholas Jacobs explains in The Conversation that the fabled “diploma divide” isn’t a satisfactory definition:
“While a larger proportion of the electorate has obtained a college degree and household incomes have risen, the share of Americans who consider themselves working class has remained remarkably stable: roughly 35 percent of voters for the past 70 years, 38 percent in 2024.… There are conventional ways to define the working class, but they often miss how people understand their own place in society.” …
… The problem here is that not all college degrees — or colleges — are created equal. People with four year college degrees, including most journalists, flatter themselves that they are part of a vaguely defined “elite.” But that term describes individuals or groups with power, influence, and wealth. Yet, in 2026, “higher education” doesn’t confer any of these things. Indeed many universities hand out degrees that are little more than participation trophies.
