Following the noteworthy Democratic successes in the 2017 elections, we’re once again hearing that Democrats can achieve their electoral goals without any greater success among the white working class. Indeed, some on the left seem to feel that Democratic gestures toward the white working class would not only be ineffective but are politically suspect.

“There’s always been something problematic about the Democratic Party’s fixation on white working-class voters,” writes Sally Kohn at the Daily Beast. “After Alabama, it’s clear that obsession isn’t just fraught with bias. It’s also dumb.”

Steve Phillips of Democracy in Color remarked in a New York Times op-ed: “The country is under conservative assault because Democrats mistakenly sought support from conservative white working-class voters susceptible to racially charged appeals. Replicating that strategy would be another catastrophic blunder.”

“The ceiling with the white working class is what it is,” Phillips adds with a shrug in The Nation.

However popular, the view that Democrats can get along without working-class white voters is simply wrong. It reflects wishful thinking and a rigid set of political priors — namely, that Democrats’ political problems always stem from insufficient motivation of base voters — more than a cold, hard look at what the electoral and demographic data say. Consider the following:

There were far more white non-college voters in the 2016 election than shown by the exit polls

The exit polls claimed there were more white college voters (37 percent) than white non-college voters (34 percent). But in a report for the Center for American Progress synthesizing available public survey data, census data, and actual election returns, Robert Griffin, John Halpin, and I found that 2016 voters were 44 percent white non-college and just 30 percent white college-educated. (The balance were black, Latino, Asian, or “other.”)

This suggests the exit polls were not just wrong but massively wrong, especially in the context of Rust Belt swing states, where errors were even larger and the political implications of misunderstanding graver. (This is a longstanding problem that is probably intrinsic to the exit poll methodology of public interviewing, which favors educated respondents. Among other reasons, educated voters may be more willing to take a survey in a public place, and so wind up being overrepresented.)

Simulations we conducted indicated that Hillary Clinton would have won the 2016 election if she had held Obama’s modest support among white non-college voters from 2012

In 2012, Obama lost whites without a college degree nationally by 25 points. Four years later, Clinton did 6 points worse, losing these voters by 31 points, with shifts against her in Rust Belt states generally double or more the national average.

Had Clinton hit the thresholds of support within this group that Obama did, she would have carried, with robust margins, the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Iowa, as well as (with narrower margins) Florida and Ohio. In fact, if Clinton could simply have reduced the shift toward Donald Trump among these voters by one-quarter, she would have won.

To put this into fuller context: If Clinton had replicated the black turnout levels enjoyed by Obama in 2012, she still would have lost the 2016 election, because the other shifts against her were so powerful.

In Arizona, Georgia, and Texas, where Clinton actually improved on Obama’s performance in 2012, she did better among not just white college voters but also white non-college voters

Improvement in support among members of minority groups had very little to do with improved Democratic performance in the presidential race in these states in 2016. This suggests that if Democrats hope to carry these states anytime soon, they will need not just to mobilize the minority vote (which is, indeed, burgeoning) but also hold and expand their support among whites. And that most certainly includes those states’ very large white non-college populations.

Doug Jones would not have won the Senate election in Alabama without a substantial shift toward him among white non-college voters

The Daily Beast’s Kohn and others argue that heavy black turnout and support led to Jones’s victory — period. But Jones’s triumph was not attributable to his strong showing among black voters alone, or even a combination of black voters and white college graduates. My analysis indicates that Jones benefited from a margin swing of more than 30 points among white non-college voters, relative to the 2016 presidential race in the state.

The swing toward Jones was for sure even larger among white college graduates. But without the hefty swing among the white non-college population, particularly women, there is no way Jones would have won the state, or even come close.

The white working-class vote is still Democrats’ critical weakness

Despite Democratic gains in Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam still lost the white non-college vote by more than 30 points; that’s little better (if at all) than Clinton’s performance in the state in 2016. This is especially worrisome because white non-college voters remain a larger group than white college voters in almost all states — and are far larger in the Rust Belt states that gave the Democrats so much trouble in 2016: Iowa is 62 percent white non-college versus 31 percent white college; Michigan is 54 percent white non-college versus 28 percent white college; Ohio splits 55 percent to 29 percent; Pennsylvania 51 percent to 31 percent; and Wisconsin 58 percent to 32 percent.

Ohio, where Democrats’ white non-college deficit roughly doubled from 16 to 31 points in 2016, is a good example of the challenges Democrats face. Given this deficit, Democrats could completely replicate, in 2020, Obama’s high-water performance among black voters and still lose the state handily, probably by around 5 points. There is no way around it — if Democrats hope to be competitive in Ohio and similar states in 2020, they must do the hard thing: find a way to reach hearts and minds among white non-college voters. 

This is hardly an impossible task. The view that white non-college voters who do not already vote for Democrats are hopelessly racist and reactionary is a canard. They’re a vast and variegated group.

Indeed, there are positive signs already in trends among white non-college voters, particularly among millennials (Democrats actually carried this group in many states in 2016, according to our analysis), and to a lesser extent among women (Democratic margins in this group of women, while negative, tend to run 20 points better than among men.) To build on these trends, Democrats will probably have to offer something besides vigorous denunciations of Trump, who is more popular with these voters than with the rest of country (though he’s slipping).

