Race-class framing finished lowest across every surveyed demographic group
The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) and the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI) polled more than 6,000 Americans between late June and early July 2026, the authors wrote. The Verasight-conducted survey asked respondents to rate 13 different Democratic campaign messages and randomly presented each one with one of two Republican attack messages modeled on actual Republican campaign rhetoric, so the survey could measure how well Democratic messages “hold up under attack.”
The top-performing messages, according to the authors, focused on “Americans’ day-to-day struggles to pay for rent and groceries” and “the widespread frustration with prices that rise faster than working-class wages.” They named the combination “kitchen-table populism” and described it as insisting that “working people should be able to give their kids a better shot,” promising to “bring costs down, make the biggest corporations pay their fair share, and crack down on the people who game the system.” The win formula, they wrote, is that “hard work should pay off.”
The “race-class narrative” framing — which holds that economic elites keep working people divided over race, immigration and cultural issues so voters do not see “they’re all getting fleeced” — “finished at the bottom of the field,” the authors reported. They wrote that race-class messaging “comes off more like a condescending sermon than an invitation” because it “strays from voters’ concrete economic woes” toward “a more abstract theory of political gamesmanship.” The framing underperformed “with every group, including non-white voters and Democrats.”
Anti-Trump-only messaging “performed poorly across the board,” according to the authors. They said they fielded the strongest anti-Trump message they could construct — one tying Trump’s “attacks on democratic norms directly to pocketbook pain” — and even that steelmanned version registered as “a net negative with rural voters and Trump waverers.”
Anti-elite messaging showed more nuanced effects. An anti-corruption message that named and promised to end corruption, paired with a cost-of-living pitch, lifted support among Republican respondents by 18 points, the authors reported. But class-war messaging — language that blamed “big corporations” and “the wealthy few” — drove Republican support down 25 points. A “progressive-coded anti-plutocrat message that railed against oligarchs and fascists,” they wrote, trailed kitchen-table populism by 14 points among Democrats and by wide margins among working-class, rural and swing voters.
The authors flagged Texas Senate candidate James Talarico as a proponent of what they called “divide-and-conquer” messaging who is “holding his own in red Texas.” But they reported that this style is “not all that effective, severely underperforming the pure kitchen-table messages we tested.”
The authors identified several 2026 Democratic primary winners they said exemplify the kitchen-table approach. Brian Poindexter, a union iron worker running on a “workers first” message, won a House primary outside Cleveland, they wrote. Sherrod Brown is mounting a Senate comeback in Ohio on the “rigged system” message. Troy Jackson, “a fifth-generation logger who built his career fighting corporate landowners,” is the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine. Josh Turek, a self-described “prairie populist,” is on the Senate ballot in Iowa.
Two Democrats the authors said previously won tough districts on kitchen-table populism were Pat Ryan, who won a Hudson Valley swing district in 2024 by 14 points on what he calls “patriotic populism,” naming “greedy corporations and corrupt politicians” as villains and “working people” as heroes; and Gabe Vasquez, who has held rural New Mexico’s congressional seat in two elections with messaging that pointed the finger at “corporate landlords, elites in Washington DC, and price-gouging investors.”
Citing their own organization’s research, the authors reported that “more than 70% of 2026 Democratic candidates now rely on populist rhetoric in their campaigns.” They argued the convergence means Democrats have largely settled the question of whether to run populist campaigns, with what remains contested being which variety of populism to project.
A March 2026 Catalist poll cited by the authors found 59% of working-class white voters still plan to vote Republican in 2026. The authors framed kitchen-table populism as a route for Democrats to claw back some of those voters without abandoning the party’s progressive base or shifting to the policy center.
In their closing argument, the authors pushed back against what they called “a false choice” — between energizing the progressive base with “ultra-liberal anti-Trump bromides” and persuading Trump-leaning working-class voters with a more conservative pitch. The winning messages, they wrote, both “name a rigged system, call out the people rigging it, and promise to rebalance the economy in favor of those who work for a living” and avoid “moral high-handedness and the preachy activist rhetoric that turns off many working class, rural, and swing voters.”
The Guardian published the piece in its opinion section. Dustin Guastella serves as director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia and sits on the board of CWCP; Erica Etelson is president of RUBI. Both organizations direct their work toward expanding Democratic electoral appeal among working-class voters.