Did the working class win the 2026 midterms? That depends on whether you’re talking about candidates or voters. Working class candidates did very well. Duke sociologist Nicholas Carnes, and Vanderbilt political scientist Noam Lupu count seven midterm general-election candidates for Congress who held working-class jobs immediately prior to entering politics. Four out of the seven won, and if you ignore Tim Rogers, a delivery driver who ran as a Republican in Wisconsin and lost, fully two-thirds of them won.
For those keeping score, the seven working class candidates are: the aforementioned Rogers; Brian Poindexter, an iron worker in Ohio who ran as a Democrat and won; Rebecca Cooke, a waitress in Wisconsin who ran as a Democrat and won; Sam Forstag, a smokejumper in Montana who ran as a Democrat and won; Ray Pooley, a machinist in Michigan who ran as a Democrat and lost; Christopher Reichard, an electrician in Missouri who ran as a Democrat and lost; and Troy Jackson, a logger in Maine and the sole Senate candidate in this group, who ran as a Democrat and won.
If you define “working class” more broadly to include anyone who ever held a union card, then, as TNR’s Monica Potts pointed out last week, at least 17 union members will be sworn in as Democrats in the House, 15 of whom turned red districts blue. In the Senate, in addition to Jackson, the Democrats James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan are both former union members. According to the AFL-CIO, when you take all state and local elections held on Nov. 3 into account, no fewer than 639 union members won elective office.
But did working class voters win the midterms? That is to say, did Democrats, in winning back the House, secure a working-class majority? That’s a harder question to answer.
According to exit polls, an imperfect metric in these matters, Democrats did not win the working-class vote. That’s disappointing given what a blowout election this was for Democrats generally. Working-class voters are conventionally defined as voters who completed high school but did not receive a college degree. Education level is not a flawless class yardstick, but it’s the best we have. According to exit polls (which are even more flawed; we’ll have better numbers in a few months derived from a Census survey and complete state voting files) Democrats did not capture a majority of non-college voters. They captured 48 percent of them, against 50 percent who voted for Republican candidates.
Some commentators see this glass as half-empty. “The Democratic Coalition Still Has a Class Problem,” wrote Jared Abbott of the Center for Working Class Politics in Jacobin. Ruy Teixeira, co-author with John Judis of the 2023 book Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, bemoaned in The Free Press the likelihood that Democrats will move recklessly to the left (and therefore away from “winnable voters,” by whom he means working class voters). Indeed, a few days before the election Teixeira predicted in The Washington Post that a blue wave “may cripple” the Democrats because “the better they do in 2026, the more likely they are to ignore their party’s weaknesses with working-class and rural voters.” For Teixeira, who’s been drifting rightward in recent years, this borders on self-caricature.
The exit polls show a substantial improvement for Democrats drawing working class voters compared to 2024. In 2024, 43 percent of the non-college vote went to Kamala Harris and to House Democrats, against 56 percent for Trump and House Republicans. That means the Democrats narrowed the Republican advantage from 13 points to two points. In the 2022 midterms, the Republican advantage was a similar 12 points (43 percent for Democrats and 55 percent for Republicans). In essence, Democrats have returned to the status quo of 2020, when Joe Biden, a candidate with strong blue-collar credentials, captured 48 percent of non-college voters to Trump’s 50 percent. (If you go by the voter database Catalyst’s figures for 2024, which are better than exit polls, the Republican advantage that year was more like 11 points. But you get the idea.)
I have written previously that over the past century no Democrat, excepting Biden in 2020, ever won the presidency without winning a majority of non-college voters—and that Biden won under the non-replicable circumstance of Trump’s bungling the deadly Covid pandemic. Judged in that light, the Democrats’ 48 percent support among working-class voters is indeed disappointing, because 48 percent won’t likely be sufficient to elect a Democrat president in 2028. If, in a blowout midterm victory, Democrats failed to secure the working-class majority that’s probably necessary to win the presidency, what hope is there next time?
But I don’t see the glass as half-empty. I see it as half full. No, the Democrats didn’t re-capture a working-class majority in the midterms, according to exit polls, but they made substantial headway toward that goal. I mentioned that Democrats shrank the Republican advantage from 13 or 11 points to two. They may even have done better than that.
The New York Times has some complicated voter trends data gleaned from polls, interviews, turnout records, etc. The idea is to improve on the many drawbacks of exit polls (which, among other things, don’t sample mail-in voters). Whether the Times achieves that goal I can’t say. But according to the Times, the Democrats won non-college voters by four percentage points, picking up 17 percentage points compared to 2024. Hooray! The biggest pickup was for Latino non-college voters (up 35 points), followed by white non-college voters (up 14 points) and Black non-college voters (up 11 points).
The Associated Press has a voter poll that, like the Times, tries to do better than the exit polls. It, alas, tells the precise opposite story about the working class vote. It says the Democrats lost non-college voters by about five percentage points, a worse showing even than in the exit polls. Even so, my glass-half-full self observes that the Democrats, according to the AP, picked up 8 percentage compared to 2024, which represents improvement, no?
We’ll be hearing a lot in the next few weeks about the crucial divide within the Democratic party between moderates and democratic socialists. I don’t think that’s where the action is. I think the divide to which we should pay attention is between non-college voters and college voters. In Abbott’s analysis, that divide has gotten only slightly narrower according to the Times data and somewhat wider according to the AP data, the reason for both being that many more college voters than non-college voters moved from the Republican to the Democratic column. But I’m not going to sweat that finding too much because both groups are swimming in the same direction.
I nonetheless agree with Abbott that the Democrats are going to have to work hard to hang on to those non-college votes. Doing so doesn’t mean hewing more either to centrism or to democratic socialism. Probably it means taking a centrist tack on culture-war issues and a democratic socialist tack on economic ones. The main task, however, is to focus on what working-class voters want going forward. The path to victory in 2028 is not about choosing the right ideology. It’s about choosing the right constituency, and that constituency is the working class. The proles deserve the Democrats’ full attention.