That does not mean that Democrats need to capitulate to Trumpism by, for instance, changing their position on key immigration issues like DACA. That would hardly pull Trump’s hardcore supporters from their man, and it would compromise a serious policy commitment of the party. Instead, Democrats should reach out to those white non-college voters for whom issues besides immigration are potentially more salient.

It is on economic issues that these voters are most open to overtures, the polling data shows. Indeed, if Wall Street financier Robert Rubin, the Democrats’ quintessential 1990s neoliberal economic figure, is now advocating for a massive public jobs program, perhaps it’s time for Democratic politicians to make a bold economic offer along those lines. Such a program could be linked to investment in desperately needed infrastructure, including not just roads and bridges but also community-anchoring institutions like schools and child care centers.

The scale of such a program would eclipse the Democrats’ current weak-tea “A Better Deal” approach; it would be a signature offering, as opposed to a laundry list of proposals. And it is well-documented that infrastructure and community investments are popular across the lines of party and class.

This may not be exactly the right program or the most effective way to frame it. But putting something in play that aggressively attacks these voters’ problems makes more sense than standing pat and hoping against hope you can succeed while ignoring those oh-so-problematic working-class whites.

Ruy Teixeira’s latest book is The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

On the left, there are two prominent worries about American jobs. One is that new jobs are terrible: Low-level service and retail positions, or “McJobs,” are replacing the middle-class occupations of the past. The second is that there soon won’t be any jobs at all: Robots, artificial intelligence, and similar technologies will produce so much labor displacement that even crummy jobs won’t be available.

That’s pretty depressing if these two (somewhat contradictory) views are accurate. Fortunately, neither one is. Start with the idea that jobs will disappear. This is, to say the least, highly unlikely. Concerns about the disappearance of jobs have recurred again and again as technology has advanced, and they’ve always been wrong. The general pattern is that technological transformations put workers out of jobs in one sector only to have more jobs created in others as demand for new products and services grow. Thus, technology advances but the availability of jobs does not decline.

Take the 1950s, when postwar concerns about automation and technological control (the so-called cybernetic revolution) were peaking. The Nation magazine remarked in 1958: “The problem we shall have to face some time is that the working force is expansive, while latter-day industrial technology is contractive of man-hours.” Sound familiar? Somehow we’ve soldiered on without mass unemployment even as the labor force has expanded from 68 million then to 160 million now.

But perhaps today is different? This technology — robots, artificial intelligence, the computerization of everything — is so powerful that it will hoover up most of the jobs and leave very few for actual humans to do. The futurist Martin Ford, in his best-selling 2015 book, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, predicted half of US workers would be replaced by robots in the next 20 years. In an influential article for Mother Jones magazine, with the striking title “Welcome Robot Overlords: Please Don’t Fire Us?”, the blogger Kevin Drum argued that robots’ capabilities are growing so fast that there will not be much need for human workers by, say, 2040, and the inevitable result will be mass unemployment and social dysfunction.

If the robots were coming, we’d see accelerating productivity. We don’t.

But what is the evidence that technologically driven labor displacement is taking place at a particularly fast — much less accelerating — rate? To put it bluntly: There isn’t any. If Ford’s “rise of the robots” were taking place, we would be seeing very rapid productivity increases today (fewer workers, larger output). We’re not. Instead, productivity increases have been abominably slow in recent years — a mere 1.3 percent per year, just over a third of the rate at the end of the last century.

Another indicator that the robots are gaining on us would be an exceptionally high rate of “occupational churn,” the rate at which the job structure is changing as some occupations decline and others grow. In a study of Census data going back to 1850, economists Robert Atkinson and John Wu found instead that the rate of churn in recent decades has been exceptionally slow — slower, in fact, than at any other period in their study. Indeed, the rate of occupational churn in the new century has been less than a third of that in the dynamic 1950 to 1980 period.

These results are completely inconsistent with the “jobless future” hypothesis. We are in no danger of having humans crowded out by incredibly productive robots. If anything, given the anemic productivity growth, we should worry that robots and related technologies are being underused, thereby holding back the advance of new economic sectors.

OK, the jobs pessimist might reply, maybe there will be jobs in the future but they’ll be jobs barely worth having. After all, isn’t that how American jobs have been trending for 50 years?

The pessimist has it right that past trends may continue, but the pessimist is wrong about what those past trends have been. Since “blue collar” and “white collar” have become hopelessly muddled terms, the best way to look at changes in the job structure over time is to sort workers by skill levels and work performed.

In The Economy Goes to College, by economists Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose, the authors sort workers into three occupation tiers: managerial-professional, middle-skill, and low-skill. In this categorization, mid-skill jobs include not only mid-level supervisors, skilled craftspeople and clericals but also service occupations such as medical assistants and police; the low-skill category includes not just factory workers but also retail sales clerks and service workers including security guards, janitors, and waitresses.

