In late fall, I was in a break room with 10 or so autoworkers at the Avon Lake Ford plant near Lake Erie. As they talked about the challenges they and their families faced, one worker asked everyone whom they were voting for in the presidential election.
One by one, they went around the table: the vice president. The vice president. The vice president. Only one was not. Why not? we asked.
“The vice president wants to take my guns away.”
The man next to him turned to him and said, “Well, Sherrod has basically the same position on guns, and you vote for him.” He responded, “Yeah, but Sherrod’s on my side. He fights for me and my family.”
That conversation happened in October … in the year 2000.
That November, Vice President Al Gore lost Ohio by fewer than 200,000 votes. Anyone reading this surely knows Ohio’s political trajectory since then. Bush, in a close race. Obama, in a close race. Obama—again, in a very close race. And then, the record-scratch moment. 2016, and Trump’s victory by more than 8 points.
In 2020, Trump held that margin against Biden roughly consistently. But last year, the bottom fell out. Vice President Kamala Harris lost by over 11 points, and I lost reelection to the Senate by about 3.5 points.
Since November 5, in the final months of the year, no one has had a lot of time for licking wounds. Seventy people in our office were suddenly out of work. My chief of staff and state director and I met with every member of our staff, working to find jobs for the public servants who had served Ohio, many for more than a decade.
And we still had legislative work to do. We fought to finally get the Social Security Fairness Act through the Senate and signed into law. After more than 10 years of work, my penultimate vote in the United States Senate—after midnight, on my last night on the Senate floor—finally restored the full Social Security that more than three million American workers earned. Teachers and police officers and school cafeteria workers and bus drivers paid in over years of hard work. Now, they will finally get the retirement security they earned.
But in the months since the election, my mind has also often wandered back to the conversation with those Ford workers 25 years ago.
That exchange would never happen today, of this I’m certain. Notably, we would have had more—likely far more—than just one Trump supporter among the group. And while I certainly met plenty of Trump-Brown voters last year, the number of Ohioans willing to split their tickets like that one anti-Gore holdout has declined dramatically. Fewer and fewer voters are willing to differentiate my work for Ohioans and fight for the dignity of work from the national party and its leader.
In large swaths of Ohio, and the country, the Democratic Party’s reputation has become toxic.
Following the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and the subsequent weeks of national media attention, I visited East Palestine over and over. My staff and I held roundtables with first responders and small-business owners and farmers. We visited the derailment site and the temporary health clinic. We demanded Norfolk Southern pay everything it owed residents. We partnered with JD Vance to push legislation to make railways safer and prevent future crashes. We secured a new fire station for the town, where the existing fire station is just 40 feet from the railroad tracks.
None of it was enough to make a dent in the county’s Republican slide—so great now is the distrust of anyone with a “D” next to their name on the ballot. All along eastern Ohio, it’s the same story—in county after county, places full of union towns that I once considered part of our base are now outrightly hostile.
There are two questions people have asked me since November: What are you going to do next? And, where do we go from here, as a party?
The answers to both are the same.
Democrats must become the workers’ party again. It is an electoral and a moral imperative, and it will be my mission for the rest of my life. To win the White House and governing majorities again, Democrats must reckon with how far our party has strayed from our New Deal roots, in terms of both our philosophy toward the economy, and the makeup of our coalition.
We cannot solve this problem without an honest assessment of who we are. How we see ourselves as the Democratic Party—the party of the people, the party of the working class and the middle class—no longer matches up with what most voters think.
It Wasn’t Just Inflation
But, you may ask, over the last four years, haven’t we been the party of workers?
Joe Biden was inarguably the most pro-labor president of my lifetime. He talked about the dignity of work. He ushered in a new era of industrial policy, making dramatic investments to create jobs and move production of crucial technologies home to the United States. He hired economists for top jobs who prioritized worker power in the labor market. He had the most pro-worker U.S. trade representative likely ever. He presided over rising wages and low unemployment. He walked a picket line.
But he was horribly unpopular. Americans repeatedly told us that they hated the economy, thought the country was on the wrong track, and felt worse off than ever.
So what happened?
There is no one simple answer. Inflation surely played a large role. For most people, the cost of living was already too high before inflation hit—health care, housing, and childcare, in particular, were becoming ever more unaffordable. Layer on top of that watching the price go up, week after week, for eggs and paper towels and diapers and a hundred other things you hadn’t thought much about before, but that you need and that are now stretching your already tight budget. It should not be that surprising that workers were angry.
The White House called it “transitory”—as if that meant anything to a parent who has to figure out how to pay their bills this month. They said it was worse in other countries—as if that would help anyone afford groceries that week and still make rent or pay the mortgage.
