From Results of Tuesday evening’s elections were counted, there was a recurring refrain about why Democrats lost so badly: They ignored the working class, white and non-white.

In what amounted to the proverbial act of descending onto the battlefield and shooting survivors, Senator Bernie SandersI-Vt., labeled Kamala Harris campaign “disastrous” and said Democrats should not be surprised that “a Democratic Party that has abandoned the working class finds that the working class has abandoned them.”

There are some problems with Sanders’ argument. The most obvious and blatant is that it’s simply not true that the democrats have abandoned the working class.

During his nearly four years in office, President Joe Biden has arguably been the most pro-union president since FDR. He literally walk a picket line, supported union organizing efforts and increased funding for the National Labor Relations Board. He injected 36 billion dollars to the Teamsters union pension plan (a law that Sanders rented).

Biden’s attention to the working class went well beyond the symbolic. The Inflation Reduction Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the CHIPS Act have all led to a fertile environment for job creation – and a significant increase in manufacturing jobs, which decreased under the presidency of Donald Trump. (It should be noted that all of this legislation passed the U.S. Senate with the support of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.)

Indeed, since Biden took office, the The American economy has created more than 16 million jobs – which stands in stark contrast to Trump’s negative job growth rate. As for wages, the working class saw a larger increase in their wages than any other group of Americansso much so that it has canceled out a third of the growth in wage inequality since 1980.

Under the Biden administration, Obamacare subsidies have increased. He canceled billions in student debt, much of which went to community college students. His Labor Department changed overtime eligibility rules, raising wages for more than 4 million workers and increase pay construction workers on federal projects.

Critics like Sanders would likely say that these successes have not been properly communicated to the American working class. That’s not true either. Like Greg Sargent of the New Republic highlighted earlier this weekthe Harris campaign invested $200 million in ads focused on her economic message. In fact, she spent about $70 million more than the Trump campaign on ads about the economy.

What was the content of these advertisements? Calls to END corporate price gouging, lower housing costs, middle class tax cuts, and protections for Social Security and Medicare. Other Harris ads accused Trump of only caring about his billionaire friends and companies and attacked him for adopt tax cuts which were aimed primarily at wealthier Americans.

This is the definition of an economic populist message.

Yet Biden’s record and the disparity in the two candidates’ economic messages have not increased the party’s support among working-class voters (who are defined here as those without a college degree). Arguably this improved Harris’ margins in swing states where these ads were predominantly running, but according to preliminary exit polls, Trump won them by 14 percentage points on Harris (56%-42%), an improvement of 6 points compared to his performance in 2020.

Harris trailed Biden by just one point among white working-class voters, but she was still mired in the 30s with them. Instead, its losses occurred among the non-white working class, a group with whom she was 16 points lower than Biden – and 26 points less than Hillary Clinton.

In short, under Biden, Democrats adopted one of the most pro-working class policy agendas in recent political memory, implemented much of it – and gained no electoral advantage.

As for Trump, his main economic agenda item was a pledge to raise tariffs, which, by raising the costs of imported goods, would have disproportionately harmed low-wage workers. Did he have a plan to reduce housing or address health care? What about reducing inflation?

What Trump essentially offered the working class were attacks on undocumented immigrants, whom his campaign blamed for much of the nation’s ills.

As in 2016, Trump served as a political voice channeling the fears, cultural grievances and resentments of the American working class – and, as has been the case for much of the last 60 years for Republicans, it worked.

Of course, it’s not just Trump. The Republican Party’s focus on the white working class is extremely symbolic. They offer nothing substantive on policy. They oppose expanding access to health care or raising the minimum wage.

During Trump’s term, his main legislative achievements were a tax cut for the wealthy and a new tilt of the economic playing field in favor of corporations, not workers. While some working-class voters drifted away from him in 2020, he easily won them back in 2024 (and of course won the majority of those voters in both elections). None of his political positions really mattered.

Take, for example, what happened in Missouri on Election Day. Show Me State voters didn’t just support a referendum Enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution by a margin of 58 to 42 percent, they supported a ballot measure raising the minimum wage and requiring employers to provide paid sick leave. Yet at the same time, only 40 percent of voters in the state cast ballots for Harris, who, unlike Trump, supports both policy initiatives.

The Democrats are a party that “does things” with an electorate completely indifferent to what they do.

As Larry Mishel, former president of the Economic Policy Institute, who has written extensively on politics and the working class, has said, there is a distinct lack of connection between material reality, even material gains, and recognition or the appreciation of these gains. “Partisanship shapes perceptions. There is simply a disconnect between policy, results and political rewards. »

Is there a way for Democrats to reverse their declining support among the working class? The short and depressing answer is that they probably can’t.

Appeals to the working class might have worked for Democrats when the Republican presidential candidate was a blue blood like Mitt Romney or even a creature of Washington like George HW Bush or Bob Dole. But in the face of a racist demagogue like Trump, the challenge is almost insurmountable.

Additionally, the Democrats’ political coalition is liberal and majority black (even with the advances Trump made on Tuesday), which only compounds the challenge. The party cannot run against undocumented immigrants or back down on cultural issues like guns, LGBTQ and civil rights, or abortion, which are such powerful political drivers within the working class.

In 1992, Bill Clinton could get away with making naked appeals to white voters, such as when he attacked rapper Sister Souljah. At the time, the Democratic Party was about 80 percent white. Today, that figure is closer to 56 percent.

Quite simply, the Democratic coalition as currently constructed does not allow for the kind of political appeal that could (but probably would not) win back the working class.

Indeed, when I recently asked a red-state Democrat what the national party should do to win over working-class Republicans, he quipped, “Bomb an abortion clinic.” The cultural divide is so intense — and Republicans are so hostile to the left — that it’s hard to see a reasonable way for Democrats to bridge it.

If there is a path for Democrats to return to national power, it might be to double down on what produced such big political gains for the party in 2018, 2020 and 2022: college-educated suburban voters. At the same time, they must find ways to stop their progress among minority voters. Or, given the fact that the last four presidential elections have been between Democrats, Republicans, Democrats, and Republicans – something that hasn’t happened in America since the late 19th century – perhaps they should just wait for a inevitable anti-Trump backlash.

But if Democrats think they can win back the loyalty of the working class, they should probably think again.