While the Democratic Party has historically been the party of labor, a prevailing narrative in more recent elections is that the GOP is the party of workers and that Democrats represent economic elites. It’s a story that has dominated right-wing media for years, but increased in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected to office. Despite being a billionaire real estate mogul, Trump and the Republican Party honed a populist message that they would fight for everyday Americans.
Democrats have scored some major wins for workers since President Joe Biden took office, including the Child Tax Credit, providing funding for child care for working families, and increased protections for pregnant and nursing workers, but the party has been rightfully criticized for not prioritizing workers and for being lax on big corporations. That’s contributed to the party losing increasing numbers of working class white voters for years now, but since 2020, they’ve begun to lose non-college-educated, non-white voters, as well — a major cause for concern for Democrats and progressives alike.
While studies have found that workers respond far better to messaging that focuses on the economy, Democrats and progressives have struggled to find a unifying economic message for their campaigns. A new project is looking to change that. The Winning Jobs Narrative Project, which began shortly after the 2020 election, aims to create a persuasive narrative architecture to talk about jobs, work and the economy in a way that frames progressive economic issues with the values working people share across race and geography.
WJN is funded by the Rural Democracy Initiative — a funding intermediary supporting civic and political infrastructure in rural communities, small cities and towns — which also helped launch the project. RDI seeks to close the gap that often exists between progressives and rural communities, including the lack of financial support — just 7% of philanthropic funding goes to rural communities. Other funders of WJN include the New Economy Fund at the Democracy Alliance, Way to Win, Open Society Foundations and the Wallace Global Fund, among others. The project has received 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) funding.
OSF is a progressive juggernaut, and Wallace Global is a prominent supporter of social movements in pursuit of systemic change. Way to Win is a hybrid funding vehicle committed to the idea that to gain ground on the issues they care about, some element of electoral or at least electoral-adjacent work is necessary. While the effort is drawing some big names, this is somewhat fraught territory for philanthropy, as the outsized presence of wealthy donors in progressive causes and Democratic campaigns can feed into the elite narrative. Of course, that hasn’t stopped wealthy conservative donors from shaping populist, blue-collar messaging for Republicans for years. Progressives, meanwhile, have wrestled with how to counter that strategy.
“There were a lot of conversations post-2020, after the election, which was in a lot of ways a really disappointing election for us on the left. A lot of the gains that we expected just didn’t materialize,” said Bobby Clark, who leads the Winning Jobs Narrative Project. Clark is an independent consultant who has also worked with RDI.
“There was some fighting,” Clark added. “People immediately started fighting on the left about things like different beliefs and whether that was smart, and whether that hurt us. Certainly, the right went into overdrive, attacking quote-unquote social issues and cultural issues in 2020.”
WJN has worked with researchers, advocates, progressive leaders and funders to create a way for progressives to unify around a shared message on jobs and the economy. Among them are Equis Research, Somos Votantes, Breakthrough Campaigns, HIT Strategies and Blue Rose Research.
“If we think in terms of narrative, what’s the overall story of the economy? There’s a story to be told about who is being served, who’s being prioritized, who’s getting things done and who’s not,” Clark said.
The project
Following the election, people who spoke with voters found that neither progressives nor Democrats had a compelling story about jobs and the economy.
As someone who grew up in a rural working class family, it’s been a frustration for me, throughout my career in politics,” said Sarah Jaynes, executive director of the Rural Democracy Initiative, one of WJN’s key funders. “I believe that Democrats should train themselves as a party for working people. That’s just the whole thing, right, we are the party for working people. And I think that folks who are working for progress in the progressive movement should also center themselves as we are for working people.”
The question then, as Alvin Starks, director of the U.S. equality team at Open Society Foundations, said, is how can progressives tell stories in compelling ways that actually move hearts and minds?
WJN’s research began in 2021, shortly after the 2020 election. The first order of business was looking into research projects from partner organizations to identify opportunities and gaps in research. From there, WJN spoke with almost 3,000 voters across 17 states, as well as canvassing, conducting field ethnographic interviews and focus groups, among other projects.