As a proportion of total employment, low-skill jobs have dropped by 10 percentage points since 1967

Back in 1967, just 21 percent of jobs were managerial-professional, the authors found, while 39 percent were low-skill and about the same proportion were mid skill. Today, 35 percent of jobs are managerial-professional, 36 percent are middle-skill and only 29 percent are low-skill. Thus, managerial-professional positions are up 14 percentage points as a share of jobs since 1967; low-skill jobs have actually dropped by 10 percentage points

In a related analysis, Carnevale and Rose classify all workers by the content of the work they perform. This breakdown produces a division of the workforce into five basic categories: office work (across all industries); high-skill services (non-office work in health care, education, and communications); low-skill services (retail, personal, and food services); manual labor in industry (manufacturing, construction, etc.); and primary production (mining, farming, fishing). They found that 44 percent of US jobs today are in offices, with another 20 percent in high-skill services. Just 15 percent of jobs are manual labor in industry, another 19 percent in low-skill services.

Since 1967, the big change has been the rise in office work and high-skill services (up 14 points), while the big decline has been in industrial manual labor, down 13 points. Interestingly, and very importantly, the share of low-skill service jobs is just about the same today as it was back in 1967.  (Fast food jobs — the quintessential low-skill gig — are stuck at around 2.3 percent of US jobs, with no sign that that share is going up since the turn of the century.)

Statistics like those put paid to the notion that middle-class jobs are disappearing and being replaced by “McJobs.” This view equates the decline of low-skill, relatively well-paid jobs like those in manufacturing — which, indeed, has been going on since 1948 — to an overall decline in middle-class jobs, which is not merited.

The middle-class jobs of today are in the growth areas of offices and high skill services. These two areas of the economy now provide 64 percent of all jobs. And they’ve expanded more as a share of jobs since 1967 than manufacturing and related jobs have declined. Middle-class jobs are not disappearing; rather, they have moved to different sectors that require higher levels of education and cognitive training.

Of course, that middle-class jobs are not disappearing does not mean inequality is not rising. It is. That trend is a product of many forces, including a lack of support for low-income workers, stagnating wages, and the skew of economic rewards toward the rich. The availability of new middle-class jobs in offices and high-skill services is not sufficient, by itself, to counteract these powerful forces. But that is not fault of these jobs. In part, it has to do with unwise policy choices.

We should expect current trends in the job structure to continue. The jobs of the future will likely require more skill, not less skill, than those of today. Take one of the chief obsessions of today: the projected rise of self-driving cars and the presumed decline of driver jobs. As experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences note in a recent report, Information Technology and the US Workforce: Where Are We and Where Do We Go from Here, the story is a lot more complicated than drivers losing their jobs to autonomous Ubers. The report notes that “there will be a long period of mixed-use road use, with both autonomous driving and manual driving cars sharing the roads.” It continues:

It is possible that ongoing development of these technologies, including infrastructure, will create more jobs than are lost in the wake of self-driving vehicles, but it is likely that the skills required for such jobs will be quite different from those currently possessed by today’s truckers and taxi drivers. The new jobs are likely to rely more heavily on analytic, cognitive, and technical skills. Indeed, even in the near term, as self-driving technologies are being developed, the occupation of trucking is likely to be transformed.

So it was ever thus. Continuing technological advance, as in the past, is unlikely to produce a future of no jobs. It will lead instead to a future of different and more highly skilled jobs. Rather than bemoaning a chimerical disappearance of work, or seeking to somehow reinvent the manufacturing economy of the past, the left should seek to increase access to high-skill and growing sectors of the economy, particularly in regions where the decline in low-skill industrial labor has significantly eroded the job base.

Analysis of Census data indicates that 84 percent of noncollege workers who make $50,000 a year or more work outside of manufacturing. Count on that trend to continue.

Above all, we must keep the focus on running a high-pressure, full employment, rising-wages economy — and expanding the benefits available to all workers. American jobs will continue to evolve toward higher skills over time; let’s make sure those jobs pay as well as possible and that they provide solid economic security.

Ruy Teixeira’s new book is The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

For liberals, one of most disturbing things about the 2016 election was that it seemed to indicate a massive lurch to the right in a country they thought was getting more, not less, liberal. Many contemplated with varying degrees of seriousness whether they should simply leave a country which had suddenly become hostile territory.   

That was a suspect view even at the time of Trump’s election — Clinton did, after all, get almost 3 million more votes than Donald Trump. But it’s even more suspect now, as public opinion polls have shown over and over since last November.

What these polls have revealed is, despite fears of surging right-wing populism, we are seeing surging liberalism instead. Consider the ultra-hot button issue of immigration. In April, the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll asked the public whether “immigration helps the United States more than it hurts it, or immigration hurts the United States more than it helps it?” The response: 60 percent said it helps more than it hurts, and just 32 percent said hurts more than it helps. That is the strongest positive evaluation this poll has ever gotten on this question.

In fact, as the chart below indicates, positive feelings about immigration have generally been rising since early 2016, including through Trump’s election and beyond. And if you go back to 2005, when the question was first asked by NBC/WSJ, positive feelings today are way higher than they were back then. (In 2005, only 37 percent thought immigration helped more than it hurt.)

If populism means resentment of immigrants who are taking the jobs of native-born Americans, it is not to be found in these numbers. So let’s look elsewhere. No proposal is more symbolic of Trump’s pledge to combat illegal immigration, and generally place “America first,” than his pledge to build that famous wall along the Mexican border. Right after Trump got elected, the Quinnipiac University poll pegged support for building the wall at 42 percent. Since then it has dropped steadily, and is down to about 33 percent. (Sixty-four percent of respondents, meanwhile, were opposed.)

