Will Blue Collar Voters Be Back in Play?

Only fools try to predict the future. Okay, so let’s get started then.

This should be a good year for Democrats. Not because anybody is excited about them (the party’s approval ratings are at an all-time low), but because it’s a mid-term election with an unpopular Republican in the White House. Moreover, people continue to say that affordability is their top concern and Trump and the GOP have not been able to turn that around. Finally, too many Trump Party voters show up only when he’s on the ballot literally. He is on the ballot, but only by extension. That will fire up Democrats to vote against him in abstentia.

So, I suppose Democrats will spend much of the year trying to lower expectations while barely being able to contain their excitement. If they don’t run the table there will be no joy in faculty lounges.

Here’s what running the table would look like.

Democrats (er, sorry, liberals — this is ostensibly a nonpartisan election) should pick up another seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April. They’ve won the last two races by double digits. The caveat here is that both of those contests were epic, nationally recognized fights for control of the Court. This time liberal control is assured regardless of the outcome but the left could cement their majority for several years.

So, the thing we can be grateful for is that the campaigns will be much lower budget affairs. We should see fewer ads accusing one candidate or the other of ordering that ax murderers be released and placed in the closets at your children’s schools.

But even without all that money the same dynamic holds. Liberals are fired up. Trump voters stay home. Normal conservatives are dispirited. So, it’s not going out on much of a limb to predict that liberal Chris Taylor defeats conservative Maria Lazar by a healthy margin. I think that’s a bit unfortunate as Taylor, a highly partisan liberal, doesn’t have the fair-minded temperament I’m looking for on the Court.

But it’s in November that Democrats should really clean up. A Democrat should replace Tony Evers as Wisconsin’s Governor, Democrats should pick up control of the State Senate, gain one seat in Wisconsin’s Congressional delegation and reclaim control of the House of Representatives. If they come up short in any of those they’ll have to see the year as a disappointment. If they were to also win majorities in the State Assembly and U.S. Senate that would mean an absolute blood bath for Trump’s party.

I can predict one thing with 100% certainty. I know exactly what Bernie Sanders will say in either event. If Democrats come up short he’ll say that it was because they didn’t present a bold enough socialist agenda. And if they do well he’ll say that they’ve now got a mandate for a bold socialist agenda.

Of course, neither will be true. Democrats need to take the gifts Trump has given them and build off that. By closing the border and forcing DEI into retreat, Trump has taken two issues that have been killing Democrats off the agenda. They need to resist their vocal activist class and keep them there.

And, with one exception, there’s also no mandate for big government. Democrats thought, when they last held majorities and the White House, that they could push through a new New Deal, with all manner of pricey social programs. The catch was that they couched them as economic recovery and relief efforts in the wake of COVID. The idea was to get the public hooked on them and so create a demand that would make them permanent.

That didn’t work. For the most part, when this stuff went away the public didn’t seem to notice. The one exception is the ACA subsidies. They were right to make this their central cause last year and now into this election year. But Democrats need to lower their expectations about the long-term political benefits of that. For one thing, if they win they lose. If the Republicans cave and support some form of reinstatement they take the one winning issue the Democrats have off of the agenda.

And for another thing, Democrats shouldn’t expect that they’ll get much in the way of political benefit, whether they win or lose on the policy front. That’s because people who benefit from Obamacare are not dedicated voters. At least in the years for which I could find data, 87% of non-elderly enrollees did not have college degrees and a college degree correlates with voting behavior. If the Democrats are successful the beneficiaries are likely to only be vaguely aware of who they have to thank and even then it’s not likely they’ll show up to vote on the issue. The theory that lots of big, new government programs will engender a new generation of New Deal voters just doesn’t have much evidence behind it.

Both Trump and the Democrats want to activate blue collar workers who are infrequent voters. The Democrats stubbornly insist that it’s their birthright and that blue collar voters should reward them for their redistribution and social safety net policies. Trump appeals to their resentments about immigrants and cultural elites. Trump wins.

But while he’s winning now, he hasn’t done anything to build a new Republican Party. His voters didn’t become Republicans; they remain Trumpicans. The way things look now, when he’s gone so are they.

On the other hand, as noted above, Democrats haven’t been able to buy back the love of blue collar voters. They’re not going to return to a party that they see as obsessed with pronouns, no matter how much money the Dems throw at health care or child care or anything else.

And so that’s the most interesting thing for me as 2026 progresses. For a decade, Trump has defined American politics. Every pol had to profess their love or hate for him, but he could not be ignored. There are signs that he’s fading now, starting to lose his grip on the GOP, but we’ll have to see how that plays out. I’ve counted him out before.

But if Trump’s decline accelerates this year, where do his voters go? Can some other Republican keep them in the fold and even engage them in down ballot elections? Can the Democrats somehow win them back? Or will they just return to the sidelines, even in presidential elections? On that question, I won’t hazard a guess.