On Wednesday morning, millions of Americans woke up to the news of a federal government shutdown. The government will remain closed until Senate Democrats and Republicans agree on a funding bill to pass, which isn’t looking likely anytime soon. While Trump can still do a lot of damage while the government is shuttered, it’s nonetheless a good opportunity to pause and reflect on the last nine months—not only in terms of the harm that he and Republicans have inflicted on the country but also what Democrats have done, and should do, in response to the policies and decisions coming out of Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court.
Our takeaway? If the Democratic Party is serious about standing up to Trump and his Republican allies, they need to win back the trust and faith of voters across the country. And if they want to do that, they need to get back to their roots and coalesce around an economic populist platform.
We’re almost nine months into Trump’s second term as president, and Americans are already disillusioned and unsatisfied with how he is running the country. According to a new New York Times/Siena poll, only 43% of Americans approve of his job as president. It’s unsurprising, given all the harm he’s managed to wreak on the country through his tax cuts for the rich, on-again-off-again tariffs, and attacks on free speech and democracy.
But what may surprise you, though, is that Democrats are faring even worse in the court of public opinion. Back in March, a record low of 27% of voters said they held a positive view of the party. Let that sink in for a moment: In a country where more than half of voters think Trump is doing a bad job, they think Democrats are doing an even worse job. Even deep levels of discontent with the president are not enough to convince voters that Democrats are any more deserving of their support.
Barring their unique position of power during the current government shutdown, there is unfortunately very little that Democrats can do on the legislative front to counter Trump without control of either chamber of Congress. But to fully understand the story of why Democrats have fallen from grace with voters—and particularly with working people—you have to look far beyond the last nine months.
For this week’s Closer Look, we’ll do just that. We’ll set the scene on how poorly Democrats currently stand with voters, and then we’ll give a history lesson involving the last three Democratic presidents to explain why. We’ll end with our suggestions on how Democrats can turn their electoral fortunes around and regain their position as the party of the working class.
Why don’t voters like Democrats anymore?
There’s no other way to spin it: while working people used to be a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, they are now solidly behind Republicans. In the 1992 election, just 36% of voters without college degrees voted Republican. This past November, 56% of those voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump.
After former Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss in 2024, analysts tossed around all kinds of ideas as to why Democrats lost the White House, Senate, and House, with the most common theory blaming post-pandemic inflation. But high prices at the grocery store and gas pump can’t tell the whole story as to why Democrats suffered a blow at the ballot box. While many incumbent parties around the world suffered defeat in the face of sky-high inflation, many of them—including in countries like Denmark, France, Japan, and Mexico—managed to retain power. In other words, it was by no means inevitable that Democrats in the US would lose, by the extent to which they did.
Simply put, the Democrats lost last November due to the party’s gradual shedding of its working-class support over the years. Working people increasingly see Democrats as out-of-touch, coastal elites that don’t act on their behalf—and a review of the economic performance of the last three Democratic presidential administrations shows that they’re largely justified in thinking as much.
Let’s start with President Bill Clinton, who served from January 1993 to January 2001. Clinton had the opportunity to reverse the inequality path that Ronald Reagan put the country on in the 1980s, in large part due to his massive deregulatory, tax-slashing, and union-busting crusades. And while Clinton’s campaign started with all the right words, it ultimately ended with all the wrong actions. For one thing, he signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has absolutely decimated America’s once enviable industrial base; between 1997 and 2020, over 90,000 factories closed as a result of NAFTA and similar agreements, which cost thousands upon thousands of Americans their jobs. He repealed the Glass-Steagall Act and, in so doing, removed long-standing restrictions that separated investment and commercial banking, which caused the 2008 financial crisis. He also instituted work requirements and time limits for government assistance benefits, which research found ended up increasing the number of families living in deep poverty. Patriotic Millionaires’ Founder and President Erica Payne likes to call Bill Clinton “the best Republican president since Ronald Reagan,” and it’s easy to understand why.
Now let’s move to President Barack Obama, who served from January 2009 to January 2017. Like Clinton, Obama rode to the White House on a wave of optimism, but in the end, his actions on the economy spoke louder than his words. Under his watch, no one in the banking sector—that’s right, no one—faced jail time for their recklessness in almost toppling the global economy during the 2008 financial crisis. In 2018, Obama told a crowd of Wall Street bankers to “Just say thank you, please” for his role in helping their stocks perform well. And if that’s not enough, in 2010, Obama extended Bush-era tax cuts for high earners like us, which is the origin story for why we started the Patriotic Millionaires in the first place.