More and more Americans view trade as an “opportunity”

Nor are Americans rising up in their millions against trade with the rest of the world — another signature “populist” Trump issue. On the contrary, support for trade has never been higher. Since 1993, Gallup has asked the public whether foreign trade is more of an economic opportunity or economic threat. A stunning 72 percent now say it’s more of an opportunity. As the chart show, this is far, far higher than that sentiment has ever been before.

Despite Trump’s grandstanding on immigration and trade, he seems to be singularly ineffective in getting Americans to turn their backs on the rest of the world. Instead, we are seeing more openness than ever. Perhaps by putting things so extremely, Trump has simply reminded many Americans that engagement with the global economy is, on balance, a good thing and that trying to shut it down is a silly, pointless endeavor.

Nor has Trump convinced Americans that getting rid of the Affordable Care Act is a great idea. On that issue, Trump wasn’t blazing a new populist path but rather signing onto a long-held Republican goal. But here again, he’s only succeeded in making Americans more supportive of the legislation.

In the aftermath of Trump’s election and the GOP’s shambolic attempts to get rid of the ACA, this landmark piece of liberal legislation has finally achieved what it never had before: a net positive image in the eyes of the public. As for the proposed alternative, the Republican bill that passed the House, the American Health Care Act, has a stunningly low approval rating of 21 percent in the latest Quinnipiac poll. Nor does Trump’s supposed base, white noncollege voters, embrace it: They approve it at the dismal rate of 25 percent.

“Symbolic” conservatism is doing just fine, but it doesn’t translate to support for conservative policies

Trump fails to understand, and liberals should always remember, one of the most enduring features of American public opinion. The dominant ideology in the United States is one that combines “symbolic conservatism” (honoring tradition, distrusting novelty, embracing the conservative label) with “operational liberalism” (wanting government to take more action in a wide variety of areas). As Christopher Ellis and James Stimson, two leading academic analysts of American ideology, note: “Most Americans like most government programs. Most of the time, on average, we want government to do more and spend more. It is no accident that we have created the programs of the welfare state. They were created — and are sustained — by massive public support.”

That’s why, now that the ACA has delivered concrete benefits for many people, it is so very hard to get rid of. Indeed, Trump greatest accomplishment so far may be in unleashing Americans’ inner operational liberal. In the NBC/WSJ poll, more people than ever — 57 percent — say they want a government that does more to solve problems and meet people’s needs; only 39 percent say that government does too many things best left to businesses and individuals. As the chart shows, that is the strongest pro-government response since this questions was first asked in 1995. 

We’re seeing this operational liberalism emerge in wide variety of areas. The phenomenon is nicely captured by a new Pew poll that asked the public whether they would like to see spending in the federal budget increased, decreased, or kept the same in 14 different areas. Compared to 2013, as the chart below shows, support for government spending is up in every area, with substantial increases in big-ticket areas like education, infrastructure, health care, and scientific research. This, of course, is pretty much the opposite of what Trump’s vague but draconian budget proposal has called for.

How about the environment and climate change? Has Trump succeeded in pushing do-gooder enviros to the side, or in making the world safe again for coal? Not quite. The NBC/WSJ poll has the largest share of the American public ever saying that climate change is real and action needs to be taken: 67 percent. Since Trump’s election, support has fallen to just 28 percent in the Quinnipiac poll on the question of whether Trump should “remove specific regulations intended to combat climate change (a meager 33 percent even among white noncollege voters).

Taxes? Americans never like the idea of lowering taxes on the wealthy. Since Trump’s election, they hate it even more. Now it’s down to just 18 percent in favor in the Quinnipiac poll, with a massive 77 percent opposed.

And there’s more. Gallup reports that Americans’ views about the moral acceptability of a wide range of practices are now more liberal than they’ve ever been. This includes birth control, divorce, premarital sex, and the death penalty. Same-sex marriage has become so uncontroversial that pollsters hardly bother to ask about it anymore.

None of this is to sugarcoat the current facts on the ground — Trump in the White House and the Republicans in control of Congress and most states. But that owes much more to the peculiar nature of the Electoral College, gerrymandering, structural GOP advantages in Congress, and poor Democratic strategy than to the actual views of the American public.

I hate to break it to America’s liberals, but — as I’ve argued before — there are considerable grounds for optimism about the American public and, by extension, the fate of the country. Now you may return to your regularly scheduled panic.

Ruy Teixeira’s new book is The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

The election of Donald Trump was a major shock to the left. It was not supposed to happen. It was not even supposed to be possible for it to happen. Many shuffle about their daily tasks suffused in gloom and pessimism. With Trump in the White House, and the Republicans in control of Congress and most states, surely little of the progressive agenda will remain in a few years. His brand of xenophobia and authoritarianism is on the ascent; the future looks bleak both for the country and a world torn by rising populism and threatened by climate change.

But despite recent setbacks, there are many excellent reasons for the left to be optimistic. The future is brighter — much brighter — than they think.

I mean this in two ways. First, there are trends that ought to hearten liberals — including the society-wide acceptance of same-sex marriage, now entrenched in the law by the Supreme Court, and the resistance to cutting new parts of the social safety net (including, so far, the main elements of the Affordable Care Act). We have made progress in recent years on issues involving basic social and economic justice — progress that seems unlikely to be reversed.

