Aretha Franklin made clear what she needed (as did Otis Redding, who actually wrote the song). 

“All I’m askin’,” she famously sang, “is for a little respect!” She then spelled it out, in case you weren’t sure: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.” 

Put in political terms, you can’t get votes from people you don’t respect. Or more accurately, you can’t get votes from people who believe you don’t respect them. 

When people of faith, or gun owners, or those worried about illegal immigration hear Democrats say that such people “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” they don’t feel respected.  

More succinctly, assigning people to a “basket of deplorables” does not signal respect. Neither does speaking as if to the Harvard faculty club or failing to put forward candidates who represent a particular segment of the population. 

Which is the most underrepresented group in Congress? Blacks? Gays? Women? Latinos? No. The most underrepresented segment in Congress are those without a college degree.  

According to the Census Bureau about 67 percent of Americans do not hold a college degree, whereas in Congress that number is less than 2 percent — a gap of more than 65 percentage points. 

Non-college degree holders are not the same as blue-collar workers, although they often overlap and many conflate the two. 

Blue collar workers do not feel respected. A 2024 Pew poll found that a mere 10 percent of blue-collar workers feel they are respected by their fellow Americans. 

And those blue-collar workers aren’t wrong. A group of European scholars found better educated Americans hold more negative attitudes towards less well-educated people than toward highly educated people. Less-educated people ranked at the bottom of a list of disfavored groups. They were also seen as more responsible and blameworthy for their situation than others.

Who is least likely to disrespect them? Not their co-workers or supervisors, but rather their clients and customers — the rest of society. 

The wages they are paid constitute one kind of evidence of disrespect. That particular dissatisfaction is signaled most painfully by the fact that “pay has not kept up with increases in the cost of living.” 

Indeed, the whole idea of meritocracy which, until Trump, animated both parties’ rhetoric for decades, reinforces this educationalism.  

Suggesting America is a meritocracy implies that people get what they deserve. Both success and failure are in the hands of each individual.  

Elon Musk “deserves” to be the richest man in the world because of his intellect, ability and vision, or so meritocrats would claim. The corollary of course is that those who are struggling economically also deserve what they got. The implication is “it’s their fault.”   

As political philosopher Michael Sandel put it, the “single-minded focus on education as the answer to inequality is partly to blame. Building a politics around the idea that a college degree is a condition of dignified work and social esteem has a corrosive effect on democratic life. It devalues the contributions of those without a diploma, fuels prejudice against less-educated members of society, effectively excludes most working people from representative government and provokes political backlash.” 

Trump tells non-college voters a very different and much more congenial story. They’ve gotten a lot less than they deserve, because immigrants, foreigners, incompetent politicians and other elites have conspired to bar the door to their success.  

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro lead the way in a different direction for Democrats. On his first day in office, the newly elected governor removed the requirement for a college degree affecting some 65,000 state jobs. “In Pennsylvania,” he said, “the people should decide what path is best for them, not have it decided by some arbitrary requirement or any arbitrary limitation.” 

He insisted that hiring should instead focus on skills and experience.  

It’s just one important example of showing respect to blue collar voters, whom Democrats need to return to the fold.  

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group a consultancy that has helped elect 30 U.S. senators, 12 governors and dozens of House members. Mellman served as pollster to Senate Democratic leaders for over 30 years and is a member of the American Association of Political Consultants’ Hall of Fame. He holds degrees from Princeton and Yale.