The phrase "working class" is one of the most durable pieces of vocabulary in American politics — and, increasingly, one of the most slippery. As both parties prepare for a midterm cycle they intend to frame as a referendum on the cost of living and the dignity of work, pollsters, economists and campaign strategists are engaged in an unusually public argument over a deceptively simple question: who, exactly, counts?

The dispute broke into the open this week across a cluster of analyses and surveys — a Bloomberg Markets "Big Take," a Pew Research Center study, and a pair of MSN columns — that collectively suggest the term may be doing far less work than the politicians who deploy it assume.

A Term Stretched to the Breaking Point

Bloomberg's analysis frames the question bluntly: if you work, are you "working class"? The outlet notes that the definition in the United States has been shifting for two decades, pulled and stretched by changes in the labor market, by the decline of manufacturing employment, and by the rise of a service economy in which the fastest-growing occupations — home health aides, food preparers, warehouse pickers — sit alongside a shrinking, unionized industrial core.

  • Earnings-based definitions: households below a certain income threshold, often pegged to the median.
  • Education-based definitions: workers without a four-year college degree, a proxy that now captures roughly six in ten American adults.
  • Occupational definitions: manual, service or otherwise "non-professional" labor.
  • Self-identification: what people call themselves — the measure that most reliably drives politics.

Not everyone believes the ambiguity can be resolved. One MSN column argued flatly that "the term working class is useless," a provocation that captures a growing frustration among analysts who point out that the label now spans a home health aide earning $30,000 and a unionized electrician earning six figures, while often excluding the jobless poor and the retired.

What Voters Say About Themselves

Pew Research Center's survey results, circulated by MSN under the headline "Who is 'working class?' Pew Research Center unveils surprising survey results," push the argument in a different direction: identity, not income, is the decisive variable. Americans routinely describe themselves as working class even when their earnings place them squarely in the middle or upper-middle of the distribution — and plenty of lower-income households, particularly white-collar ones, insist they are middle class.

The mismatch matters because self-identification is what campaigns actually target. Class in the American context has always been as much a story about origin, region, union membership and the kind of work your parents did as it is a line on a tax return.

"If you work, are you 'working class'?" — the framing question of Bloomberg Markets' Big Take

The Partisan Contest

The stakes are electoral. A Yahoo contributor analysis, "How Democrats drifted away from the working class," traces a decades-long realignment: the attenuation of union ties, the party's growing dependence on college-educated voters, and the perception — fiercely contested inside the party — that Democrats became the voice of the professional class on cultural as well as economic questions.

MSN's reporting on the ground tells the mirror-image story. Under the headline "'We better not blow it': Both parties are fighting to win over working class voters," the piece describes Republicans working to consolidate gains among non-college white voters while Democrats fight to hold non-college voters of color and win back defectors. The quoted anxiety — "we better not blow it" — is a rare point of bipartisan agreement.

AI and the Next Working Class

Bloomberg's analysis adds a forward-looking twist that could scramble the debate entirely. Advances in artificial intelligence are beginning to press on traditionally white-collar work — paralegal drafting, entry-level coding, customer support, routine analysis — the very jobs that once anchored the middle class and that college credentials were supposed to protect.

If those roles are automated or deskilled, the boundary between "working class" and "professional" may collapse from the top rather than the bottom. That prospect raises policy questions — wage insurance, portable benefits, retraining, a new push for unionization in tech-adjacent sectors — that neither party has fully answered.

On the Campaign Trail

The abstractions collide with reality at the level of individual races. Wikinews, which has been documenting candidate-level contests in detail, has published interviews with a New York City mayoral candidate, with the campaign manager for a Democratic candidate in Texas' 6th congressional district special election, and with an independent contender in the same race — each staking a claim to working-class voters whose interests, and identities, are defined differently.

At the national level, President Joe Biden's 2024 reelection announcement — "Let's finish this job" — was itself built around the claim that his economic program was written for working people. Whether voters accept that framing depends heavily on which definition they hold in their heads.

Why It Matters

Language shapes policy. If nearly everyone can plausibly claim the working-class label, targeted programs become politically impossible to design; if the definition is drawn too narrowly, the coalition needed to pass them fractures. Economists have long warned that class debates in the U.S. suffer from a measurement problem — income data, educational attainment and subjective identity tell three different stories.

What is clear is that the argument itself has become a campaign tactic. Both parties are competing less to define the working class than to be defined by it. And with AI threatening to redraw the map of American work, the answer to Bloomberg's question — if you work, are you working class? — may soon be: yes, and that is precisely the problem.