But I also believe that the left should be optimistic because optimism energizes people and wins elections. Social criticism has its place: We want to make society a better, fairer place, and pointing out flaws is an important first step. But criticism has its limits as a way to inspire social movements.

Here are seven reasons optimism beats pessimism every day of the week.

The gains of the left are sticky

Over time, the left has accomplished many things, from building out the social safety net to cleaning up the environment to protecting public health to securing equal rights for women, black people, and gay people. These and many other gains of the left have a very important thing in common: They are “sticky.” That’s a term borrowed from economics that means, simply, they will be hard to reverse. They provide benefits that people do not want to lose — and, what’s more, they shift norms of what is right and wrong.

Social Security and Medicare are great examples of policies that once seemed radical and now are simply a part of life. The Affordable Care Act’s core innovations may turn out that way, as well, despite the controversy that has dogged the program from its inception — and the declared intent of the current administration to eliminate it.

The ACA has provided benefits to millions who don’t want them taken away, and helped to establish the principle that every American has a right to health care, guaranteed by the government. That’s why the Republican attempt to radically downsize the program hit a buzzsaw. To be sure, Republicans will keep trying, and they’ll do some damage. But they will not be able to “repeal and replace” with a fundamentally less generous program.

Instead, it’s more likely that the ACA, either under that name or another, will get more generous over time. As conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer recently noted: “A broad national consensus is developing that health care is indeed a right. This is historically new. And it carries immense implications for the future. It suggests that we may be heading inexorably to a government-run, single-payer system.”

Krauthammer was despairing, but the left should be heartened by the observation. Indeed, at this point, Trump and the GOP have been reduced to hoping that if they neglect the ACA, it will collapse on its own — yet that doesn’t seem to be happening (knock wood). The very desperation of this “strategy” is a sign that Krauthammer may well be prescient about where American health care policy is headed.

We’ll see the same dynamic with the administration’s attempts to gut environmental regulations. Yes, Trump’s crew will do some damage, but the public will not accept actions that significantly reduce air and water quality. The benefits of a clean environment are deeply popular and the norm that the environment should be clean is well-established. There is no going back; clean air and water is another sticky reform of the left.

So it will go and so it has gone.

Science and technology are our friends

The left has a certain amount of faith in the conclusions of science (for example, on the basic facts of global warming), but a remarkable lack of faith when it comes to using technology — that is, applied science — to solve our problems. In fact, and unfortunately, a certain amount of techno-pessimism has gained currency on the left. This is strange, since almost everything people like about the modern world, including relatively high living standards, is traceable to the advance of technology.

This is also not an area where Trump’s politics are likely to slow progress significantly, though the proposed cuts to federal funding of research won’t help.

From smart phones, flat screen TVs, and the internet to air and auto travel to central heating and air conditioning to the medical devices and drugs that cure disease and extend life to electric lights and the mundane flush toilet — the list is endless — technology has made people’s lives both much better and much longer than ever before. The average person today is far, far better off than her counterpart in the past. As the Northwestern University economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, the so-called good old days were old but they were not good.

And what do we have to thank for all these spectacular advances? It’s technology that has made possible the new goods, machines, medicine and so on that we consume, and that has fueled the economic growth that allows us to consume at such a high level. One would think, therefore, that the left would embrace techno-optimism: After all, if the goal is to improve people’s lives, rapid technological advance is surely something to promote enthusiastically.

Yet many on the left tend to regard technological change with dread rather than hope. They see technology as a force facilitating inequality rather than growth, destroying jobs, especially for manual workers, turning consumers into corporate pawns rather than information-savvy citizens and destroying the planet in the process. We are far, far away from the traditional left attitude that welcomed technological change as the handmaiden of abundance and increased leisure — or, for that matter, from the liberal optimism that permeated the culture of the 1950s and ’60s, the optimism that offered up tantalizing visions of flying cars and obedient robots.

The idea that we will face a jobless future seems to have particularly struck home. Martin Ford’s 2015 book, Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, which predicts half of US workers will be replaced by robots in the next 20 years, was widely and respectfully reviewed in liberal outlets. Coming after a spell of high unemployment attributable to the Great Recession and then to inadequate stimulus and misguided austerity policies (especially in Europe) — none of which have anything to do with robots — this seems like a very odd thing for those on the left to worry about. It is especially odd when the history of technological advance is full of transformations that put workers out of jobs in one sector only to have more jobs created in others as demand for new products and services grow.

Continuing technological advance is unlikely to produce a future of no jobs. It will lead instead to a future of different and more highly skilled jobs. This is clearly the trend in the US economy, where the increasing share of jobs in offices and high-skill services (now almost two-thirds of employment) has replaced the declining share of jobs in industrial manual labor. Rather than bemoaning a chimerical disappearance of work, the left should seek to increase access to high-skill sectors of the economy, particularly in areas where the decline in low-skill industrial labor has significantly eroded the job base.

Consider also that if robots were really displacing workers at a great rate, we should be seeing very rapid productivity increases (fewer workers, larger output). But we’re not. In fact, productivity increases have been remarkably slow in recent years — 1.3 percent per year, just over a third of the rate in the late 1990s, when we had very strong employment growth and rising wages and incomes across the board.

