This year’s Democratic primaries look and sound a lot more populist than usual. Brian Poindexter, a union iron worker running on a “workers first” message, won a House primary outside Cleveland. Sherrod Brown is mounting a Senate comeback in Ohio on the same “rigged system” message that has allowed him to outshine other Democrats in Ohio. Troy Jackson, a fifth-generation logger who built his career fighting corporate landowners, is the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine. And Josh Turek, a self-described “prairie populist”, is on the Senate ballot in Iowa.
In fact, according to research we’ve conducted through the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), more than 70% of 2026 Democratic candidates now rely on populist rhetoric in their campaigns, laying the blame for our broken system on rich elites of one kind or another.
It seems after decades of bleeding working-class support, Democrats are converging on a solution to win them back: run populists.
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The real question, then, is not whether Democrats should embrace populism, but rather what kind of populism they should embrace. To settle that argument, CWCP teamed up with the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI) to conduct a new survey.
In polling conducted by Verasight between late June and early July, we asked more than 6,000 Americans to rate 13 different kinds of messages commonly deployed by Democratic candidates to see which pitch would draw the strongest support. We also randomly presented each respondent with one of two Republican attack messages modeled on actual Republican campaign rhetoric in order to see how well Democratic messages hold up under attack.
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The top-performing messages we tested have a simple formula. They focus 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 insist that working people should be able to give their kids a better shot. They promise to bring costs down, make the biggest corporations pay their fair share, and crack down on the people who game the system. Ultimately, they tell a simple story: hard work should pay off.
We call this winning combination “kitchen-table populism”.
None of the plausible alternatives to this kind of messaging performed nearly as well. Consider what we call the “divide-and-conquer playbook” messaging popular with certain progressive campaign consultants. One prominent proponent of this style is the Texas senatorial candidate James Talarico. Talarico strikes a populist posture, emphasizing that economic elites keep working people divided over race, immigration, and cultural issues so that no one sees that they’re all getting fleeced. It sounds good, and Talarico is holding his own in red Texas, but this tactic is not the slam dunk against the culture war that some progressives think it is. In fact, in our survey, it was not all that effective, severely underperforming the pure kitchen-table messages we tested.
The weakest variant of the divide-and-conquer narrative is the one that tells voters they’ve been tricked into blaming scapegoats. These “race-class narrative” appeals, so popular in progressives circles, finished at the bottom of the field. Why? Because telling people they’ve been duped comes off more like a condescending sermon than an invitation. Unlike kitchen-table populist messages that meet voters where they’re at, the race-class narrative strays from voters’ concrete economic woes to expound a more abstract theory of political gamesmanship. These messages trailed our top kitchen-table populist pitches with every group, including non-white voters and Democrats.
Another alternative to populist messaging is a big-tent anti-Trumpism, pushed by some establishment liberals. The argument here is that candidates could unite all those Never-Trump Republicans, anti-Trump independents, and Resistance Democrats with a simple opposition message – one that steers clear of divisions over policy or ideology. Again, the theory makes sense. The trouble is that messaging focused on attacking Trump performed poorly across the board. We fielded the strongest-testing anti-Trump message we know, one that ties his attacks on democratic norms directly to pocketbook pain, and even this steelman version was a net negative with rural voters and Trump waverers.
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It wasn’t all roses for populism either. We found that anti-elite messages varied in their efficacy. While naming corruption, and promising to end it, was a powerful way to convey anti-elite sentiments – especially with Republicans, where adding an anti-corruption pledge to a plain cost-of-living pitch lifted support by 18 points – messages that leaned too stridently into class war turned off these same voters. Republicans swung 25 points against messages that blamed “big corporations” and “the wealthy few”.
We also tested a progressive-coded anti-plutocrat message that railed against oligarchs and fascists: it trailed kitchen-table populism by about 14 points among Democrats and by huge margins among working-class, rural and swing voters.
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To be clear, this shouldn’t be understood as a plea for centrism or moderation. While it may seem like Democratic candidates are forced into a trade-off – either you opt to fire up the progressive base with ultra-liberal anti-Trump bromides or you aim to persuade Trump-voting working-class voters with a more conservative pitch – our results show that this is a false choice. The winning messages do neither; instead, they 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. But they also avoid moral high-handedness and the preachy activist rhetoric that turns off many working-class, rural and swing voters. These are the lessons Democrats must internalize if they want to win back the working class, including some of the 59% of working-class white voters who, according to a March poll by Catalist, still plan to vote Republican in 2026.
Some of the strongest-performing Democrats have already shown the power of kitchen-table populism in tough districts. Pat Ryan rode what he calls “patriotic populism” to a 14-point win in a Hudson Valley swing district in 2024, naming greedy corporations and corrupt politicians as the villains while casting working people as heroes. And Gabe Vasquez has won one of the country’s toughest seats in rural New Mexico twice with a similar pitch: Vasquez points the finger at corporate landlords, elites in Washington DC, and price-gouging investors who get rich by bending the rules, while praising hard-working blue-collar families that are struggling to stay afloat. That’s the winning formula, one we hope to see more Democrats and independents deploy.
