Jacobin’s new poll gives a left cover to Democrats’ standard messaging about the working class

When he wrote about working class consciousness and ideology, the Italian revolutionary Marxist Antonio Gramsci made the distinction between what he called “common sense” and what he called “good sense.”

“Common sense” was a conglomeration of everyday and often contradictory ideas about social life, largely reflecting a lot of the dominant ruling-class ideas. “Good sense” described a more critical and coherent understanding of society, achieved through a fusion of socialist politics with workers’ own experience in struggle against capitalism.

Having this understanding of ideas in society as Gramsci explained them is one way to construct a socialist evaluation of “Commonsense Solidarity: How a Working-Class Coalition Can Be Built, and Maintained,” an opinion-poll based analysis sponsored by and published in the socialist magazine Jacobin.

The Jacobin analysis not only made its way around the socialist left, but it received top-level billing in the New York Times’ daily news roundup on November 10, and sympathetic coverage in outlets like the Nation and even a back-handed compliment from the Wall Street Journal’s right-wing opinion writer Peggy Noonan. If nothing else, the Jacobin editors have a good PR operation.

The Jacobin editors dress up their goals with a lofty claim: “Our experimental study, the first of its kind, offers a new and powerful perspective on working-class political views.” But digging into the report makes clear that its purpose is much more conventional, and hardly hidden. First, it’s a survey of “working-class” respondents as voters chosen from five “swing” states: Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.Second, its “experiment” is a political messaging exercise that mainstream candidates and their PACs perform all the time. The survey asks respondents to rank on a 10-point scale their support for fictional candidates with different demographic and occupational backgrounds, different “day one” priorities, and different stump-speech appeals (a.k.a. “soundbites”). In a real sense, the study is a more left-wing version of the message-testing for Democrats (for example, here) that Democracy Corps, the consultancy of Clintonites James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, regularly offer up.

The Jacobin effort is not a project designed for socialists to understand how better to recruit workers to socialist organizations. It’s a project designed to advise progressive Democrats about how to win more elections to the U.S. House and state legislatures. As the 76-page report notes in its consideration of geography: “This suggests that in many of the rural and small-town precincts where Democratic candidates have most struggled in recent years, populist rhetoric can help them appeal to working-class voters.”

To be better able to influence the study’s intended audience—which is, in reality, Democratic Party linked NGOs, union officials, the major media,politicians and consultants—the Jacobin study made a number of concessions to convention. One was to exclude from their sample people who indicated strong preferences for Republicans (because “we are primarily interested in the effect of variation in Democratic candidate profiles”). But most importantly, it decided to measure social class by education level.

Most common media descriptions of the “working class” assume that education defines social class, with workers being found among the majority of the U.S. population that doesn’t hold a bachelor’s degree. The media and pollsters use this definition because, as even the Jacobin writers note, “For most researchers and journalists trying to make sense of voting patterns and political choices, the preferred shorthand for social class is educational attainment. Substituting educational attainment for social class provides a neat solution to a messy problem.”

There are a number of problems with equating educational level with class. Most obviously, it doesn’t get at what a Marxist would consider the baseline for determining someone’s class: their job and its relationship to capital.Moreover, as Princeton University political scientist Larry Bartels wrote in a critique of Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? the non-college educated population in the U.S. pretty much mirrors the income distribution of the population as a whole.

But there are other more obvious problems related to the two points above. The most significant is that excluding people with bachelor’s or higher degrees excludes workers like most nurses and other health care workers and most K-12 educators. For a survey purporting to assess working-class consciousness, it’s a strange decision to exclude two groups who have been on the forefront of working-class collective action in recent years. From the 2018 “red for ed” mobilizations to the just-averted strike of tens of thousands of health care workers in the Kaiser Permanente chain on the West Coast, workers in the education and health sectors have been among the most active in taking collective action.Secondly, if the non-college educated workforce mirrors the income distribution of the population as a whole, above-median incomes are quite likely to be associated with small business owners and lower-level supervisors.

However, if the aim is to advise the Democrats about how their candidates can win 50 percent plus one of the vote, then it’s not important to craft a politics that appeals to the most active or conscious parts of the working class. To return to Gramsci’s analysis, the Jacobin project is about how to appeal to “common sense,” not how to organize and give voice to workers with “good sense.” This may not be what the Jacobin editors meant when they headlined the study as “commonsense solidarity,” but that is the logic of their political practice.

