Do working-class candidates activate class-based voting?

Abstract

After steadily leaving the Democratic Party, working-class voters are increasingly seen as pivotal in US elections. What type of candidates should parties nominate to win over working-class voters? Parties often nominate candidates based on characteristics they think will appeal to certain groups of voters. These typically include campaign messages, such as policy positions or rhetoric, but can also include descriptive characteristics. In this paper we use a conjoint experiment to test whether candidates’ class background can activate class-based voting. Overall, we find that a candidate’s occupation has a substantial effect on voter perceptions: working-class respondents are 6.4 percentage points more likely to prefer a candidate with a working-class occupation over one with an upper-class occupation. This effect is not driven by inferences that respondents make about candidates’ policy positions or group-based rhetoric. Instead, we find that working-class voters perceive working-class candidates as more understanding of their problems. Our results suggest that candidates’ class background is an underappreciated yet effective mechanism for activating class-based voting.