Purpose: This article examines how U.S. presidential campaigns construct economic identity through the recurring figure of the symbolic worker, a communicative form rooted in mid-twentieth-century industrial iconography and later reshaped by post-industrial inequality, cultural polarization, and the economic anxieties of the digital era. Design/Methodology/Approach: Using over seven decades of presidential general-election audiovisual advertising, the article traces the evolution of blue-collar symbolism from its mid-century roots in manufacturing prosperity to its contemporary role in narratives of decline, precarity, fairness, and populist grievance. Findings: Through combined textual analysis and rhetorical-economic interpretation, the study argues that symbolic workers function as a durable political shorthand for structural inequality. They serve as embodiments of national resilience, victims of economic transition, or moral exemplars of “real America,” depending on partisan emphasis. Practical implications: These developments reveal how candidate rhetoric now uses the symbolic worker not simply as an economic figure but as a vehicle for representing social belonging, inequality, and moral desert. Originality/Value: Building on the concept of group-interest Democrats—candidates who claim to represent the economic and moral interests of working-class voters through imagery of factories, miners, machinery, and industrial labor—this study expands the historical analysis to incorporate the 2020 Biden–Trump campaign and the 2024 Harris–Trump contest.