But it would be a mistake to simply excuse ourselves as a party and chalk this defeat up entirely to inflation that, messaging tone deafness aside, was largely out of the president’s control.
The march away from the Democratic Party among working-class voters—now including nonwhite workers—began long before inflation hit. And the road back is going to require more than just waiting for Trump to fail and voters’ memories of inflation to fade.
For all the legislating over the last four years—much of it designed to put government to work for working people—Americans did not see this administration as a break from the status quo. Instead, they saw us as defenders of it: defenders of institutions that people believe have fundamentally failed them.
Much ink has been spilled since 2016 on the origins of working-class discontent, and the seeds of Trumpism. Journalists parachuted into Youngstown. Dispatches from the Mahoning Valley reporting on white men working in factories who had voted for Trump quickly became a cliché.
The more that’s been written, the less we seem to have learned. It’s not that complicated. We have an economy today that does not reward work and does not value the work of Americans without four-year college degrees. Over the past 40 years, corporate profits have soared, executive salaries have exploded, and productivity keeps going up. Yet wages are largely flat, and the cost of living keeps getting more expensive.
Productivity and wages used to rise together. That changed in the late 1970s. Since then, workers produce more and more, but they enjoy a smaller and smaller share of the wealth they create.
And when work isn’t valued, people don’t see a path to economic stability, no matter how hard they work. A couple of years of modestly rising wages are not going to make up for decades of Americans working harder than ever with less and less to show for it.
Most people in Ohio believe the system is rigged against them. They’re right. Today, income and wealth inequality rival the Gilded Age. Using one of the most classic definitions of the American dream—that children will be better off than their parents, moving up the economic ladder with each generation—we are going backward. More than 92 percent of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents did. For children born in 1984, it’s only 50 percent.
These changes hit working-class kids particularly hard. Children born to parents without college degrees are less likely to get a four-year degree, setting them back in nearly all aspects of life.
Some years ago at a Cincinnati labor dinner, I sat around a table with a half-dozen custodial workers. They cleaned office buildings overnight downtown. With a bargaining unit of 1,200 workers, they had just signed their first union contract.
“What does that mean to you?” I asked.
I’ll never forget one woman’s answer: “I’m 51 years old. This will be the first time in my life I’ll have a paid one-week vacation.”
That’s the reality that much of the country lives in. College graduates have four times the net worth and four times the retirement savings of Americans without degrees. Americans with a bachelor’s degree live eight years longer than those without a bachelor’s degree.
None of this is a coincidence. People in power make decisions that benefit themselves and people like them, whether intentionally or not. And those in power are less and less reflective of the country. In the 1960s, about one in four members of Congress only had a high school degree. Today 96 percent of members are college graduates.
Most Democratic policymakers and serious journalists know all of this. But we keep acting shocked by the results. Decade after decade of a system that is fundamentally failing large swaths of the country is going to have consequences.
David Brooks—with whom I’ve often disagreed over the years—put this well in The New York Times the day before Trump’s second inauguration: “if you build a system in which the same people win every time, the people who have been losing will eventually flip over the table.” If Democrats continue to be seen by voters in places like Ohio as the defenders of a system that rewards a minority of coastal elites at the rest of the country’s expense, we will continue to lose ground among the very people we claim to represent.
It All Goes Back to NAFTA
This isn’t a two-year or a four-year problem. It goes back at least to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The fight against NAFTA formed a large part of my political education in Congress. When I got to Washington in 1993, George H.W. Bush had dropped the proposed trade deal in President Bill Clinton’s lap. We wondered if the new president would reopen it for negotiation or forge ahead with the woefully inadequate deal that had little in the way of standards to prevent a race-to-the-bottom on wages across the continent. We soon got our answer—unfortunately, the wrong one.
I led the opposition among the freshman class that year. I remember Bill Richardson—the pro-NAFTA member of Democratic leadership from New Mexico—lamenting congressional recesses to me. He said, “Every time members of Congress go home, my side loses votes.”
There was a reason for that. And as a party we are still paying for our failure to listen to workers. There was—still is—a visceral sense of betrayal that the party of Roosevelt had sold out these communities.
Today in the Mahoning Valley, I still hear about NAFTA. One member of my Senate staff who grew up in the valley told me last year that, to this day, Clinton is not to be spoken of in his family’s steelworker household, so deep runs the sense of betrayal.
People in Youngstown and Dayton and my hometown of Mansfield expected Republicans to sell them out to multinational corporations. But we were supposed to be the party that looked out for these workers—to be on their side, to stand up to corporate interests.
And as a national party, we failed.
Yes, plenty of us in Congress protested. But a party is represented by its president, and the president and his administration made a choice. And that choice had reverberations for decades.
