The Term “Working Class” Is Useless

The Center for Working-Class Politics, a relatively new research institute helmed by political scientist Jared Abbott, and the Equality Action Center’s Joan C. Williams released a report Monday about how progressive candidates could win working-class voters. The report detailed a survey of 40,000 voters produced by the socialist magazine Jacobin (whose editorial director, Bhaskar Sunkara, is on the CWCP’s board), and its analysis relied on an almost laughable definition of the working class: “those with no four-year college degree and a household income in roughly the middle 60% of the national distribution (about $30,000 to $150,000).” The report compared that group’s responses to a middle- and upper-class group defined as those with a four-year degree and a household income of at least $80,000.By this logic, a household with a social worker married to a teacher, together making just over $100,000 a year, is not working class, but a master electrician making six figures is. The report thus repeats a common, fatal flaw in how many people define the working class today: relying largely on education level leaves us with an income range so wide it tells us little about how much those folks struggle—or not—to make ends meet.I can’t really fault the CWCP, though. The left’s collective freakout over working-class voters—mainly, but not exclusively, “white working-class” voters—began in earnest when Donald Trump pulled off his surprise win in the 2016 election. So many years, so many takes about what happened and how to win those voters back. And throughout this time, writers, pundits, and voters themselves have tossed around the term working class without remembering or thinking about what it means. It’s now a term that doesn’t mean anything at all. And we should stop using it, because it’s been used as a sloppy shorthand for a group that’s so broad, varied, and voting on so many different issues that we’re often misdiagnosing our political and economic problems.This is not to say that the term never meant anything. For some researchers, especially economists and sociologists, working class has always referred to people who earn hourly wages, often in unskilled or low-skilled jobs (or jobs perceived as not requiring skills, which is an entirely other conversation). Their bosses largely control their workdays. They don’t own assets, except maybe the house they live in, and don’t have investments or another financial cushion to rely on if they lose their jobs. They can work their way into financial security over time but are vulnerable to their factory or office closing—and, even worse, to finding that their skills aren’t easily transferable or are becoming entirely outdated in a rapidly changing labor market. They just don’t have a lot of economic power. They’re not quite in poverty, but also not quite middle class.This is how I’ve always defined it, and some experts I spoke to recently do, as well. “Our foundational definition is people who have to work for a living and have little or no financial security to fall back on if they lose their job or are unable to work,” said Ravi Mangla, the press secretary for the Working Families Party. “So it could include people of a higher income that have no safety net underneath them and exist in a precarious state. So our formula factors in family income, education, and occupation and type of work (not just income). And we estimate that working class comprises roughly 63 percent of the electorate.”The Institute for Women’s Policy Research relies on a similar definition, but one that emphasizes lower incomes. “One definition that IWPR considers for working-class workers is workers making two-thirds or less than the median wage, and who might be employed in manual labor or jobs that don’t require a college degree,” said Kate Bahn, the organization’s chief economist and senior vice president of research. “More than half of those workers are women, and a disproportionate share of those workers are Black and Latinx workers.”These are complicated definitions that don’t lend themselves to easy shorthand. Maybe that’s why many journalists, pundits, and pollsters began to search for a different meaning, and settled on one that relies on education level, like the CWCP’s definition: It simply lumps all voters without a bachelor’s degree into the working class. “When I first started working in political journalism, I found the idea of a definition of working class that included Bill Gates (at the time the richest man in the world) somewhat absurd,” Matthew Yglesias wrote in his newsletter in July, referring to the fact that Gates famously dropped out of Harvard University. “But I was beaten down by convention and have generally used the term the way everyone else does.” (Not everyone!)There’s a logic to this: The skill levels and economic opportunities available to those who have completed a college education and those who have not are roughly analogous to the differences between a middle-class worker or manager and one who is working class. Another, and perhaps bigger, reason that analysts have relied on education level as a proxy for working class is that voter education level is reliably measured in polls and surveys, while other parts of the more accurate definition of working class aren’t. When news stories interpreted exit polls from the 2024 presidential election as showing that Trump won over some working-class Latinos, for example, they largely relied on the fact that Trump