What’s up with Jacobin’s “Working-Class Win-o-Meter”?

Every few months, Jacobin announces what it purports to be a secret to win working-class voters based on a finding from its associated Center for Working Class Politics (CWCP). Its September 14 editorial “Report: The Working Class Vote is Not Lost” was the latest in this series.

The latest innovation from CWCP is the “Working-Class Win-o-Meter,” that Jacobin describes as “a data-driven road map for winning back working-class voters.” It purports to demonstrate the optimal combination of social and political appeals to move working-class voters to vote for a hypothetical Democratic candidate.

Two points should be made at the outset. When Jacobin and CWCP talk about “winning working class voters,” they don’t mean winning the working class to socialism. They mean “winning” the working class to vote for Democrats. And they define the “working class” as non-college educated people with family incomes of between $30,000 to $150,000.

This supposedly groundbreaking survey and analysis is an exercise in political message-testing for Democratic candidates. It uses the definition of “working-class” that is the standard in lazy polling and media commentary, and thus, adds no new insights. Attaching the labels of “socialist” and “working-class” doesn’t change the fact that what Jacobin and CWCP are engaged in is a completely conventional activity that regularly earns millions for Democratic Party consultants.

Without digressing into a long discussion of the inadequacies of the study’s understanding of class, it’s worth pondering why, under its definition, a non-college educated small business owner is “working class” but a college-educated nurse or K-12 teacher who is a union activist is not considered working-class. It’s the same sort of logic that had Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-adjacent consultants and Jacobin fawning over working-class avatar “oyster farmer” Graham Platner as a U.S. Senate candidate in Maine before Platner’s campaign imploded.

The study’s key findings include “lead with working class economics” and “adopt culture and climate positions that resonate with working-class voters.” These takeaways are supposed to increase the hypothetical Democratic candidate’s support over what it calls a “Kamala Harris-2024 style Democrat.”

For working-class economics or economic populist policies, the winning positions come from a list of ordinary policies from tuition-free community college to protecting Social Security from cuts to capping prescription-drug prices. There is nothing wrong with these proposals. But they are hardly bold. In fact, many of them are the same poll-tested offerings that Democratic Party politicians have included in their campaigns for years.

The fact that they are repackaged here as keys to victory should emphasize how little the Democrats have done to implement these when they have held power in the past. And it’s noteworthy that “Medicare for All,” the signature proposal that social democrats like Jacobin and DSA have championed for more than a decade, didn’t make the list.

But what really gives the game away is the “culture and climate” positions that the analysis considers to be losing messages for Democratic politicians. For anyone who is familiar with Jacobin’s antipathy to “subcultural leftism,” t”he losing positions won’t surprise: reducing funding for police, “abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE),” and letting “trans girls play in girls’ sports.” Other so-called “social issues,” such as defense of abortion rights, don’t significantly move the needle toward the Democrats, CWCP finds.

Mainstream Democratic Party campaigns in the midterm electoral cycle are following this script without even dialing up the “Win-o-Meter.” It’s an article of faith that serious Democratic candidates run on “kitchen-table issues” like the price of groceries and gasoline, and “don’t take the bait” by engaging with Republicans over “silly culture war” issues. Or they try to get ahead of the Republican attacks by pre-emptively jumping to the conservative side. For example, Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico said he too opposes trans girls in girls’ sports.

As the liberal journalist Perry Bacon explained,

“Economic issues not cultural wars” produces a party that both loses elections and abandons moral causes and vulnerable people. That’s not a theoretical argument—it’s the story of the Democratic Party of my entire adulthood.

The reality is that there are no silly culture wars happening in America. There are equality wars and justice wars and fairness wars. Democrats should try to win those wars—and the elections that involve them.

When Jacobin argues for Democratic candidates to express their positions in the language of “working-class values,” it explicitly cites “loyalty to community and country, pride in hard work, respect for traditional institutions and for playing by the rules, personal security, and anti-elitism.”

A Democratic politics stressing “it’s the economy stupid” and supporting people who “work hard and play by the rules” isn’t some new formula that Jacobin discovered. In fact, these were two catchphrases of Bill Clinton’s first run for president in 1992! Daniel Goulden’s takedown of the “Win-O-Meter” asked a pertinent question: “Why Does Jacobin Sound Like Third Way?” Third Way is the corporate-funded DC think tank that pushes warmed-over Clintonism and that recently announced a McCarthyite campaign against “democratic socialists” in the Democratic Party.

Why would a “socialist” initiative end up echoing some of the worst Democratic Party conventional wisdom? The conventional wisdom that opened the door to Trump, no less.

At a base level, this is where you end up if you accept the DSA perspective that the most important form of “mass politics” is electoral and focused on the bosses’ Democratic Party. The DSA may have built an impressive canvassing operation for Mayor Mamdani’s election in New York City, but that mass element has mostly dissipated since. Moreover, in the period since Bernie Sanders’ unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, prominent supporters of his have gone on to form consultancies for Democratic candidates that reflect just the sort of politics that CWCP espouses.

When you play in Democratic politics, you adopt its norms and tropes. This is not a new problem, as the Democrats have historically absorbed challenges from the left and disarmed them. In his Communists in Harlem During the Depression, historian Mark Naison shows how, during the 1930s “Popular Front” era, the Communists transformed themselves from radical organizers of community protests into deal-making operatives whose efforts helped propel the career of the Harlem Democratic machine politician, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

A fundamental principle of socialism, going back to Marx and Engels, is the commitment to build a working-class political organization independent of capitalist politics. Histories of U.S. communism in the 1920s and 1930s demonstrate how the CP abandoned that principle as it transformed itself into the left wing of the New Deal. But where the CP once had what you might call a “heroic period” of working-class radical activism to abandon, the DSA can’t claim that. It has always been an electoral organization focused on transforming the Democratic Party, abandoning instead calls for breaks (“dirty” or otherwise) from the liberal capitalist party.

Even though DSA, Jacobin, CWCP and the rest aren’t in practice committed to a fundamental goal of 19^th century social democracy—that is, building a social democratic or labor party—they operate on a theory of working-class politics and consciousness very much in line with their social democratic forebears.

In Party and Class, the late British revolutionary socialist Chris Harman distinguished between the social-democratic party, that purports to organize the “whole” working class, and the Leninist revolutionary party that organizes the most political conscious and active members of that class. Unlike the social democratic party that caters to the lowest common denominator of an electoral coalition, the revolutionary party carries out “continual agitation and propaganda among more [politically] backward elements of the class so as to raise their self-consciousness and self-reliance” to fight for socialism.

From these conceptions of political organization and working-class consciousness, it’s entirely understandable why Jacobin and friends would workshop ways to attract support of voters (even Trumpy ones) with “kitchen-table issues” while accommodating their conservativism on other issues. It’s the direct counter position to Lenin’s view that socialists should be “tribunes of the people” who champion the rights of the oppressed in the broader class struggle.

A socialist focus on “kitchen-table issues” is entirely inadequate, not only because wide swathes of working-class people are activated because they oppose Trump’s racist, xenophobic, sexist and homophobic policies, but because there is no hope to build a working-class opposition to Trumpism unless it confronts its racist, far-right core.

As Lenin noted in another context,

There are two sorts of independent [working-class] activity. There is the independent activity of a proletariat that possesses revolutionary initiative, and there is the independent activity of a proletariat that is undeveloped and held in leading strings … There are Social Democrats to this day who contemplate with reverence the second kind of activity, who believe they can evade a direct reply to pressing questions of the day by repeating the word “class” over and over again…

Lenin wrote those words more than a century ago. But they could have been written about Jacobin and the “Win-o-Meter” today.