Democratic Party leaders acknowledge that they are struggling to figure out how to regain the trust, and the votes, of working-class Americans who no longer see their party as their political home. After the setbacks the party experienced in November, the candidates who are eyeing the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee and other top DNC positions admit this is the party’s biggest challenge going forward. Ben Wikler, the head of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin and a contender for DNC chair, goes so far as to say, “The Democratic brand is broken, and is a drag to people in many parts of the country.”

Fair enough. So how do Democrats rebuild the brand so that it connects with working-class voters? How do they assemble the sort of multiracial, multicultural working-class coalition that, historically, delivered overwhelming majorities to Democratic presidential and congressional candidates from the days of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to those of Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama?

There’s an easy answer to those questions: Get a lot more Americans into unions.

The labor movement gave overwhelming support to Vice President Kamala Harris and mounted an aggressive campaign to turn out their members for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot in 2024. Their efforts proved to be dramatically more successful than those of the Democratic Party. “Union members voted for Democratic endorsed candidates from the top of the ticket on down at a much higher rate than the general public,” explains AFL-CIO President Elizabeth Shuler.

Union members voted for Harris by a solid 57–39 margin, according to exit polls. That was comparable with the union vote for Joe Biden in 2020, a notable fact in an election year when support for Democrats declined among so many demographic groups. “In fact,” noted Politico, “union voters were one of the few groups that did not appreciably shift toward Trump and Republicans in what is shaping up to be one of the party’s strongest presidential election cycles in recent memory.”

So why are we hearing so much about the Democrats losing the working-class vote? Because most working Americans aren’t union members. As a result, they don’t get information about Trump’s aggressively anti-worker policies from the education campaigns that unions have developed to inform their own members and to turn those members out as voters for pro-labor candidates.

“Vice President Harris got a stronger percentage of union voters this election than President Biden did in 2020. But she still lost!” explains International Union of Painters and Allied Trades union president Jimmy Williams Jr. Why? “Because the Democratic Party has continued to fail to prioritize a strong, working-class message that addresses issues that really matter to workers,” explains Williams. “The party did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Donald Trump. That’s not good enough anymore!”

How could the party start to get it right?

The AFL-CIO has a plan.

Describing the race for DNC chair as a “unique opportunity to once again bring working people back to its center,” Shuler explains that the election of a new slate of DNC officers will allow the party to change its course and “center its purpose and messaging around the economic and social needs of working people.”

What resonated with union members in 2024 was a message “built around economic issues with broad appeal,” says Shuler. “In a time of heightened cynicism and distrust of politics, those messages were even more salient because they were delivered by voters’ trusted fellow union members at the door, in the workplace, on the phone, and through digital advertising. If there were more workers represented by unions, and as a result more voters, the outcome of the 2024 election would have been different.”