Non-college voters chose Republicans 51% to 47%
A commentary published by The Guardian on November 13, 2026 argues that the Democratic Party’s midterm victories conceal the work required to hold a winning coalition together through the 2028 presidential election. Its author, Dustin Guastella, is a research associate at the Center for Working Class Politics and the director of operations for Teamsters Local 623.
Guastella begins from the strength of the results. Democrats posted big wins in Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, Maine and Texas, which he writes show the potential for a majority coalition reaching well beyond traditional liberal strongholds. That, he writes, is a good sign for the party’s chances come 2028. The story of the midterms, he writes, was “affordability”: surveys showed the economy was the top issue, with a third of voters citing cost-of-living concerns as their number one issue and nearly 40% claiming their personal financial situation had worsened over the past year.
That verdict, in Guastella’s reading, is a judgment on Donald Trump’s economic management rather than an endorsement of progressive appeals. He notes that 2024 was also an affordability election, one that Democrats lost, and warns that voters kicking out the party in charge does not mean they will stick by the party come 2028.
Despite the victories, Guastella writes, the midterms revealed a few troubling signs for Democrats. Populist, pro-worker candidates in purple districts such as Sherrod Brown, Brian Poindexter and Bob Brooks had a great showing in blue-collar districts, overperforming expectations — but, in his words, such “Bernie-dog” candidates are “few and far between.”
The commentary’s central statistical case is the party’s standing with working-class voters. Guastella reports that only 47% of voters without a college degree voted for Democrats, against 51% who voted for Republicans — an improvement over 2024, but with, in his words, “a long way to go.” Democrats won 53% of the lower- and middle-income brackets of $30,000 to $99,000 per year, yet performed best among higher-income voters: about 60% of those making more than $300,000 voted blue. He calls these “worrisome signs” that the party’s reputation among working-class voters is still in rough shape, and says repairing it should be the major priority for the next two years.
Guastella identifies three weaknesses. The first is economic program. He argues that hammering Republicans on pocketbook failures is no substitute for an ambitious economic agenda, and that fixing what he calls a lopsided, K-shaped economy will require major new investments in domestic infrastructure, industrial policy to revive manufacturing, crackdowns on corporate gouging and new means to generate public funds. He points to Senator Cory Booker’s campaign to exempt all residents making under $75,000 from federal income tax — which Guastella says would mean a $5tn tax cut — as an example of cheap anti-tax pseudo-populism that can win blue-collar votes in a cost-of-living crunch but not their loyalty in the long run. Democrats, he writes, need to treat affordability as a wage and job crisis, not just a price problem.
Guastella offers what he calls a better message: pledge to balance the budget on the back of rich tax cheats, big pharma, Silicon Valley and Wall Street, all of whom have grown fat off taxpayer largesse, and reinvest the lost revenue in American industry, American infrastructure and the American worker. Democrats need a post-Trump economic model for shared prosperity, he writes, and it will not be built on policy gimmicks.
The second weakness is trade. Guastella writes that in reaction to Trump’s tariffs, Democrats risk ignoring the worldwide working-class revolt against globalism. In 2016, he writes, liberals were blindsided by Trump’s attacks on free-trade; Trump excoriated Nafta and the “American carnage” that unfettered globalism wrought. Then, in 2024, Trump again capitalized on Democratic aloofness by attacking Biden’s border failures. Both issues, and they are linked, Guastella writes, suggest a hunger for a step back from hyper-globalization. Despite a decade of experience, Democrats spent no effort making a positive case for a post-free-trade, post-neoliberal economy.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Guastella writes, Democrats spent more than $58m on ads bashing tariffs and exactly $0 making a positive case for a new trade agenda. Trump’s tariffs have failed to bring good jobs home, he writes, and nary a Republican will defend them today. Without an argument for a world beyond free trade, he writes, Democrats cannot address one of the central concerns that propelled Trump to power, and if the anti-tariff message hardens into an embrace of the economic status quo ante, Democrats will be in trouble.
Immigration sits alongside trade in that argument. Guastella notes that immigration was number three on the list of voter concerns and remains among the only issues where voters still trust Republicans more. He writes that Democrats are right to decry what he calls the brutality and illegality of Ice tactics, but should not conflate anti-Ice sentiment with a sudden embrace of liberal border policies, because working-class voters want humane border enforcement and a path to citizenship for peaceable residents. If Democrats cannot make the case that they can reduce illegal immigration, Guastella writes, they will suffer.
The third weakness is cultural. Guastella writes that leading progressives have signaled a retreat from the liberal-to-the-max approach of the recent past, citing AOC’s admission that “Woke 1 was crazy,” but judges the shift tactical and superficial. He warns that some social liberals in the party will take the results as reason to reanimate the spirit of 2020, and calls that a mistake. He draws on a recent report from the Center for Working-Class Politics by Jared Abbott and Joan Williams, which finds that the “biggest single contributor” to winning blue-collar voters “is embracing cultural positions that resonate with the working class.” Guastella adds that working-class voters are not uniformly conservative on social issues and have moved significantly to the left in recent years, but that professional-class voters are far more socially liberal than the working class as a whole, and that many Democratic operatives come from professional-class, uniformly liberal social worlds — a liability if they fail to reckon with how different their views are from working-class voters on gender, abortion, crime, climate and immigration.
Guastella closes by arguing that Democrats have been gifted a victory thanks to Trump’s economic mismanagement and should accept it with humility. He writes that there is time yet to demonstrate to working people that Democrats can represent both their values and their economic interests, and calls for big new investments in American infrastructure, a new post-global trade plan to rebuild manufacturing and industrial unions, expansion of Medicare and social security, new programs for young families, better public schools, free community college and trade programs, and new workplace rights — candidates, in his formulation, that can marry working-class populism with progressive economic policies and reach deep into Trump country.
Correction (November 14, 2026): An earlier version of this article said Democrats’ midterm wins showed a majority coalition reaching beyond traditional liberal strongholds; the commentary says they show the potential for such a coalition. An earlier version also said Democrats entered the 2028 cycle having won Congress and a majority of governorships on affordability anger, a claim not contained in the commentary; it has been replaced with the five state wins the commentary reports.