Since Tuesday night’s election results were counted, there was a recurring refrain about why Democrats lost so badly — they ignored the working class, both white and non-white.

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

There are a few problems with Sanders’ argument. The most obvious and glaring is that it’s simply not true that Democrats have abandoned the working class.

During his nearly four years in office, President Joe Biden was perhaps the most pro-union president since FDR. He literally WALKING a picket line, supported union organizing efforts, increased funding for the National Labor Relations Board. He infused $36 billion in the Teamsters Union pension plan (an act that Sanders praised).

Biden’s attention to the working class went far beyond the symbolic. The Inflation Relief Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the CHIPS Act all led to a fertile environment for job creation—and significant growth in manufacturing jobs, which declined during Donald Trump’s presidency. (It’s worth noting that all of this legislation was passed by the US Senate with the support of Vermont’s senior senator, Bernie Sanders.)

Indeed, since Biden took office, The US economy added more than 16 million jobs — which contrasts sharply with Trump’s negative job growth rate. In terms of wages, the working class saw more growth in their pay than any other group of Americansso much so that it has reversed a third of the increase in wage inequality since 1980.

During the Biden administration, subsidies for Obamacare increased. He forgave billions in student loan 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 also grew up pay construction workers on federal projects.

Critics like Sanders would likely argue that these successes have not been properly communicated to working-class Americans. That’s not true either. Like Greg Sargent from the New Republic pointed out earlier this weekthe Harris campaign poured $200 million into ads that focused on her economic message. In fact, she outspent the Trump campaign by about $70 million on ads about the economy.

What was the content of these ads? Calls to Ending lower corporate prices, lower housing costs, lower taxes for the middle class, and protections for Social Security and Medicare. Other Harris ads have accused Trump of only looking at his own billionaire friends and corporations and attacked him for the adoption of tax reductions which were aimed primarily at the wealthiest Americans.

This is the definition of a populist economic message.

However, Biden’s record and the difference between the two candidates’ economic messages did not increase the party’s support among working-class voters (defined here as those without a college degree). It arguably improved Harris’ margins in the swing states where these ads predominately aired, but according to preliminary polls, Trump he won them by 14 percentage points over Harris (56%-42%), a 6-point improvement over his 2020 performance.

Harris did just one point worse than Biden among white working-class voters, but she was still bogged down in her 30s with them. Instead, her losses came among the non-white working class, a group with which he did 16 points worse than Biden — and 26 points worse than Hillary Clinton.

In short, under Biden, Democrats passed one of the most pro-working-class policy agendas in recent political memory, passed much of it — and reaped no electoral benefit.

As for Trump, his main item on the economic agenda was a pledge to raise tariffs, which, by raising costs on imported items, would disproportionately hurt low-wage workers. Did he have a plan to downsize housing or deal with health care? What about falling inflation?

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

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

Of course, it’s not just about Trump. The GOP’s attention to the white working class is overwhelmingly symbolic. It offers nothing of substance in terms of politics. They oppose expanding access to health care or raising the minimum wage.

During Trump’s tenure, his major legislative accomplishments were cutting taxes for the wealthy and further tilting the economic playing field in favor of corporations over workers. While some working-class voters drifted away from him in 2020, he easily won them over in 2024 (and of course won most of those voters in both elections). None of his political positions mattered much.

Take, for example, what happened in Missouri on Election Day. Voters in the Show Me State didn’t just narrowly do so supports a referendum enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution by a 58%-42% margin, they supported a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage and require employers to provide paid sick leave. However, at the same time, only 40% of the state’s voters voted for Harris, who, unlike Trump, supports both policy initiatives.

The Democrats are a party of “doing things” with an electorate totally indifferent to the things 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 glaring disconnect between material reality, even material gains, and recognition or appreciation for such gains. “Partisanship shapes perceptions. There is simply a disconnect between politics, outcomes and political rewards.”

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

Appeals to the working class might have worked for the 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 when you’re up against a racist demagogue like Trump, it’s an almost insurmountable challenge.

Moreover, the Democrats’ political coalition is liberal and overwhelmingly black (even with Trump’s inroads on Tuesday), which only adds to 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 among the working class.

In 1992, Bill Clinton could get away with overt appeals to white voters, such as when he attacked rapper Sister Souljah. Back then, the Democratic Party was about 80% white. Today, the number is closer to 56 percent.

Simply put, 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, “Firebomb an abortion clinic.” The cultural divide is so intense — and Republicans are so hostile to the left — that it’s hard to see any reasonable way for Democrats to bridge it.

If there’s any way for Democrats to return to national power, it might be to double down on what produced such significant 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 slide with minority voters. Or given that the last four presidential elections have been Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican — something that hasn’t happened in America since the late 19th century — perhaps they should wait for the inevitable anti-Trump backlash.

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