Has the GOP become a working-class party? On its face, the question is absurd. Whatever the modern Republican Party is, its historical analogues are not the parties of the working class. The party has virtually nothing in common with the SPD (Social Democratic Party) of prewar Germany, the SAP (Swedish Social Democratic Party) of the Meidner Plan, or Lula’s PT (Workers’ Party). Even the decrepit Socialist International, which once counted among its member parties Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, would surely balk at extending admission to the Republican Party.

Yet many Republicans themselves are convinced that their party has indeed made a turn to the working class. The night of the 2020 election, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri tweeted, “We are a working-class party now. That’s the future.”¹ A few months later, Representative Jim Banks, chair of the influential Republican Study Committee, wrote a memo to House minority leader Kevin McCarthy making this case in more detail. Banks argued that the two parties were undergoing “coalitional transformations,” with the GOP becoming a party of the working class, and the Democratic Party becoming a party of professionals and the rich. The result was a historic opportunity for the Republicans to redefine themselves, and, in so doing, secure the “permanent Republican majority” the party has been chasing for the past two decades.²

Liberals have also expressed worry over this prospect. Since at least the 1990s, liberal writers have sounded the alarm about the defections of white workers from the Democratic coalition. At different moments, liberal analysts have pointed to different causes for their alleged abandonment by the white working class. In the 1990s, Thomas and Mary Edsall identified the backlash to the party’s embrace of civil rights.³ In the early 2000s, Thomas Frank highlighted Christianity and cultural conservatism.⁴ More recently, Thomas Piketty has argued that the Democrats are but one example of a broader phenomenon across the advanced capitalist world, in which educational polarization replaces class polarization, with the highly educated voting liberal and the less educated voting for various forms of conservatism.⁵ It is not only the hopeful right who sees the working class turning the wrong shade of red.