And remember that productivity increases — through technological advances or other means — are something the left should welcome and strive for. They are the source of rising living standards for the broad population. Rising living standards, in turn, create a favorable environment for left advancement.

Globalization is a force for good

Many on the American left seem to miss this, but the world is getting to be a much better place. Since 1950, the proportion of the world’s citizens living in extreme poverty has declined from 72 percent to under 10 percent, while world life expectancy has increased from 48 years to 71. These remarkably positive changes have actually accelerated in the past 25 years, as globalization has intensified.

Richer, healthier countries are great for the individual citizens of these countries, of course, but they are also great for the values and priorities of the left. Richer countries tend to provide more services to their citizens, educate a larger share of their population, and do a better job honoring human rights. They’re also more democratic.

Of course, it is true that globalization has had some negative effects — for example, on manufacturing jobs in developed countries — but these are exaggerated. The decline of industrial employment is a very long-run trend that predates the sharp rise in globalization toward the end of the last century. If you plot the share of manufacturing jobs in overall US employment since 1948, there has been a steady decline from a high of about 35 percent to less than 9 percent today. This decline can be traced to rapidly rising productivity in the manufacturing sector — the same output could be produced with fewer workers — combined with shifts in demand toward services, reflecting a rise in consumer affluence.

Affluence (even of the American middle-class variety, not the Jeff Bezos variety) leaves more room in family budgets for non-necessities: 46 percent of consumption spending was on the basic necessities of food and clothing in 1947 compared with less than 18 percent today.

That’s why the left will do a lot more good by advancing effective policies on growth, employment, and fiscal policy than by standing in the way of globalization. This is true even when it comes to jobs in the manufacturing sector. Germany, for example, has in recent year done far better than the US in managing its manufacturing job loss by retraining manufacturing workers from import-competing industries and moving them into export-oriented manufacturing jobs.

In short, globalization is not the villain many on the left make it out to be. A richer world is ultimately a better world, both for its citizens and for the goals of the left. The sensible response is not to denounce globalization but to make it work for as large a share of the population as possible.

The clean energy revolution is underway

Perhaps no other subject generates as much angst on the left as global warming. That is not unreasonable: Climate change could do a stunning amount of economic and social damage and poses a serious threat to the future of the planet. If only we could replace dirty fossil fuel energy with clean energy from wind, solar, and other sources.

But wait! That’s already happening. In fact, we’re making dramatic progress in expanding the use of clean energy and dropping its price — which is the key to further expansion and eventually replacing dirty energy entirely.

In the past few years, even as fossil fuel prices have declined, world investments in clean energy, chiefly wind and solar, have reached levels that are double those for fossil fuel. Renewables now provide half of all new electric capacity worldwide. (And two-thirds in China, which has drastically cut its plans for new coal plants.) It’s increasingly common, at least in some countries and some regions of the United States, for clean energy to be cost-competitive with fossil fuels.

The rapidity with which clean energy is becoming cheaper and more available is underappreciated. The cost of solar has fallen to 1/150th of its 1970s level, and the amount of installed solar capacity worldwide has increased a staggering 115,000 times. These exponential trends are hard to properly assess, even for those whose business it is to do so. For example, Ramez Naam, a US technologist and proponent of clean energy, posited in 2011 that solar power was following a kind of Moore’s Law for energy. (Moore’s Law projected that microchips would double in efficiency every two years.) Such efficiency gains would allow solar energy systems, which had by then fallen to about $3 a watt, to drop to only 50 cents a watt by 2030. However, Naam noted in the spring of 2015 that he had been way too conservative: Solar power systems by early 2015 had already hit the 50 cent mark.

Wind power, which tends to be complementary to solar power (the former best at night, the latter during the day), has been following a similar, if less steep trajectory. And, critically, energy storage, an essential complement to these more intermittent sources of energy, is also rapidly dropping in price and becoming more efficient. The price and efficiency improvement rates for battery storage have actually been faster than the corresponding (already high) rates for wind and solar over the same periods.

Much of this progress will continue even under the unhelpful administration of Donald Trump. China has bolted to the front of clean energy development and seems willing to play a leadership role in pushing the fight against climate change forward, regardless of Trump’s attitude toward the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Trump may strive to eliminate Obama’s Clean Power Plan, an effort that may take years, but the genie is already out of the bottle. Dozens of states, including the largest ones, are on track to meet the Clean Power Plan’s 2030 targets for switching from coal to natural gas and renewables. They are unlikely to be deterred by Trump’s actions, since energy utilities are largely regulated at the state level.

And most of all, the development, deployment, and cheapening of clean energy will continue whether Trump likes it or not because of rapid technological advance, a continuing stream of new investment, and evolving consumer preferences. Then, when the left gets back in power, it can press the accelerator on this progress by investing in clean energy research and infrastructure, and it can reinstate the Clean Power Plan and other regulations.

The left’s coalition is growing while the right’s is declining

Demography may not be destiny but it’s still hugely important. No matter what happened in the 2016 election, the fact that the Democrats’ coalition relies on growing groups while the GOP’s relies on declining ones is still a considerable advantage for Democrats. That advantage will only grow in coming years.