A large-scale quantitative research phase followed with more than 110,000 survey interviews. Spanish-language messages were also tested across the nation.
Building narratives to move people
In recent years, more nonprofits, funders and political candidates have begun including narrative change in their work, but narratives have always been an important part of how humans understand the world and, as a result, of communication strategy.
“People construct a story. That’s how we make meaning as human beings,” Clark said. “We, in our evolutionary past… look up at the sky and we see seemingly disconnected points of life, and we connect them and make a story about them and make meaning.”
The narrative architecture developed by WJN is five-fold: Progressives should center and lead with working people so that they see that they are a priority, not an afterthought; value and support work to connect around deeply held shared values; situate working people as engines of our economy; position government in a supporting role so that personal agency is centered and respected; and relate policies to the broad economy and broad benefits to remind people that progressives are focused on the economy and shared prosperity.
In terms of shared values, WJN found that Americans, regardless of race and geography, identify as hard-working people. Work isn’t just a paid job. It’s the way we contribute to our group, our families, our communities, including volunteering or caring for an elderly neighbor or family member.
“People really see work as a way that they contribute to their community… It’s a way that they show love for their family and show they’re going to take care of them. It is this very community-oriented value,” said Jaynes of RDI.
For WJN, work is what unifies people across race and geography. Just as people in big cities have to go to work to feed their families, rural workers have to do the same. For Jaynes, working people of color have a lot in common with white working class colleagues and neighbors. The problem is that the Democratic Party does not speak directly to these people.
“At the end of the day, most people get up every day, work hard to take care of their family, struggle with the same things — higher housing costs and child care. There is a way for us to be able to communicate about those things across race and geography more effectively,” Clark said.
Combating fear-mongering
Creating an effective narrative framework on jobs and the economy can be used to address a number of other important issues. Effective messaging can also be used as a tool for combating fear mongering.
For years, concerns about the economy have been used as a scapegoat for racism, sexism and xenophobia. Immigration is a clear example of this. One of the major components of anti-immigrant rhetoric is that immigrants will take away jobs from hard-working Americans.
“The space of immigration is often understood as an economic one,” Starks explained. “And without its proper articulation, people can be easily misguided around information that immigration takes jobs away, but it actually doesn’t. But we don’t have compelling narratives that make sense of that.”
He added, “When you don’t have a story to tell, people will fill in that story with something else. And oftentimes that quote-unquote ‘something else’ is fear.”
WJN offers a way to quell these fears by creating narratives around work that emphasize shared experiences.
“In our storytelling, we remind people that immigrants are part of our families, who are part of our communities, and they’re doing all the things we do,” Clark said. “They’re just like us. They get up and go to work and pay taxes, and … all of those things. And in that simple step of adding to our overall mix of messaging that immigrants are like us … they’re part of our communities’ battle, that alone shifts support on issues. Just that one step.”
A sign of things to come?
Democrats shocked the nation by faring better than expected during 2022 midterm elections. So what changed from 2020? For one, the pandemic altered how we think of work. The early days of the pandemic saw a great deal of job insecurity, but when business began reopening, workers didn’t just want more jobs. They wanted better ones.
In the months running up to the midterms, inflation became a major cause for concern among voters. Prices for things like gas and food skyrocketed, but wages didn’t increase to keep up with rising costs.
According to Jaynes, the major difference between 2020 and 2022 was the Democrats spoke at length about the economy. “They talked about jobs, and they talked about costs and how much it costs to be able to buy gas or get a gallon of milk. They also talked about healthcare and prescription drugs and child care and other issues that … are directly related to people’s day-to-day economic reality,” Jaynes said.
By using WJN’s research and guidelines, they hope progressives can unite behind a unifying message that appeals to a wide variety of voters.
Jaynes added, “That’s one of the things that we’re really looking forward to — not shifting everybody to only care about jobs in the economy, but to show that [by] buying into this framework into the issue that is top-of-mind for your constituents, you can be more successful, and also be able to draw more working people into your cause.”