Ohioans weren’t wrong to think the Democratic Party was changing. The Clinton administration’s follow-up to NAFTA was an inexorable march toward normalizing trade relations with China. Unbelievably, they called it “most-favored-nation status”—policy-speak for allowing a flood of Chinese imports into the country. There was little debate among the supposed “serious economists.” Yes, we would lose some manufacturing jobs, the thinking went, but the labor market would adjust.
Talk to anyone in a manufacturing town in Ohio, or anywhere across the country, and they will tell you this was lunacy.
And then the young staffers in the Clinton administration became the seasoned experts in the Obama administration, attempting to ram through the Trans-Pacific Partnership and confidently pushing a vision of an ever-more-interconnected global order. To people in Ohio, that sounded like a recipe for more of the same: more shuttered storefronts, more kids moving away, and more good-paying careers replaced by dead-end jobs at big box stores that have few benefits and opportunities for upward mobility.
In 2020, the same researchers who proved just how many manufacturing jobs we lost in the wake of what they dubbed the “China shock” looked at the political shifts in places hit hard by increased competition with China. They found that, in these communities, more people began watching Fox News, and they became more likely to elect Republicans to Congress.
Spend time in a place like my hometown of Mansfield, and it can be no surprise that working people have lost faith in our party and in their government. People feel gaslit, and they feel condescended to.
Leaders in both parties said these deals would lift everyone up; they said this was the future—free trade would stop wars, end poverty, and usher in a new, glorious era of prosperity and innovation.
And they looked down on anyone who disagreed. I remember campaigning with one national Democrat in Ohio. In between events, the conversation turned to trade, and he said, “You’re fighting the last war.”
“You’re on the wrong side of history,” was another one I heard.
During the NAFTA fight, I remember talking to one woman, a business owner, who told me, “I can’t believe you went to Yale and you’re taking this position.” We Ivy Leaguers were supposed to know better, apparently. And any time you raised a concern about workers, they’d say, “Oh, don’t worry, we’ll compensate the losers,” with seemingly no awareness of how insulting that sounded to all those “losers.”
As if any amount of compensation could replace the dignity you get from a good, middle-class job, with skills you’re proud of, where you can support your family.
This is what leaders of both parties have missed—and not just on trade, but on the entire project that often gets dubbed neoliberalism. The bargain for Democrats was supposed to be, allow the supposed “free market”—the financial industry, multinational corporations—to run wild, and we would do enough redistribution in taxes to make up for all the inequality it created.
Of course we didn’t. Not even close.
But beyond that, the solutions to try to fix this economic regime’s fundamental unfairness have been unpopular. Most people don’t want what they view as government handouts. Nor do they want to be left to fend for themselves in an unfair market, rigged by multinational corporations, that only benefits the people at the very top.
They want a level playing field so their hard work can actually pay off. And they want a government that will actually fight to create that level playing field, which means taking on corporate interests.
But instead, the message they’ve heard from party elites, over and over, has been: We know better than you do. Voters sense it. They hate it. And until we fix it, working-class voters will continue to abandon us.
Becoming the Party of Work
As Democrats debate where to go from here, sometimes this is presented as a trade-off: The party has lost working-class voters, but it has gained more educated and upper-income voters. And if we become “too populist,” we risk losing the voters we have gained, the thinking goes.
But my hunch is that the above equation conflates donors with voters, and it far underestimates the economic anxiety among even the upper middle class.
Most families at all income levels feel squeezed by soaring housing costs, unaffordable childcare, rising insurance prices, stubbornly expensive health care—not to mention trying to save for retirement, higher education for their kids, and care for aging parents. Life feels unaffordable even for workers whose incomes put them well ahead of their working-class neighbors.
And most people get their income from a paycheck, not an investment portfolio. Work unites all of us.
We’re all trying to do something productive for our family and our community and our country. We want to develop skills and take pride in them, and we want our work to be valued, and for our paychecks to be enough to provide for our families.
That should be our party’s North Star, the foundation on which we build.
How Americans view work and opportunity, and the role of government in creating the conditions for their hard work to be valued, is not well enough understood by Democratic politicians and policymakers.
We have plenty of research showing the precariousness of most Americans’ economic situation, at all income levels. And we have many well-intentioned policy experts who have churned out ideas that would improve workers’ economic lives. But we have not been able to weave it all together into a coherent and compelling agenda that resonates with a broad majority of working Americans.
Sometimes people in Washington assume that if an idea is good for the working class on paper by the calculations of D.C. policy experts, it must be popular with ordinary workers. But workers don’t always see things the same way. Other times, the ideas are left on the shelf entirely—often the victim of the filibuster—or they’re filtered through the prism of the same sorts of people who talked about “transitory” inflation.