won Latino voters without college degrees. The terms are often used interchangeably.Because the term working class has a long history in economics, sociology, and Marxist politics, its usage suggests that we’re automatically talking about those voters’ material conditions—and that, as a group, these voters share those conditions. But actually, we’re talking about their education levels. Whether someone goes to college at all or gets a degree can be influenced by economics, but also where they’re from, how fundamentally liberal or conservative their upbringing was, their cultural concerns, and a host of other things that might impact how they vote. And in fact, the biggest political shift this century is best described by education level, not income: Since President Barack Obama’s first term, college-educated voters have moved to the Democratic Party, and non–college educated voters have moved to the Republican Party—regardless of class.Emphasizing college education so heavily in a definition of the working class leaves out a lot of the workers in the health care, education, and service economy, rapidly growing fields where so many workers make below the median income—in 2025, $66,620 for full-time workers—despite having degrees. Their degrees also cost them: They had to pay or borrow for their tuition and possibly didn’t work while earning the degree, which means they have more bills to pay. And women, especially Black and Latino women, need degrees to even get their feet in the door, while some workers, especially men, can still rely on apprenticeships for trades that make much more money. These are college-educated members of the true working class, and they overwhelmingly vote Democratic.I’ve always objected to using working class to mean non–college educated, in part because it ignores these kinds of workers. Mary Alice McCarthy, a senior director for the Center on Education & Labor at New America, agrees. “Defining the ‘working class’ as non-college workers conflates two very different descriptors of individuals: The first corresponds to an individual’s position in the labor market, and the second to their highest credential,” she said. She said they can serve as effective proxies but aren’t perfect, especially for women and people of color. “More importantly, it masks enormous variation in the types and quality of the jobs that college-educated workers have and also obscures the role of employment arrangements and whether or not someone is a boss or not a boss.”Using education as a proxy becomes even less useful among older voters, who were less likely to go to college, and rural voters, who live in places with dramatically fewer college graduates and where the job market is more limited and idiosyncratic than in cities. And these demographics also happen to be heavily Republican. A non–college educated voter in my home state of Arkansas, for example, could own a car dealership or a large family farm. That makes them bosses and owners, who comfortably make six figures, if not more. It’s hard to see how business owners who employ people are working class, whether they went to college or not. These local elites are Trump’s base, while those with the least amount of education and lowest incomes are less likely to vote at all than more educated, higher-earning voters.Our political imagination has had a hard time catching up to this reality—that someone who drives a truck (which are very expensive, by the way) and wears a trucker hat and has literal grime on their hands from work might be better off than someone who’s filing patient financial forms at a desk in a hospital’s back office. It doesn’t fit our traditional image of working-class America. That’s why so many people reach for a definition that is kind of cultural and feels right.Americans are even doing so in defining themselves. The Pew Research Center released a report just before Labor Day revealing that 60 percent of Americans—across education, income, occupation, and racial and ethnic groups—say they’re “working-class.” This percentage has ticked up over the years, but the term has increasingly taken on a partisan tinge. Two-thirds of Republican voters say the term describes them well, versus 55 percent of Democrats, and Republicans are more likely to do so regardless of their job, level of education, or income. Which means, increasingly, people who vote Republican just describe themselves as working class. Many Democrats worried about winning more working-class voters who vote Republican could just be chasing solid Republican voters who now use that label. That’s a losing game.All of this is why many researchers often tend to stick to more precise definitions, like income brackets, or describe the specific community they’re discussing in a report. I think analysts writing about Democrats and their voters should also aim for more precision. If we mean someone without a college degree, we can just say that. We can also use income levels or types of jobs when we mean specific workers.Perhaps Americans are increasingly identifying themselves as working class because they work for a living but still feel like they’re struggling, or aren’t getting ahead as much as they expected to. It’s getting harder to own assets and to build a financial cushion. That sense of precarity, of living paycheck to paycheck, keeps people from feeling middle-class, which connotes a sense of financial security. But that doesn’t necessarily make them working class—not by any useful definition, anyway.