Who will turn the Democrats around?

Donald Trump’s sweeping presidential victory this month proved that his 2016 win was no fluke. Like his populist-right counterparts in Europe, Trump is riding a working-class revolt against governing elites — a spreading brushfire the Biden-Harris administration failed to comprehend and effectively counter.

After losing the national popular vote in his two previous White House runs, Trump won it this time by about 2.5 million votes this time and is right on the borderline between winning an outright majority and a plurality. He made inroads in blue cities, suburbs and states while scoring substantial gains among independents and traditionally Democratic-leaning groups: young voters as well as Black and especially Latino voters without college degrees.

This convergence in the voting behavior of the white and non-white working class punctures the progressive myth that “voters of color” think and vote alike along reliably Democratic lines. Class, now defined chiefly by education level, appears to be eclipsing ethnicity as the nation’s deepest political fault line.

Harris, yoked to an unpopular incumbent, couldn’t withstand the public’s powerful appetite for political and economic change, which torqued the country rightwards. Her loss confirms Democrats’ status as a shrinking party that’s now in the minority because it has lost touch with working families across middle America.

For decades, the party has chased a beguiling mirage — a “new progressive majority” composed of left-wing activists, minorities, college graduates and professionals. Cast by the wayside were working families, who constituted roughly two-thirds of the electorate.

Since Barack Obama left office in 2016, the trendlines have been uniformly bad for Democrats. As analyst Ruy Teixeira reports, Harris underperformed Obama among Black voters (26 points), Latinos (27 points), and young voters (19 points). Even more striking are the figures for nonwhite working-class voters (a 30-point Democratic drop). And the party continued to lose ground among white non-college voters (down 10 points).

Harris performed well with white college grads. But that only underscores the weird class inversion that’s made Democrats the party of upscale college grads while Republicans represent an increasingly multiethnic working class.

This problem has been decades in the making and won’t be fixed by minor tweaks. Democrats need a fundamental change in direction now to head off a U.S. political realignment around a new populist right majority.

To regain their competitiveness, Democrats must reinvent themselves. It’s hard work, but they can draw inspiration from several precedents.

A recent example of a successful electoral turnaround by a major center-left party comes from Great Britain. On July 4, the Labour Party under Keir Starmer (now Prime Minister) won a decisive victory that ended 14 years of Conservative rule.

That capped a remarkable rebound for Labour, which in 2019 had suffered a devastating rout under Starmer’s hard-left predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. Boris Johnson’s pro-Brexit Tories poached 28 traditionally working-class constituencies that were part of Labour’s “Red Wall” in the industrial Midlands and north.

Over the last four years. Starmer moved the party back to center ground and focused single-mindedly on winning back working-class voters. In July, Labour swept 37 of 38 Red Wall seats by increasing its support among working-class voters by five points.

Democrats also can look back to their own transformation in the late 1980s and 1990s. At the time, the party was in the throes of a long White House losing streak, managing only one win since 1968 and averaging a dismal 42 percent of the vote.

Ronald Reagan’s 49-state landslide in 1984 sparked the rise of the “New Democrats” — a movement of elected leaders and thinkers determined to disrupt the party’s electoral slide and infuse it with new intellectual energy. (Full disclosure: I played a role as a co-founder of the Democratic Leadership Council).

The New Democrats challenged stale liberal orthodoxies and special interest domination of the party’s agenda, focusing instead on the aspirations and values of working families who, in Bill Clinton’s words “work hard and play by the rules.”

This difficult but essential exercise in party renewal culminated in Clinton’s 1992 election on a New Democrat platform of modernizing government. Four years later, he became the first Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt to win a second term.

The main lesson Democrats should draw from these experiences is to put working families first. Mathematically, there’s no way to build durable governing majorities upon college-educated voters alone. Morally, the party of the people should reflect the mainstream values of middle-class America, not the rarefied “luxury beliefs” of upper-class elites.

Democrats must develop a new governing blueprint anchored in center-left pragmatism rather than the demands of the antimarket and cultural left. Progressives have an important place in a big-tent Democratic coalition, but it’s not behind the party’s steering wheel.

Rather than climate change and elite conceptions of “social justice,” the party should give priority to raising living standards for working families, creating better alternatives to college for acquiring in-demand skills, lowering their tax and regulatory burdens, making government work better and get things done faster, and, in the cultural realm, elevating our common American identity over disparate tribal identities.

But who has the authority and the ability to make all this happen? The best answer is elected Democrats. Unlike activists, constituency groups, media pundits, think tanks, foundations and academics, they get a reality test in public sentiment every two, four and six years when they face the voters.

Fortunately, the party has an abundance of talent, especially among governors like Colorado’s Jared Polis, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, as well as newcomers like North Carolina’s Josh Stein and former governors like Rhode Island’s Gina Raimondo. There are also rising stars within the House New Democratic Coalition and the Senate.

Democrats need new leaders willing to invest their time and credibility in a collective effort to return their party to its roots in the working middle class. Who will step forward?

Will Marshall is founder and president of the Progressive Policy Institute.