Missouri voters tend not to give Democrats a second look. No member of the Party has won a national seat since 2018 and last week choice Republican Senator Josh Hawley, who had raised his fist to encourage the January 6th crowd at the Capitol, won re-election by about fourteen points. But on the same ballot, Missouri voters enshrined the right to abortion in the state constitution. And they passed Proposition A, which will institute a minimum wage of fifteen dollars an hour over time and guarantee workers paid sick leave. (Voters in the red state of Alaska approved a similar minimum wage increase, and a successful referendum in Republican-heavy Nebraska will now require employers to provide sick leave.) Missouri’s measure was opposed by the state’s Chamber of Commerce, a bastion. of the Republican coalition. And yet Proposition A won by a larger margin than Hawley.

This is the kind of result — a few ballot measures in a smaller, far-flung, deeply red state — that tends to register mostly with political mishaps, ending up on the third page of election notices sent to politicians. But it should resonate more widely, among politicians of both parties. The red state’s minimum wage and sick leave measures are a useful example, in the midst of an important election, where voters are revealing not just who they align with, but what they want. And their success suggests little about how much the field of politics has changed in the past decade.

Among Republicans now seeking positions and power in Washington, there is intrigue and opportunity because of how vague the president-elect is. Donald Trumphis political insights may be. Some of the most ambitious young politicians in the Party have spent much of the last decade arguing for working class conservatism which is both sharper and more economically populist: Hawley, Marco Rubio, and, most significantly, JD VanceThe forty-year-old vice president-elect. Their ideas—among them an alignment with some of the Joe Bidenhis antitrust initiatives, promotion of the child tax credit, and willingness to speak enthusiastically about unions—were enthusiastically received by the Party’s young boys. In Vance’s keynote address last July at the National Conservatism Conference, he said that “the Republican Party is increasingly, aggressively and with momentum” rejecting what he called ” Wall Street Journal editorial-page approach” that prioritizes globalization and corporate interests over the concerns of working-class Americans. So far, these policies haven’t really translated into Republican legislation or become key themes in the Party’s campaigns — tax cuts are still the GOP’s guiding light — and when I traveled with Vance on the campaign trail for a Profile that was recently published in this magazine, I heard very little economic populism from him and a lot of attacks on immigrants. But the minimum wage and sick leave measures are a timely reminder to these young Republicans that if they’re serious about reorienting the party around working-class voters, now is the time to do it.

And yet the real significance of these votes is for Democrats, for whom it should serve as both a rebuke and a wake-up call, as the minimum wage and paid sick leave are core liberal priorities with which the Party risks losing touch . In 2016, doubling the federal minimum wage — which has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009 — was a left-wing fringe position pushed by Bernie Sanders and the most progressive unions. By 2020, however, it had become something of a consensus position among Democratic presidential contenders, supported not just by progressives like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but also by liberal pragmatists Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, billionaire candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer (with the latter vowing to raise it to twenty-two dollars), and the eventual winners of that year’s election, Biden and Kamala Harris. Once in office, however, Biden did not prioritize raising the minimum wage, and although initial proposals for the American Rescue Plan bill included fifteen dollars an hour, it was opposed by several Democrats and was withdrawn after the parliamentarian in the Senate decided to include it. in the package was against the rules. A bill to raise the federal minimum wage to seventeen dollars an hour, introduced by the ever-reliable Sanders last year, went nowhere.

The cost of this inaction is high. Voters no longer know what economic changes Democrats are fighting for. Celinda Lake, one of the Party’s leading pollsters, recently described her experience with focus groups of swing voters in this year’s election for Washington Post: “Everybody knows what the Trump economy is – China, tariffs, tax cuts. Then you go to them and ask them, “What is democratic economics?” and someone will make a joke about welfare and half the people can’t name anything. It doesn’t look like the Republican brand at all.”

In the wake of a fairly crushing defeat, some Democrats lamented the Harris campaign’s turn away from economic populism. Speaking anonymous TO Of the Atlantic Franklin Foer, a Biden adviser, blamed the influence of Harris’ brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber’s general counsel. But Biden, Harris and the entire 2020 Democratic field tried to double the federal minimum wage, and then, in their four years in office, didn’t try very hard to reach it. This failure is stronger than the campaign message, and the responsibility for it lies with the Biden administration and the party.

It also left a void, visible from the perspective of Silicon Valley boardrooms. David Sacks, the venture capitalist and ubiquitous social media presence close to both Vance and Donald Trump, Jr. recently he wrote“This election is a reminder that after all the manufactured drama and overheated rhetoric, politics is still about issues. Whether you agreed with him or not, Trump ran a substantive campaign based on issues like the border, inflation, crime and war.” Harris, Sacks continued, “would neither defend the Biden-Harris record nor say what she would do differently.” Sacks is a liberal bête noire and frequent troll. But on this point he is right.

If this liberal vulnerability made Lake frustrated and Sacks smug, it also made Sanders angry. “It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that a Democratic Party that has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” the Vermont progressive said in statement reacting to the election results. Despite explosions in technology and worker productivity, Sanders continued, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. “Will the big interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? . . . Do they have any idea how we can take on the increasingly powerful oligarchy that has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”

A significant tragedy of the Biden Administration, embedded in the larger, overall tragedy, is that the party at first enthusiastically embraced Sanders’s simplest idea of ​​how to demonstrate that it could help the material prospects of the working poor. Voters can detect the gap between what a candidate promises to do when campaigning for office and what they actually accomplish after being elected. Liberals should take solace this week in the successful referendums on abortion and wages: a country that has most obviously moved away from them has moved, in other, quieter ways, towards their ideals. But the shift on which Trump’s election hinged, the return of working-class voters to the Democrats, has been a decade in the making and was the source of the populist uprisings of 2016. Democrats learned the wrong lessons from it.

And maybe their voters did too. Last week, just as Missouri and Alaska were voting to raise their minimum wages, voters in deep California were considering the same. (There, the initiative proposed gradually raising the minimum wage to eighteen dollars an hour, which makes sense given how much wealthier and more expensive California is.) Not all ballots have been counted yet, but the California initiative may not have enough votes. . For liberals hoping to win working-class Americans back to their cause, this counts somewhere between a merely interesting development and a truly ominous one.