The reckoning: Inside the GOP's escalating panic over Trump voters

Pat Burns, a pro-Trump councilman for the City of Huntington Beach, poses in the MAGA stronghold of Huntington Beach, California, U.S. May 27, 2026. REUTERS/Caroline Brehman

To put it mildly, the Democrats have had a complicated relationship with the white working class at least since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But things are going to be simple in the run up to November's midterm elections. Democrats don't need to offer much. White working-class voters who supported Donald Trump are probably going to stay home.

“I don’t even want to vote for anybody in the next election,” Annette Dombrowski told the Post last month. The 64-year-old janitor in rural Ohio voted for the president three times. She used to vote in the midterms, but not this time. “I don’t care, because they’re all crap.”

Dombrowski represents an "extraordinary swing," as the Times put it last week. Though his unpopularity, especially among affluent white women, hurt the GOP in the 2018 midterms, white working-class voters stood by their man. They approved of Trump's "management of the economy by margins of 30 percentage points or even more," the Times said. Now, however, as inflation climbs ever higher, his base is falling out from beneath him. The Times: "Now, recent polls show them disapproving by anywhere from 14 to more than 30 points."

That's why a GOP pollster who has worked with Trump is sounding downright panicked. “It’s working-class voters who are not happy with the Republican Party, and they may not come out and vote,” John McLaughlin told the Times. The day before the 2018 midterms, Trump's approval rating on the economy among white working-class voters was 66 percent, according to a CNN poll. Now, his disapproval is 57 percent, a recent CNN poll said. If the Republicans fail to mobilize them, McLaughlin said, "we lose the House and the Senate.”

Despite the odds being in their favor, I don't think Democrats should leave anything to chance in light of the Supreme Court's decision to legalize cheating via white-power gerrymandering. Though they don't need to offer white working-class Trump voters anything, they should offer them something to shore up their advantage. But I don't mean offer them nonpartisan policies like universal child care. I mean offer them retribution.

These voters know who's screwing them. According to a new study by research firm Bluelabs, as reported by The New Republic's Greg Sargent, the most resonant messaging "blames insurance companies and other conglomerates for high medical and prescription drug costs and hits big corporations for price gouging and tax avoidance." It also "blames Trump and Republicans for allowing these things to happen." But most important of all, in my view, is that the messaging that works "vows that Democrats will crack down on them."

"Regions hit hard by Trump’s tariffs and Iran War-related costs are very responsive to arguments about those things," Greg said. "Among targeted voters in Iowa’s 1st and 2nd districts, for instance, one message that resonates hits Republicans for backing Trump’s tariffs and his war with Iran, arguing that they’ve hiked grocery and energy costs and hurt farmers who export goods. In short, what appears to work is a populist economics that centers villains, hits Trump and Republicans for enabling them, and pledges action.

I put "villains" in italics, because that word gets at something important about the white working class. These voters – including in "districts in some pretty pro-Trump areas in rural North Carolina, central Pennsylvania, and Iowa farm country," Greg said – have been primed to gobble up messaging that names the bad guy. Only instead of "insurance companies and other conglomerates," the villains have been "criminal illegal aliens" or some other other. The white working class is persuaded by messaging that clearly identifies the criminal, the crime and the punishment, to wit: The brown guy is stealing from you, so crack down on him.

Maga messaging also taps into the fundamental nature of the white working-class voters, which is that, above and beyond all else, they are hierarchical. The belief that society has a top-down structure is fixed. That's why they can apply the word "entitled" to people at the bottom of the social order – undeserving "welfare queens" – as well as people at the top – the undeserving rich. Neither has earned their place. One wants everything given to them. The other has already had everything given to them. Both are "entitled." For a decade, the GOP has oriented white working-class voters so they look downward only. The trick for the Democrats is reversing that orientation, so the criminal, the crime and the punishment are just as clear looking upward, to wit: The rich are stealing from you, so crack down on them.

Some progressives believe that if the Democrats want white working-class voters back under the Big Tent, they must offer something in the affirmative. So there's lots of discussion of broad nonpartisan issues that affect everyone, like health care, wages, inflation, affordability and so on. The head of American Bridge, which commissioned the Bluelabs study, told Greg Sargent that "working-class voters of all kinds are 'pissed' over everything from higher healthcare and grocery costs to gas prices, and 'this fall they will make their voices heard.'"

Maybe.

More likely, they will stay home in the absence of a strong Democratic message that taps into their fundamental nature. It's one thing to say "we're going to bring down the cost of groceries." It's another to say "we're going to bring down the cost of groceries and bring those responsible to justice." One is an aspirational statement applicable to all. The other is a gesture of power in which the crime, the criminal, the victim and the punishment are clear.

Progressives who do not come from the white working class may not be aware that working-class white Americans are essentially illiberal, in the sense that they will resist liberal attempts to flatten the top-down structure of society. In that resistance, however, lies an opportunity. It is because they are illiberal that they are not only open to a message of retribution, but attracted by it. They already know who's screwing them. What they don't know is who's going to make it right. The Democratic candidate's job is to tell them.

Indeed, many merely need reminding. Annette Dombrowski, the Ohio woman who told the Post that she didn't "want to vote for anybody," grew up poor to parents who worked in a factory. They taught her to believe that "Republicans were for rich people," according to the Post, "not families like theirs who struggled and saved money by making their own clothes."

She put her faith in Donald Trump, but that backfired on her. (She told MS Now that "I'm the most angry person when I grocery shop.") She trusts no one now. She's so demoralized that she told the Post that politicians just “want your money and give you fake promises.”

She will continue to feel that way if the Democrats offer nothing.

But she might feel differently if she believed Democrats would make the bad guys pay.

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