Naturally, that advantage does not, by itself, determine election outcomes, as we have recently seen. It was always the case that if a declining group in the GOP coalition — think white non-college voters — intensified its pro-Republican preferences enough, that would mathematically be enough to negate the pro-Democratic effects of demographic change. That is what happened in the 2016 presidential race (with an assist from the Electoral College, which gives extra weight to states with high concentrations of white non-college voters).

But live by the white non-college swing, die by the white non-college swing. The utter dependence of the GOP on this voter demographic means that they need to not only maintain their extraordinary 2016 levels of support among these voters, they need to drive that support ever higher in future elections, to neutralize continued growth in the Democrats’ coalition. That’s a tough assignment.

Consider how strong Democratic growth will be. The share of white non-college voters is dropping 3 points every presidential cycle, replaced by ever more minorities and college-educated voters. The growth of minorities is particularly striking. Right now, there are only four majority-minority states: California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas. But the next two majority-minority states, Maryland and Nevada, should arrive in the next three years. After that, there should be four more in the 2020s: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and New Jersey. In the 2030s, these states should be joined by Alaska, Louisiana, and New York — and in the 2040s by Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Virginia.

But perhaps nothing illustrates the ongoing shift in the political terrain better than the differences between younger and older generations. Right now, according to Pew data, the millennial generation identifies with Democrats by 54 percent to 33 percent over Republicans and Generation X by 48 percent to 37 percent. By comparison, baby boomers were 44 percent to 44 percent and the silent generation (those born from 1928 to 1945) preferred Republicans by 48 percent to 44 percent.

Together, millennials and Gen X-ers accounted for 57 percent of eligible voters in 2016, an advantage that was tamped down by the relatively higher turnout of older generations. But by 2024, millennials and Gen X-ers, plus the emerging post-millennial generation, will constitute fully 68 percent of eligible voters. What’s more, the millennials and Gen X-ers will have aged into much higher turnout years. Silents, the most conservative generation by far, will be down to a mere 7 percent of eligibles.

So the GOP is really walking a tightrope as they fend off these demographic changes while trying to extract ever more votes from white non-college voters, particularly older ones. The job of the left is to push them off that tightrope. It shouldn’t be that hard, especially if Democrats can make even a small dent in the white non-college vote. Which brings us to…

Trump can’t solve people’s problems. The left can.

The left should have the courage of their convictions on this one. Trump certainly exploited voter anger and, yes, racism to get elected. But he also promised to solve people’s problems — with their health care, with their jobs, with their living standards, with their communities, with their children’s prospects. He won’t succeed. That’s a huge opening for the left, including among white non-college voters.

Nowhere is that opening greater than on the issue of growth that leads to better jobs and higher living standards. The Democratic Party is more or less united around a programmatic approach to the economy that could actually produce such growth — an approach some of us call “equitable growth.” It pushes back on inequality, seeing current high levels as an active detriment to growth, and seeks to combine support and opportunity for the broad middle class with investments to make the economy more productive.

This includes universal pre-K, free access to two years and some four-year colleges, paid family leave, subsidized child care, higher minimum wages, a commitment to full employment, and robust investments in infrastructure and scientific research, especially around clean energy.

The GOP, in contrast, now harbors a cacophony of different economic approaches, from pure libertarianism to Trump’s incoherent economic nationalism. Astonishingly, the one point of agreement of these approaches appears to be that inequality should be pushed even higher by increasing the flow of benefits to the rich. The idea that ratcheting up inequality will somehow lead to strong growth, better jobs, and higher living standards is substantively ludicrous — and not at all what Trump’s working-class supporters had in mind. When it doesn’t work, they will be upset.

How strong growth can be with a better approach is a matter of debate. Certainly, the 4 percent annual rate bandied about the Trump administration is fanciful. But, as Jason Furman, chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, recently pointed out in Vox, we should “do everything that [we] can for growth, because over time a few tenths of a percent really do matter” And of course, the point is not just to grow faster but to better distribute that growth. The left’s approach will do both.

The left should have confidence this approach is both feasible and important. In the end, solid growth with better distribution will both improve people’s lives and make it vastly easier for the left to attain its priorities. Conversely, Trump will be punished when he fails to deliver economic improvements for his voters. He is an unusual politician, but he has not repealed the basic laws of politics.

Finally, optimism is a better selling point than pessimism

It’s time for the left to realize that pessimism is an absolutely terrible selling point — and to downplay that aspect of left self-presentation. If things were terrible yesterday, are worse today, and are likely to get even worse tomorrow, this does not motivate the typical person to engage in heroic struggle to change the world. It is more likely to make them cautious, guarded, and determined to hold onto what little they have. To the extent the left wallows in a slough of despond about the state of the world, it only manages to undercut its ability to mobilize ordinary people.

Optimism, by contrast, mobilizes people. It allows people to raise their heads from the daily struggle for existence, envision something better, and believe it’s actually possible to get there. That makes the project of joining together with others to make positive change seem worth the effort it typically entails.

Many on the left insist that it is their job to highlight negative trends with as much theatricality as possible, since that is where the motivation for change will come from. But this confuses the motivations of left activists with the motivations of average citizens. It is absolutely true that most left activists are fundamentally motivated by what they see as wrong and unjust in contemporary social arrangements.