Too often, well-meaning public officials end up sounding like they think workers in the heartland are charity cases. No matter how beneficial a policy may be, if it sounds like a handout bestowed out of the goodness of the hearts of Ph.D.-toting experts in Washington, it’s unlikely to feel empowering to working people who want to feel in control of their own lives.
Following the election, CNN reported on one focus group Harris supporters conducted after the presidential debate with undecided voters in western Pennsylvania, which shares much political DNA with eastern Ohio. One woman described Trump as “crazy” and Harris as “preachy,” but, asked to pick between the two, she chose the former, “because ‘crazy’ doesn’t look down on me. ‘Preachy’ does.”
To become the workers’ party, we need to better understand workers and their lives, and we need to have ordinary workers more actively involved in the party and its decisions. The easiest way to understand the working class is to be of the working class: to spend as much time as possible outside D.C., to talk with people working regular jobs, to hire people from all kinds of backgrounds who have worked different types of jobs—or to be from that background yourself.
And we need to trust workers. If they tell us that inflation is killing them, we need to believe them. If they tell us that they don’t like “free trade,” we need to believe them. If they tell us they like tariffs and see them as showing allegiance with American workers, we need to believe them.
Sometimes workers are going to tell us things that make us uncomfortable or that we may not want to hear. But if we are going to be the workers’ party, that can’t apply only when the opinions of working-class voters happen to match up with those of current party leaders and elite donors.
We also need solutions and a response to the Trump administration that meet the level of frustration people rightly feel with the status quo. Trump is a wrecking ball to the system, but there’s a reason people wanted a wrecking ball. The problem is, what comes in its wake? Eight years ago, Americans rebelled at the first Trump administration’s supposed “repeal and replace” plan for Obamacare because people knew it was a con—there was no “replace.”
There is no “replace” this time either. There’s no better system on the other side of Trump’s wrecking ball where workers are better paid and have greater retirement security and lower prices. But there are farmers who are losing sales and kids who are losing after-school programs and workers who are losing jobs. And there will—of course—be massive tax cuts for the very same corporations that are raising our prices and sending our jobs overseas.
Where is the wrecking ball for them?
We have to acknowledge that, yes, people have legitimate frustrations—including with their government—and want to tear things down. We need our own vision for what we’re going to break—starting with corporate special interests’ stranglehold over the country, a stranglehold that makes it impossible for people’s hard work to pay off. And we have to show Americans that we have the better vision for what could replace it. We don’t want to wreck the country—we want to fix it.
Coming up with that vision is easier said than done, of course. One place we can start: overtime pay.
The first harbinger of what was to come for working people in the new administration came in mid-November. To little fanfare, a single judge in East Texas, at the behest of the Plano Chamber of Commerce, struck down a Labor Department rule guaranteeing overtime pay for workers making around $40,000 a year. That judge was appointed by President Trump in his first term, and because of that ruling, four million workers lost overtime pay.
This is such a fundamental principle: If you put in extra hours, you ought to earn extra pay. Yet most people know nothing about the overtime expansion, or the fact that it was blocked. Yes, it was a Biden administration decision. But if you ask most people what President Biden did for working people, I doubt anyone would tell you, “expanded overtime pay.” It was not pushed as a signature accomplishment by the White House. It wasn’t a major fight—we had a bill to expand overtime pay even further and put it into law permanently, but there was no real attempt by party leaders to pass it, another case of preemptive surrender.
And when that Texas judge struck it down, we heard next to nothing from Democrats. Most of my colleagues didn’t know it happened.
No, overtime pay alone is not an agenda. But we are going to have to start making these fights. And we have to take into consideration the message they send to workers about our broader values. This fight goes to heart of what the dignity of work is—it’s about rewarding hard work. It’s about working people finally getting what they earn.
Of course, no one can claim to have all the answers right now. Anyone who does has not put in the work or done the self-reflection we will need.
And no matter how we may adapt our policies, our message, and the types of candidates we recruit and leaders we elevate, we know that we face a daunting disadvantage in how most Americans now get their information—with the California CEOs who control the levers of attention in this country now firmly ensconced in the upper echelons of the Trump administration. Figuring out how to reach working-class Americans will be its own massive undertaking.
None of this will be a project measured in months, or in one or two election cycles. We need a generational effort to transform our party, with the dignity of work at the center.
This is what much of my work will center on over the coming months: We need to reset the narrative on American workers, to push our country to take their views seriously, and to put their work and aspirations at the center of all we do.
And as we do this work, we need humility. If the results of this election have taught us one thing, it should be that the class of people who have been running the country have much to learn about their fellow citizens: the people whose work built the strongest economy the world has ever seen, and who haven’t gotten nearly enough credit for it. Their work has dignity, and it must be valued. Let’s start there.
