We learned this week that the Democratic-aligned group American Bridge plans to spend $50 million to help the party’s congressional candidates in this fall’s elections. It’s a whopping sum and a big gamble. The group’s announcement of its targeted seats turned heads in Democratic circles: They include House districts in some pretty pro-Trump areas in rural North Carolina, central Pennsylvania, and Iowa farm country.
All of which raises a question: Are these really plausible pickup opportunities for Democrats? The selection of these seats, it turns out, is backed up by some detailed internal polling and research. The findings shed light on the party’s perennial debate about how to win back various working-class and Trump-curious constituencies—and offer reasons for cautious optimism.
The research into these places—which was conducted by the Democratic firm Blue Labs for American Bridge and described to The New Republic—tells a somewhat complicated story. To start with, the most eye-opening finding is that a lot of voters in these red places blame Trump and the GOP for their economic woes.
To gauge this, American Bridge modeled a target universe of voters in these regions, using survey research, vote history, and other techniques. This voter universe includes people souring on Trump (they voted for him but now disapprove), people deemed highly persuadable (not rigid partisans), and people who describe themselves as in some sense economically vulnerable.
The pollsters then asked these pools of voters if they see the economy worsening and who they blame for it. The answers they got back from four states are striking:
- In Iowa, 58 percent of these targeted voters see the economy worsening and blame Trump for it, and 56 percent blame the GOP.
- In Michigan, 63 percent of these voters blame Trump, and 61 percent blame the GOP.
- In North Carolina, 51 percent of these voters blame Trump, and 48 percent blame the GOP.
- In Pennsylvania, 54 percent of these voters blame Trump, while 57 percent blame the GOP.
Drilling down further, the findings are very similar among that pool of voter groups within the specific House districts (all of which Trump won in 2024) that American Bridge is targeting in these states. Among them: Two in Iowa (the first and second), two in Michigan (the fourth and 10th), one in Ohio (the seventh), one in Pennsylvania (the eighth), and four in North Carolina (the third, fifth, ninth, and 11th).
So what do these voters want? Well, among the targeted constituencies in these districts, the testing found, a certain type of economic messaging resonates. It blames insurance companies and other conglomerates for high medical and prescription drug costs and hits big corporations for price gouging and tax avoidance. It blames Trump and Republicans for allowing these things to happen. And finally, that messaging vows that Democrats will crack down on them.
Similarly, regions hit hard by Trump’s tariffs and Iran-war-related costs are very responsive to arguments about those things. Among targeted voters in Iowa’s first and second districts, for instance, one message that resonates hits Republicans for backing Trump’s tariffs and his war with Iran, arguing that they’ve hiked grocery and energy costs and hurt farmers who export goods. In short, what appears to work is a populist economics that centers villains, hits Trump and Republicans for enabling them, and pledges action.
All this is backed up by public polling. The latest Economist/YouGov poll has Trump’s approval on the economy and inflation in the twenties. And a new analysis from The Argument finds Trump’s net approval deeply underwater in many red states (minus eight in Iowa and Ohio; minus 18 in purplish North Carolina) with competitive Senate races in them. As Paul Krugman documents, the real conditions of the rural economy are so bad that even rural voters disapprove of Trump’s stewardship of it.
Our debates over Democrats and the working class have gotten somewhat scrambled by Graham Platner’s Senate run in Maine. (Despite deeply troubling revelations about his Nazi-like tattoo and alleged violence toward women, he easily won the nomination Tuesday and Democrats appear committed to him.) Platner works as an oyster farmer, served in combat, prominently displays those tattooed arms, and speaks an effective language of left populism that’s rooted in his personal struggles to get by.
Yet Platner’s somewhat more privileged backstory (his father is an Ivy League grad and lawyer), while not detracting from his pro-worker bona fides, also highlights a phenomenon that’s explained well by Noam Scheiber. The “working class” is a complicated entity these days. It can’t be simplified into “those without a four-year college degree,” though for polling purposes it’s useful and the educational divide does remain significant in determining social outcomes.
Nor does the “working class” map neatly onto the mid-twentieth century picture of the predominantly white, heavily male industrial working class that—bafflingly—remains a touchstone in our political debates. The working classes—for the purposes of our politics—span all kinds of people. They arguably include everyone from conventional “hard hat” and manufacturing workers, to professionals pushed into retail work, to exurban Trump-backing owners of ailing local construction or plumbing businesses, to immigrant home care workers, to denizens of the gig economy, and many other categories.
The American Bridge approach seems designed to take stock of all these constituencies. It reaches people who voted for Trump but aren’t at all committed to him, people who drift between the parties (Trump made inroads with such groups in 2024), and people who are getting hammered economically (a quite large and varied group these days).
Meanwhile, in some of these districts, Democrats are fielding candidates who have biographical roots in this multi-faceted working class and are familiar with its struggles. In Iowa’s first district, Christina Bohannan is a law professor but grew up in a trailer park. In Michigan’s 10th, Christina Hines, a former prosecutor, has relatives who are autoworkers. In North Carolina’s 11th, in Appalachia, Jamie Ager is a fifth-generation farmer.
Note that one of American Bridge’s ads, in Iowa’s second district, features a personal trainer who voted for Trump in 2024. He comes across as representative of gig economy workers, and he now feels betrayed by Trump as he struggles under the weight of war-fueled inflation. As American Bridge president Bradley Beychok said in an emailed statement, working-class voters of all kinds are “pissed” over everything from higher healthcare and grocery costs to gas prices, and “this fall they will make their voices heard.”
Economic discontent has plainly widened the possibilities for Democrats in surprising ways. As Lauren Egan reports for The Bulwark, even the Senate seat of GOP incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi is no longer a pipe dream for Democrats, as rural hospitals teeter toward closing and soybean farmers get clobbered amid Trump’s carnage.
So the potential for a very, very broad midterm map looms large. Democrats should be contesting territory everywhere. And they appear to be doing just that. Because in an environment like this, the truly unexpected can happen—and it can happen in some very unexpected places, too.
