Democrats' 2026 midterm wave masks a persistent and widening class gap that leaves them vulnerable in 2028
Source: Jared Abbott. "The Democratic Coalition Still Has a Class Problem." November 5, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
Democrats won big in 2026, but mostly because Trump was unpopular and his less-reliable voters stayed home, not because working-class voters came back. Compared with 2018, Democrats are doing worse with voters without college degrees and better with graduates, and those non-graduates are still most of the electorate. Unless that changes, 2028 could look like 2024.
Conclusion
Despite their large 2026 midterm victory, Democrats have not fixed their problem with working-class (noncollege) voters. The victory rested on temporary factors and a college-skewed coalition, so the party remains exposed to another 2024-style loss in 2028 unless it wins back working-class voters.
Premises
- The 2026 win was driven largely by temporary conditions: Trump's unpopularity (38% approval, 75% rating the economy poorly), depressed turnout among low-propensity Trump voters (worth about 5 points to Democrats), and a midterm electorate tilted toward highly engaged college graduates.
- Those conditions are unlikely to recur in 2028, when Trump is no longer the Republican standard-bearer and low-propensity conservative voters will likely return to the polls.
- Compared with the 2018 midterm wave, Democrats' standing with noncollege voters has worsened (from +3.5 to about -5), while their margin with college graduates grew from 14 to 26 points. The class gap is now over 30 points, up from about 10, and gains among voters of color without degrees recover only about a quarter of the ground lost since 2018.
- Noncollege voters remain a majority of the electorate, including in every key swing state in 2020, so relying on college-educated suburbanites alone is arithmetically insufficient and politically unsustainable.
- Although college graduates supplied most of the 2026 national swing, the red-state Senate upsets were won by outrunning the national trend among noncollege voters. Had those voters moved only at the national pace, three of five winners would have lost.
- Democrats remain unpopular and are trusted only thinly on the issues. Their favorability is 40% (Pew) against 46–47% in Trump's first term, about 4 points of their margin came from voters who dislike both parties, and their immigration gains are shallow.
Assumptions
- Preliminary AP Voter Poll survey data and the author's own calculations reliably approximate the true 2026 electorate.
- Education (college vs. noncollege) is a valid proxy for class.
- The 2018 midterm is an appropriate benchmark for judging 2026 working-class performance.
- The 2028 presidential electorate will resemble 2024 in composition, with high-propensity and low-propensity voters returning.
- Midterm and Senate patterns in red states are informative about what Democrats need in presidential battlegrounds.
- Democrats' deficit with working-class voters is a durable structural problem rather than a mostly transient reaction to events.
- Democrats need a majority or near-majority of noncollege voters, or at least a smaller deficit with them, to win key states durably.