The midterm election results may signal that a deeper shift is underway.
Democrats just notched the biggest congressional landslide in 50 years. And though every campaign had its own story, the coalition that returned Democrats to control of the House and Senate — and any number of state houses — resembled the one Zohran Mamdani assembled to win New York City’s mayoralty in 2025. Mamdani united creative and service workers around their shared struggles to afford a decent life. The midterm results suggest that coalition has legs and is already reshaping American politics.
Some imagine America to be “classless.” But contemporary society is organized into three major socioeconomic classes.
For much of the 20th century, America’s largest class was the blue-collar working class, which includes factory and construction workers and people in transportation and the trades. As manufacturing employment declined, it contracted dramatically, from about half the U.S. workforce in 1950 to about a fifth today.
As the blue-collar working class has shrunk, American society has come to be dominated by two newer and larger classes. The first is the class is the creative class. It is made up of knowledge and professional workers — engineers, technologists and designers, educators, doctors and lawyers, managers, artists, writers and musicians. As the economy has shifted toward knowledge and ideas, this class has grown to more than 43% of the workforce. The second rising class is the service class, made up of people who staff retail stores, prepare, serve and deliver food, clean buildings, handle clerical work, provide personal care, and look after children and the elderly. It makes up just over 35% of the workforce. Its members, who carry out much of the essential work of the economy, are disproportionately women and people of color. Their jobs are often precarious, paying low wages and providing few or no benefits, with unpredictable schedules and few opportunities for advancement.
Not only does our class position shape what we earn, our economic outlook, our ability to buy a home and our children’s educational opportunities and life trajectories; it also shapes our politics.
In research I conducted over several presidential election cycles dating back to 2012, tracing the connection between the class composition and partisan voting patterns of America’s more than 350 metropolitan areas, we found distinctive class divides in electoral behavior. The blue-collar working class, once a cornerstone of the Democratic coalition, has increasingly shifted toward Republicans. Metros with larger concentrations of blue-collar workers had become GOP strongholds. I grew up watching that shift. My family moved from Newark, where I was born, to North Arlington, New Jersey, where my father’s factory job gave us a shot at a better life. The town was full of working families like ours, FDR Democrats who believed government could help them get ahead. Many later became Reagan Republicans, and the town has been staunchly MAGA in recent years. In the recent election, its Republican mayor held his seat, and every Democrat running for its Republican-controlled council lost.
The creative class moved in the other direction, increasingly gravitating toward Democrats. Metros with larger concentrations of creative-class workers leaned strongly Democratic. But the service class presented a different picture. Because its members are disproportionately lower-income, female and people of color, you might expect the places where they concentrate to be reliably Democratic. They aren’t. Metros with larger concentrations of service-class workers lacked the consistent partisan alignment found in creative-class and blue-collar working-class metros. Service-class communities are the swing locations of our partisan map — the places that are most up for grabs.
More than two decades ago, I ended my book “The Rise of the Creative Class” with a chapter titled “The Creative Class Grows Up.” In it, I argued that this rising class needed to take responsibility for the society it was reshaping and reach across the economic divide to service-class workers. If they worked together, I noted, they had the numbers and capabilities to forge a powerful cross-class coalition and build a much broader prosperity.
Around the same time, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira made the case in “The Emerging Democratic Majority” that professionals, women, Black Americans and Latinos and working people (obviously, these are overlapping groups) would soon form an enduring Democratic majority. It didn’t happen. Democrats kept gaining among educated professionals but lost huge numbers of blue-collar workers, and two decades later, in “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” Judis and Teixeira largely walked back their prediction. Indeed, when Donald Trump made gains among younger voters and voters of color in 2024, some began to predict the opposite: a Republican multiracial working-class majority.
Even though such a broad cross-class alliance failed to coalesce nationally, big-city mayors like Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams in New York and their counterparts in other large cities were able to tap into it. Still, at a national level, the two classes remained on different economic trajectories. For a large share of the creative class, life was good. Their careers advanced, their neighborhoods improved and their home values appreciated. They were able to afford vibrant urban neighborhoods in big cities after college and to upscale suburbs when they formed families, bought and renovated their homes, and pursued interesting careers and lives. Though many leaned fiscally conservative, their politics were progressive on social issues. That generally kept them comfortably in the Democratic-leaning camp.
At the same time, members of the service class were falling further and further behind. My own research shows that creative-class workers were, at least for a time, able to afford rents and house prices even in expensive superstar cities and metros like New York and San Francisco. Many service-class workers, by contrast, slid down the economic ladder. Unable to afford rents, they were pushed to the periphery and forced to endure long commutes, or pushed out of these cities and metros entirely. Plenty of members of the service class, especially new immigrants, hold more traditional social and religious values than their creative-class counterparts. They felt increasingly out of touch with, and put off by, the agenda of increasingly progressive or “woke” Democrats. Trump’s MAGA movement recognized those workers’ grievances, including deep anxieties about the cost of living and immigration, while also tapping into their frustration with Democrats’ positions on immigration and social issues. Trump gained significant ground with members of the black, Latino and immigrant service class in the 2024 elections, including in New York City.