But this just isn’t the way most people work. The typical American generally adopts a bifurcated view of their situation that does not comport well with the relentless pessimism of many leftists. On the one hand, most Americans do tend to believe that many things have changed for the worse — that the economy has been doing poorly, that long-term trends have hurt security for average families, that leaders just don’t get it. On the other hand, these very same Americans believe that they are holding up their end of the economic bargain, that they are working hard and doing right by their families, that their story is one of achievement against the odds, not pessimism and despair. Left pessimism appeals to one side of Americans’ outlook, completely missing the other.

The left should reject this approach. Leftists and liberals should promote instead a sense that positive change has been, is, and will continue to be possible. That will make it far easier to mobilize their fellow citizens.

Besides, look at it this way: It is basically impossible to out-pessimism Donald “American Carnage” Trump. It’s time to try something new.

Ruy Teixeira’s new book is The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think. He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

Here’s one way to think about the 2016 election. We are witnessing a great race in this country between demographic and economic change that’s driving a new America, and reaction to those changes. On November 8, with a tremendous burst of speed, reaction to change caught up with change and surpassed it.

But is that advantage sustainable over the long haul, as change continues and reaction has to run ever faster simply to keep pace? Probably not. Those old legs will give out eventually, though we do not know exactly when. In the end, the race will be won by change — as it always is.

Looking back from 2032, we are far more likely to view the 2016 election as the last stand of America’s white working class, dreaming of a past that no longer exists, than as a fundamental transformation of the political system.

Consider the following. Democrats in 2016 benefited from a substantial shift in their direction from the white college-educated vote, which more than canceled out some decline in the strength of the minority vote. If these trends had been all there was to the election, the Democrats not only would have won, they would have increased their margin overall and in most states relative to 2012.

But that was not to be. Instead, their support crashed to historically low levels among white working-class (non-college) voters — a staggering 39-point deficit nationally, compared with 25 points in 2012 — pushing Democratic margins down in most states and allowing Trump to eke out an Electoral College victory, despite losing the popular vote. His narrowest victories took place in Florida and three Midwestern/Rust Belt states: Florida by 1.3 percentage points, Pennsylvania by 1 percentage point, Wisconsin by 0.9 points, and Michigan by 0.2 points. 

The white working class surged for the Republican this year, but it is shrinking

Let’s take a closer look at these states and see how they might shape up going forward in the great race. In these states, Trump’s white working-class support ranged from 62 to 66 percent, which represented very sharp shifts toward the GOP, particularly in the Rust Belt states. Among minorities in these states — black, Latino, Asian, and those of “other” race, considered as a group — Clinton’s support ranged from 72 to 81 percent.

Over the next four cycles, to 2032, the share of white working-class eligible voters in each of these states is projected to drop by 8 to 9 percentage points, while minority voters continue their steady increase. (Depending on the state, there should also be small increases in white college voters.)

Here’s what all this means concretely, applied just one election ahead. If we assume that the support patterns from 2016, with their astronomically high white-working class support rates for Trump and relatively weak minority support rates for the Democratic candidate, hold in 2020, projected demographic shifts in the electorate would still, by themselves, produce a very different outcome. 

The Democrats’ advantage in the national popular vote would bump up from a little more than 1 point to 3 points. Critically, this change would flip the Rust Belt trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — plus Florida — back to the Democrats, producing a 303-235 victory for the Democratic candidate, even with the white working-class surge toward Trump replicated in 2020. In addition, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, already very competitive in the 2016 election, would become even more contestable under this scenario.

And this is just one election ahead. Naturally, the effects of demographic change will be magnified the further away we get from 2016. 

Therefore, all else equal, Trump or another Republican candidate will have to continue to increase white working-class margins or white working-class turnout (or both) to be successful in future cycles. But that will be a difficult task, to say the least, given just how high support from that population was for Trump in 2016.

If Trump fails to satisfy the expectations he has raised, it’ll be even tougher

Indeed, given that Trump has essentially promised to solve all the economic and social problems of his white working-class supporters by making America “great again,” he is liable to be judged harshly when, as seems likely, this does not come to pass. That will create an opening for Democrats to reach out to these voters with programs and ideas that might actually help their communities. It is vital that Democrats take advantage of that opening. Combined with the ongoing advantages Democrats have from demographic change — which is bringing states like Arizona, Georgia, and even Texas within their reach — that could create quite a formidable coalition. 

This suggests that the rampant fear among Democrats that Trump and his Breitbart strategy are throwing up a permanent barrier to left advance — perhaps even threatening democracy itself — is overblown. He and his movement are clearly riding on demographic borrowed time. His greatest strength comes from the votes of less educated aging whites, who are declining. This is not to say that Trump’s populism will not continue to be a problem for some time, but rather that over the medium to long term, his movement has intrinsically limited growth potential.

In the end, the Trumpian populism of the 2010s will likely have no more staying power than the agrarian populism of the 1880s and ’90s, which was similarly driven by demographic groups on the decline and similarly undercut by ongoing structural change. 

Today, as well, the great race, with some twists and turns, will be won by change, not the reaction to it. 

Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. His next book is The Optimistic Leftist: Why the 21st Century Will Be Better Than You Think, forthcoming from St. Martin’s Press in March.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

Watch: The presidential race as seen through the polls