The report includes many findings that are beyond the scope of this article to review. Readers who are interested in the details should take a look for themselves. A few general points should be kept in mind though. First, the survey constructs a cluster of “day one” priorities, “key issues” and “soundbites” that are supposed to represent fictional candidates on a continuum between “progressive populist” and “Republican” with gradations based on some assessment of the candidates’ “wokeness” (“a political style” including a “particular emphasis on race and anti-racism and a specialized vocabulary”)or moderation. Although the report wants to make the case for the “progressive populist” appeal (a la Bernie Sanders), it finds that the “mainstream moderate” appeal (a la Joe Biden) is almost equally as popular.In fact, statistically speaking, most of the findings aren’t as clear-cut as the authors make them seem.

Second, the partisan presentation for the fictional candidates obviously biases the responses to Democrats. The fictional candidates respondents rated were presented as “Independents, running as Democrats,” “Democrats” and “Republicans.”Given that opinion polls show that the plurality of voters identify themselves as “independents,” the choice of “Independent, running as Democrat” is strange. Not only is it a choice that is hardly ever presented to voters (Sanders’ decision to run in the Democratic presidential primaries is probably one of a handful of examples), but it doesn’t measure what it purports to. The Jacobin authors may have aplausible rationale for it (not wanting respondents to associate “Independent” with “unelectable” and therefore not choose it),but giving respondents two out of three chances to pick “Democrat” doesn’t answer the question of whether candidates should distance themselves from the Democratic Party. It also appears to be a transparent attempt to operationalize the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA’s) and Jacobin’s perspective that socialists should run in elections as Democrats.

Third, the report’s conclusions are constructed around a narrative that Jacobin and its associated publication Catalyst have made something of a trademark. That is, “mass politics” can only be based on electoral politics around “bread and butter” economic issues with “universalistic” appeal, and that raising issues of race or gender or sexuality, as “woke” issues, are losers at the ballot box.That’s the main message of the project and the report: “Working-class voters prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, and who frame those issues in universal terms. This is especially true outside deep-blue parts of the country.”This was the study sponsor’s view before the study, and (lo and behold!) the study reinforces that view.

In and of itself, this doesn’t make the Jacobin effort illegitimate, because every political consultant “talks their book” (has well-established opinions they try to sell to their clients). But it should make one question the social scientific gloss that the study imbues to economistic social democratic politics. And as noted above, some of the study’s findings contradict what the authors would like it to say. In an attempt to address the criticism of using educational level as a proxy for class, they assign survey participants to social classes based on the Marxist-influenced work of the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright. Interestingly, with Wright’s construct, those categorized as “low-class” show no statistically significant difference in candidate preference from “middle-class” respondents, with the exception of preferring women candidates.

One objection to the idea that the study’s conclusions urge candidates to avoid “woke” messaging may be the finding of a high degree of support for candidates who pledge to address “systemic racism.” This is certainly a notable finding. But without knowing much about how the survey respondents understood “systemic racism,” it’s difficult to draw hard-and-fast conclusions.It could be that many interpreted systemic racism as the left understands it (racism is embedded in capitalism and its institutions). It could also be that some believe that “the system” is “too woke” and discriminates against whites. And why a fictional candidate’s pledge to address “systemic racism”seemed to outpoll a pledge to support “equal rights for all” should raise some questions.

Still, when all is said and done, one can’t avoid the sense that Jacobin’s chief concern is to promote a “common sense” politics tailored to a working-class electorate that it conceives asliberal on economic issues and conservative on “cultural” issues.It’s the same conception that informs pundits like the New York Times’ Thomas Byrne Edsall (who has been peddling this analysis since Ronald Reagan was president) and Clinton adviser Carville (who famously blamed the Democrats’ 2021 election losses on “stupid wokeness” and “defund the police lunacy”). Democratic political consultant David Shor urges “popularism,” a more sophisticated version of the same general position of Edsall and Carville. WhatJacobin is promoting is neither new nor novel. It’s just giving it a “left” cover.