The Vital Center
The Vital Center
The Niskanen Center
Can Democrats win back the working class, with Joan Williams
1 hour 6 minutes Posted Jul 6, 2026 at 9:00 pm.
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As Joan Williams observes in her recent book Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back, as recently as 2010 Democrats still represented a majority of working-class districts. But in the decades since, the two parties have traded their political bases, with Democrats increasingly becoming the party of the college-educated professional classes; the percentage of Democrats who are college grads almost doubled between 1996 and 2018.