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By Les Leopold / Substack
First, my apologies to those who live in the Rust Belt for using that name. It’s been very difficult to come up with a different one for our survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. We couldn’t call it a swing sate survey, because Ohio has jumped off of that swing long ago. And we couldn’t call it a working-class survey because it covers all voters in the four states, not just working-class voters. So, Rust Belt it is, with apologies. To be sure, there’s a lot more than rust going on out there.
The survey was designed by the Center for Working Class Politics, the Rutgers LEARN labor education program, and the Labor Institute, where I work. YouGov was the polling outfit that conducted the actual survey.
Here are the links to the survey, and to the video webinar we held last week about the survey, featuring Shawn Fain, the President of the United Autoworkers.
The report covers a lot of ground, so I’d like to focus on three findings that jumped out at me.
1. The Democratic brand is really tarnished: We found that on average if a Democratic candidate and an independent candidate run on identical messages, word for word, the Democrat starts off 8 percent behind. In Ohio, it’s 16 percent. That means that when Sherrod Brown runs for Senate as a Democrat in Ohio, he’s starting off way behind before he even says a word.
2. Voters in these states, which have large numbers of working-class residents, are way more radical on economic issues than we would infer from media reports that denigrate “populism.” More on that below.
3. Rust Belt voters are ready to support a new working-class political formation, independent of the Democrats and Republicans.
The collapse of the Democratic brand isn’t really news. It’s plain to see.
The news is why. Our survey strongly suggests that most of the alienation is not the result of the so-called “woke” positions that Democrats support or are loudly accused of supporting. Rather, it’s more about the failure of the party to deliver. In fact, we asked these 3,000 voters if they would support “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for three years and not been convicted of any felony crimes.
A remarkable 63.3 percent supported that statement. (The word “illegal” was used because we wanted to match exactly what has been used in other voter surveys since 2000.)
These voters also very strongly support economic populist issues. We found that the more anti-corporate the economic populist message, the more support from these voters.
We also tested a progressive and corporate-disrupting policy proposal on mass layoffs that no one had ever heard of before. It read:
“Any corporation with 500 or more employees globally that receives Michigan taxpayer-funded contracts, grants, tax subsidies, or abatements, shall not conduct compulsory layoffs of taxpayers. All layoffs must be voluntary, based on financial incentives. No employee of such a company shall be forced to leave their job.”
Forty-two percent of the respondents supported this statement, with only 26.3 percent opposed.
Also, this proposal tied for fifth on a ranking of 25 economic proposals that were evaluated by the respondents. And again, not one of the respondents had ever seen this proposal before!
The final shocker in this survey, at least for me, is the support for a new working-class political formation. Here’s the question we posed:
Would you support a new organization, the Independent Workers Political Association, that would support working-class issues independent of both the Democratic and Republican parties. It would run and support independent political candidates committed to a platform that included
· Stop big companies that receive tax dollars from laying off workers who pay taxes.
· Guarantee everyone who wants to work has a decent-paying job, and if the private sector can’t provide it, the government will
· Raise the minimum wage so every family can lead a decent life
· Stop drug company price-gouging and put price controls on food cartels
Now let’s take a good look at what we are asking. First, it calls for something like a new working-class political party totally independent of the two major parties. And second, the platform is very radical.
It leads with our no compulsory layoff proposal that no one had ever seen before. Then it follows with the government serving as employer of last resort. And this comes during a time when only 22 percent of the American public believes the government is doing the right thing some or most of the time. The minimum wage proposal we know is popular across the country, and the last proposal is about controlling corporate greed.
Here are the state-by-state results for those who support this organization that doesn’t even exist!
Michigan 58,9%
Ohio 58.1%
Pennsylvania 56.8%
Wisconsin 55.3%
For me, the message is simple: Voters in the states we polled want a bold new agenda and a bold new political party totally independent of the Democrats and the Republicans. These voters are way more progressive than the pundits who put them down as no-account populists. They are also more radical than many progressives who are playing footsie with the Democrats.
As UAW president Shawn Fain suggests in his opening remarks for the webinar, what we really need are more working-class candidates like Dan Osborn in Nebraska instead of all the billionaires and millionaires who dominate our political system. (President Fain suggests we look at Mouseland, a 7-minute cartoon film created by the Canadian labor party.)
We need a slew of working-class candidates to build a new independent working-class politics, something for all working people, not just those lucky enough to be unionized. If a new political organization is built outside of the two parties, I’m sure that working people and their allies will come running.
How about this for a bumper sticker?
No Blue, Not Red: I’m a Working-Class Independent!
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Les Leopold
After graduating from Oberlin College and Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, Les Leopold co-founded the Labor Institute in 1976, a nonprofit organization that designs research and educational programs on occupational safety and health, the environment, and economics for unions, worker centers, and community organizations. He continues to serve as executive director of the Labor Institute and is currently working to build a national economic educational train-the-trainer program with unions and community groups.