The Tour That Is Not What It Looks Like
Cory Booker is apparently signaling a new way Democrats can campaign in the Trump era — less identity politics, more economic messaging, more focus on the kitchen table concerns of working-class voters who have been drifting away from the party for a decade.
Good messaging advice, if they actually take it. But let's be precise about what this is and what it isn't.
This is a Democratic Party that has spent fifteen years telling working-class voters — including the Hispanic and Black working-class voters who make up a disproportionate share of its base — that their economic concerns were downstream of racial and gender politics. That the way to address economic anxiety was through progressive cultural transformation. That truckers and factory workers and small business owners needed to be educated out of their retrograde views before the party could really help them.
Those voters left. They left in South Texas. They left in Miami-Dade. They left in the Detroit suburbs. They left in exactly the places that Democrats need to win national elections. The party is now, in the form of Cory Booker's listening tour, discovering that economic messaging resonates with the people it lost.
This is not wisdom. This is a lag indicator.
The Libertarian Read on Democratic Economic Populism
My concern about the Democratic economic pivot isn't that it's insincere — though it may be. My concern is that the economics they're pivoting toward are wrong.
When Democrats talk about "economic messaging" in the Trump era, they mean a particular set of policy proposals: expanded child tax credits, higher minimum wages, more union protections, more federal spending on social programs. Those policies poll well in isolation, especially among people who are struggling. And then they get implemented, and the economy doesn't respond the way the polling suggests it should, because the policies themselves carry costs that the messaging doesn't mention.
Higher minimum wages accelerate automation. More union protections entrench incumbent workers at the expense of new entrants. More federal spending means more debt or more taxes — usually more taxes on the businesses and small employers that working-class people actually work for. The messaging is about helping workers. The policy frequently makes it harder to become a worker in the first place.
I grew up in a family that owned a small business. We employed eleven people at peak. Every mandate, every payroll tax increase, every regulatory requirement fell on us proportionally harder than on the corporations the Democrats profess to be fighting. The idea that more government is better for working people is something you can believe if you've never had to make payroll. Booker has never had to make payroll.
What a Real Economic Message for Working People Would Sound Like
If the Democrats were serious about winning back the working class on economics — not just on messaging — they'd need to be willing to say things their donor base absolutely does not want to hear.
They'd need to say that the regulatory and licensure regimes that protect incumbent industries and professional associations are a direct transfer from working people to established interests. That zoning laws that prevent housing construction are a middle-class tax on the poor. That teachers' unions defending seniority over performance have made public education into a system that works for adults rather than children. That the trade policies that decimated manufacturing communities weren't reversed quickly enough under Democratic administrations because the party's donor base in finance and tech benefited from them.
None of that is in Booker's tour. None of it will be. The donors who write the checks wouldn't allow it, and the progressive activists who staff the campaigns wouldn't organize for it.
What working people deserve is a party that actually interrogates why their economic situation has deteriorated — not one that tests new messaging to sell them the same old policies. Whether that party is the Republican Party as currently constituted is a separate question. But the answer to working-class alienation is not a better script. It's a different set of commitments. And those commitments require a different kind of political courage than listening tours produce.
