In the wake of the 2022 midterm elections, Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio showed her Democratic colleagues a chart listing the congressional districts with the highest and lowest median incomes. The highest-income districts were virtually all Democratic, the lowest-income districts Republican. The chart was shocking to Kaptur and her colleagues, all of whom thought of their party as the natural representative of the working class. “How is it possible that Republicans are representing the majority of people who struggle?” Kaptur wondered. “How is that possible?”

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.

This swap has proved disadvantageous for the Democratic Party. College-educated voters’ values and preferences have come to dominate the Democratic Party, alienating much of their former support in the working class, including increasing numbers of minority voters. And since noncollege voters comprise nearly two-thirds of the electorate, and are especially dominant in the rural areas and swing states that disproportionately determine election outcomes, Democrats will either have to win back some of their lost working-class support or resign themselves to near-permanent minority status.

Williams is a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, and the cofounder of the Center for WorkLife Law, which is an advocacy and research organization focused on defending the legal rights of employees who are pregnant, have children, or are family caregivers. She is also a progressive who doesn’t believe that the Democratic Party should move toward the political center since, as she puts it, “the third way’s brand of neoliberal ‘moderation’ is precisely what got us into this mess.” But she does believe that Democrats will have to rediscover ways of communicating and connecting with the working class. And, more generally, she feels that progressives will have to decide if they prefer to approach the working class “with more disdain for the ‘deplorables’ or with genuine curiosity about why noncollege voters are unhappy with the Left.”

In this podcast interview, Williams discusses her experiences — including marriage to a man from a working-class background — that led her to consider the ways that class as well as factors like race and gender impact much of life in America. She considers the history of meritocracy — which she experienced as a member of one of the first classes of women at previously all-male Yale College — and the movement of college-educated women into professions that previously had been closed to them. And she describes how her research has shown that in politics, working-class voters “want to be talked to in the language that normal people talk to people. And they want to be shown how a candidate is going to improve their lives in very concrete ways. They don’t want fancy policy talk.”