Right on schedule — and as they had done countless times before — pundits of the center left followed up the Democratic Party’s drubbing with autopsy reports, many of which tried to absolve the party of responsibility for its own defeat. Among the most unsavory of these attempts at absolution were those that blamed Democrats’ loss on the betrayal of the party by working-class voters.

Writing in the Washington Post, for example, Fareed Zakaria urged the party to accept the harsh lesson of the election: “Biden failed to win the working class. Democrats might want to stop trying.” It is past time, Zakaria argued, for Democrats to stop “pining for the working-class whites whom they lost decades ago” and to embrace their new “solid base of college-educated professionals, women and minorities.” Never mind that, as 2024 clearly indicated, the party’s problems now extend to working-class minorities. “Perhaps,” Zakaria mused, Democrats “should lean into their new base and shape a policy agenda around them.” He asserted that “Biden’s presidency has been an important test of a powerful theory.” This theory was that “the party’s shift to more market-friendly economic policies was a mistake.” The solution, or so the Biden neo–New Deal Democrats hoped to show, was to bring working-class voters back with “economic policies infused with [a] new interventionist spirit.” But, Zakaria maintained, November’s election showed just how wrong these illusions were.¹

In a similar manner, Jonathan Chait at the Atlantic chided those who advanced the faulty theory, in his mind, that “Donald Trump’s 2016 election represented a voter backlash against ‘neoliberal’ economic policies that had impoverished people in the heartland.” Partisans of this theory preferred to believe that these voters, “in their desperation,” had “turned to a populist outsider promising to smash the system that had betrayed them.” These were the ideas that animated the Biden presidency. Yet Biden’s relentless overtures to workers and his decision to “support labor unions categorically” went nowhere. “The electorate’s diffidence in the face of these measures is bracing. The notion that there is a populist economic formula to reversing the rightward drift of the working class has been tried, and, as clearly as these things can be proved by real-world experimentation, it has failed.”²