Much noise and concern has been expressed about recent losses in some off-year elections where Democrats have been defeated by Republicans. Virginia’s election for governor being one of the most visible.  But there’s even more worries among Democratic party stalwarts about the upcoming mid-term elections in 2022. With an increasingly radicalized (and violence tolerant) Republican party challenging basic democratic principles, the stakes have only increased.

Ronald Brownstein, senior editor at The Atlantic recently highlighted the dilemma Democrats find themselves in. Is it possible to regain the votes of less educated, working-class white voters?  Some Democrats argue we must move toward the center in a revival of a Clinton era mindset to moderate extreme liberal views.  Others say it’s too late to try and win back working-class Trump supporters, and Democrats should concentrate on getting out the votes from its diverse constituencies.

“Just like the centrists who clustered around Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council that he led decades ago; today’s dissenters argue that Democrats risk a sustained exodus from power unless they can recapture more of the culturally conservative voters without a college education who are drifting away from the party. (That group, these dissenters argue, now includes not only white Americans but also working-class Hispanics and even some Black Americans.) And just as then, these arguments face fierce pushback from other Democrats who believe that the centrists would sacrifice the party’s commitment to racial equity in a futile attempt to regain right-leaning voters irretrievably lost to conservative Republican messages.”

Finger pointing and blame among pundits often focus on the extreme views of progressives, the “Leftist” wing of the party, and holdouts for the big Build Back Better social reforms bill.  What’s lacking in this type of approach is an honest reckoning with how the Democratic party has evolved since the Clinton era of the 1990s.

The Democratic party has consistently abandoned its white, working-class base

In essence, the policies that began in the Clinton presidency have consistently taken the Democratic party away from its working-class base and alienated its loyal voters. Implementing deficit reduction, free trade, and deregulation in financial markets, along with instituting harsh prison sentences to crack down on crime and ending many welfare safeguards—all hallmarks of a “moderate” Democratic party agenda have been a disaster for the traditional Democratic base working class.

The reason Democrats are so vulnerable on cultural and social issues is because they’ve abandoned the working class on the core economic issues of jobs protection, wages, and the countervailing power of unions to keep corporate greed at bay.

Recent research collected by Thomas Edsall in the New York Times highlights what’s actually happened to Democrats working class base. He cites several studies that confirm:

“Before NAFTA, the authors write, Democratic Party support for protectionist policies had been the glue binding millions of white working-class voters to the party, overcoming the appeal of the Republican Party on racial and cultural issues. Democratic support for the free trade agreement effectively broke that bond: “For many white Democrats in the 1980s, economic issues such as trade policy were key to their party loyalty because on social issues such as guns, affirmative action and abortion they sided with the G.O.P.”

The impact of NAFTA has been devastating on many communities.  According to researchers at Princeton University, “…counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to NAFTA suffered large and persistent employment losses relative to other counties. These losses begin in the mid-1990s and are only modestly offset by transfer programs. While exposed counties historically voted Democratic, in the mid-1990s they turn away from the party of the president (Bill Clinton) who ushered in the agreement and by 2000 vote majority Republican in House elections.

“The trade agreement with Mexico and Canada ‘led to lasting, negative effects on Democratic identification among regions and demographic groups that were once loyal to the party.’ Before enactment, the Republican share of the vote in NAFTA-exposed counties was 38 percent, well below the national average, but by 1998, these once solidly Democratic counties voted as or more Republican in House elections as the rest of the country.”

Why Republicans win votes with “culture wars”

The economic devastation for many communities, especially the less educated and rural, makes the “culture war” approach to politics by Republicans that much more potent in 2022. As Thomas Edsall points out in one of his columns in the New York Times,

“It is hardly a secret that the white working class has struggled in recent decades — and clearly many factors play a role — but what happens to those without the skills and abilities needed to move up the education ladder to a position of prestige in an increasingly competitive world?

Petersen’s answer: They have become populism’s frontline troops.

Over the past six decades, according to Petersen, there has been a realignment of the parties in respect to their position as pro-establishment or anti-establishment: ‘In the 1960s and 1970s the left was associated with an anti-systemic stance but this position is now more aligned with the right wing.’

“Right-wing populists usually identify what they call liberal elites in culture, politics and the media as the ‘enemies of the people,’” writes Lea Hartwich, a social psychologist at a university in Germany, cited by Edsall.. “Combined with the rejection of marginalized groups like immigrants, this creates targets to blame for dissatisfaction with one’s personal situation or the state of society as a whole while leaving a highly unequal economic system intact. Right-wing populists’ focus on the so-called culture wars, the narrative that one’s culture is under attack from liberal elites, is very effective because culture can be an important source of identity and self-worth for people. It is also effective in organizing political conflicts along cultural rather than economic lines.”

This assessment would suggest that trying to win back working-class white voters, the Democratic party needs a fundamental realignment—not towards the center to act like most traditional Republicans as many Democratic party pundits urge. Rather, Democrats need to lean into a more progressive agenda that aims to build back the middle class through support of unions and bringing together diverse coalitions of voters much as Stacy Abrams is doing in Georgia.

The extremism of the Republican party Trumpists may yet save the Democrats in the 2022 midterms, especially if Roe vs Wade is overturned and suburban women voters can be motivated and mobilized.  But the major challenges to the Democratic party have been 30 years in the making and will not be resolved without a serious reckoning with its complicity in failing its working-class and middle-class constituents.