Worsening economic conditions over the past few years, compounded by the Trump administration’s misguided policies, brought the interests of these two classes into closer alignment. The economic insecurity long experienced by service workers increasingly reached into the creative class. Rising income and especially wealth inequality, alongside escalating housing prices, eroded its sense of security as well. In New York City, young graduates of elite colleges working at top companies could earn good salaries and still struggle to imagine putting down roots. Their peers in the arts, academia and other prestigious but low-paying professions shared cramped walk-ups and saw little prospect of homeownership. AI added uncertainty about careers they had expected to provide security. Most had worked hard, gone to the right schools and chosen promising careers, only to find a home and the American Dream slipping beyond reach.
Mamdani’s genius was to recognize the increasingly aligned economic interests of these two classes and give them a common agenda. His message was straightforward: People who work in New York and contribute to its prosperity should have a reasonable chance to build a life there. He appealed to the shared hopes and aspirations of creative-class professionals and service workers, including immigrants, gig workers and racially diverse working people. Young, well-educated professionals helped drive his primary victory. Unions representing building, hospitality and health care workers backed him in the general election.
In the wake of the midterms, affordability has emerged as the galvanizing economic issue of our time, much as the quest for better wages defined the New Deal and made the American Dream possible for postwar generations. The promise then was that steady work could support a home, a family and a better future. The promise now is that members of all classes can afford a home and a life in the place they want to live. To fulfill that promise today requires massive efforts to bring housing, childcare, transportation and other essential costs within reach — and tangible efforts to channel if not control the spiraling wealth inequality in which the top 1% of American households hold more than 30% of the nation’s wealth.
New York is not a microcosm of America. Most of the country has a very different makeup, and the politics that win in New York City can’t simply be grafted onto a race for governor in Ohio or North Carolina. But like New York, the creative and service classes make up the large majority of workers across the country — not just in cities but in suburbs and rural areas, where they often face analogous pressures over housing, childcare and the cost of building a secure life.
At the risk of sounding like Tom Friedman by relaying a cab driver anecdote, let me offer one. On an Uber ride in Nashville a few weeks ago, my Egyptian American driver told me he had moved to Tennessee so he could pay less in taxes. He was highly educated but underemployed because he was not certified to work in his field in the U.S. Now, he told me, for the first time in his life, he was planning to vote for the Democrats. The service class includes many people like him. Many formerly backed Republicans because they believed the party would help them get ahead. But those allegiances change when the promise of a better life collides with the stark reality of making ends meet.
Trump’s reelection in 2024 underscored the limits of a Democratic coalition anchored by educated professionals. Just two years later, his failed economic agenda and retrograde social agenda provided a much-needed wake-up call for the creative class to look beyond its own circumstances and build a broader alliance.
The midterms put the idea of a Republican multiracial working-class majority to rest. Judis and Teixeira weren’t wrong about the coalition; what was missing was an issue that could hold it together. Affordability supplied it. According to a post-election analysis by Ronald Brownstein, Democrats won 61% of Latino voters, 69% of Asian American voters, 88% of Black voters and 71% of voters under 30. Nonwhite voters without a college degree backed Democrats by 67% to 29%. Democrats also recovered ground among college-educated white men and some white working-class voters. These voters span both sides of the coalition: younger and college-educated voters drawn from the creative class, and the nonwhite working-class voters who make up much of the service class. Not to mention that in the same election, democratic socialists running on an affordability playbook won the mayoralties of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Providence.
Mamdani may come from the Democratic left, but the coalition he assembled has potential across the party’s ideological spectrum. In the recent midterms, progressives and centrists alike drew on the same broad coalition of educated professionals, younger voters and racially diverse working people. These constituencies form the foundation of a big Democratic tent.
Mamdani’s first year in office offers a second lesson for Democrats. Though many have tried to define his administration ideologically, its emphasis has been on making everyday government work better: filling potholes, improving bus service, expanding childcare and pursuing policies to deliver more affordable housing. To succeed nationally, Democrats across the ideological spectrum must focus less on ideological battles and confrontation with Trump and more on delivering practical improvements: bringing housing and childcare within reach, helping curb inflation, improving public services and making the economy work better for everyday people. Their coalition will endure if voters see government making their lives better.
Together, creative and service workers account for more than three-quarters of America’s workforce. Across cities, suburbs and distressed communities, rising living costs, deepening wealth inequality and growing uncertainty about the future of work are bringing their economic interests into closer alignment. A political coalition built on those shared interests could redefine American politics for a generation.
