Democrats and the White Working Class

This volume presents a unique collection of essays by 12 of America’s leading progressive political analysts and researchers. In the spring of 2017 the American Prospect and the White Working Class Roundtable joined together to organize an unprecedented roundtable discussion aimed at addressing the vital and urgent challenge of regaining support from white working class Americans. The organizers of the roundtable reached out to a very select group of top polling analysts, demographic specialists and social science researchers, asking them to submit commentaries that articulate their interpretation of the results of the 2016 election and present their ideas about political strategies for regaining support from America’s working people. The contributors to this collection include the leading opinion pollsters Stan Greenberg, Guy Molyneux and Celinda Lake, political demographer Ruy Teixeira, well known writers and editors Harold Meyerson and Robert Kuttner as well as a variety of other leading researchers in this field, individuals ranging from grass roots organizers to ethnographic field workers. The results of this unique collaboration are already generating wide discussion in the American Prospect magazine and are now collected in this volume to provide the most substantial reference and source of information for progressives and democrats who wish to understand and communicate with white working Americans.

The 12 authors of this unique collection of articles are all recognized experts in the study of the opinions, views and political choices of white working class Americans. They represent a range of views and methods of social research but are united in their belief in the vital political importance of this large and frequently misunderstood social group.

Stan Greenberg, Guy Molyneux and Celinda Lake are three of the leading political pollsters who study white working class Americans. Ruy Teixeira, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority, and his co-authors John Halpin and Robert Griffith, are important researchers in the study of American political demography.

Contributors Justin Gest and Andrew Levison are recognized specialists in the field of ethnographic field research with white working people while Karen Nussbaum, director of Working America and Matt Morrison, the organization’s political director, conduct the most extensive and important research based on data collected from door to door canvassing and grass-roots organizing.

Rounding out the group of authors, Harold Meyerson and Robert Kuttner, editors of The American Prospect magazine, and Joan Walsh, contributing editor to The Nation, are well known political commentators who have written extensively on the historical background and political evolution of today’s white working class. New York Magazine columnist Ed Kilgore is a specialist in electoral politics at the national and local level.

Taken together, these 12 authors represent the most significant group of political and social researchers that have been assembled in a single volume to discuss this critical subject in contemporary American politics.