Finally, there’s President Biden, who served from January 2021 to January 2025. To his credit, Biden did some great work on the economy and was more deliberate in getting back to Democrats’ roots in prioritizing the needs of working people. You could see this in all the good that his administration did on issues like antitrust and protecting and supporting labor unions. But in the end, his party as a whole—largely thanks to the grandstanding of former Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—did not go anywhere near as far as they should have on advancing and protecting the interests of working people. It’s especially disappointing when you remember that Democrats had total control of the White House, House, and Senate from 2021 to 2023. They came close to raising the federal minimum wage, but failed. They came close to closing the carried interest loophole, but failed. And they didn’t come close at all in achieving some of Biden’s other economic priorities, like raising taxes on capital income or strengthening the estate tax.
While voters may not know the minute details of this history lesson, they feel the lasting impacts of these political decisions when they drive by the shuttered factories where they used to work. They feel it every time they walk down the aisles at the grocery store and experience more and more sticker shock. And they feel it when they have to work two or three jobs just to put food on the table, while the CEO of their company makes 6,666 times more than them.
The solution: Focus on economic populism
Trump and Republicans have offered a story to voters to explain their financial woes. They’ve blamed immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA people, government bureaucrats, and more. And while they are morally, historically, and economically wrong to do this, unfortunately, Democrats have not strongly pushed back on these assertions in a way that resonates and sticks with voters.
If Democrats want to win back the affections of voters, particularly those of working people, the solution is simple: they need to start telling a story. More specifically, they need to tell the RIGHT story about why working people are struggling so much while a handful of millionaires like us are doing so ridiculously well. That story involves ruthless corporations, C-suite executives, Wall Street financiers, and compliant politicians from the past and present. It’s not as simple and straightforward as “Immigrants are stealing your jobs,” but it’s also not that complicated to explain.
But they can’t stop at telling a story to explain people’s economic problems. They also have to offer a solution to them. And that solution is so uncomplicated that it’s almost painful for us to write: adopt an economic populist platform for people to rally around.
An economic populist platform will involve policies that are simple, straightforward, and effective at reducing inequality. Centrist tinkering around the edges will not meaningfully change lives. Pursuing such a platform will involve things like raising the minimum wage to a living wage, fully equalizing the tax rates on capital income and labor income, eliminating federal tax obligations for those that don’t make the cost of living, and instituting a wealth tax—or, you know, all of the elements of the Patriotic Millionaires’ legislative platform, The MONEY Agenda.
It’s not an accident that the overwhelming majority of minimum wage ballot initiatives have passed over the years—and that’s the case in red states like Arkansas and Missouri, blue states like Colorado and Washington, and purple states like Ohio. It’s not an accident that Republican and Democratic voters alike support raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations. They might not be able to agree on things like abortion, immigration, or guns, but when it comes to kitchen table issues, it’s safe to say they’re on the same page. And that provides a perfect “in” for Democrats to unite a large coalition of voters across race, ethnicity, religion, and more, similar to what they did in the past.
The recent success of New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani shows that an economic populist platform can and does work. He has focused his campaign on lowering the cost of living in the Big Apple and has proposed relatively straightforward, bread-and-butter policies to do it, like raising taxes on the wealthiest 1% of city residents and increasing the minimum wage to $30 an hour by 2030. As of this writing, Zohran is ahead in all of the polls and is well on his way to becoming NYC’s next mayor.
The response from establishment Democrats to Zohran’s campaign should tell you everything you need to know about how far the party needs to go in terms of getting on the economic populist train and turning their electoral fortunes around. His opponent, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—an establishment Democrat if there ever was one—has rallied billionaires and wealthy real-estate developers, who apparently think a 2% tax on their earnings is cause for panic and the worst thing that could possibly happen to them and the country. Many top-level New York Democrats have also failed to support Zohran. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries put out a public statement praising current NYC Mayor Eric Adams after Adams announced he was no longer seeking re-election. In case you need reminding, Adams was indicted on bribery and fraud charges last year. And yet, Jeffries has remained silent on whether or not he supports Zohran, the official Democratic party nominee in the race.
Conclusion
In February, James Carville, a longtime Democratic political operative and the lead strategist for Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times in which he argued that Democrats should “roll over and play dead” amidst all the chaos that Republicans are wreaking across the government.
That’s terrible advice. Democrats might have their hands tied a bit in terms of what they can do right now to stand up to Trump, but they should still use this opportunity to rebrand themselves and unite around an economic populist platform. In the words of our friend Senator Chris Van Hollen, “That attitude will not win elections. We need to change. This moment demands leadership from all of us. People want to know what we stand for and what we’re willing to fight for.”
Carville gave better advice in 1992, when he coined the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid,” which went on to become the mantra for Clinton’s campaign. It was true then and it’s true now. If Democrats want to turn their electoral fortunes around, both in the short term for the 2026 midterms and in the long term, they need to realize this sooner rather than later.