Milbank lays it on the line. He writes,
Working people no longer vote their interests as “workers” but cast ballots for all kinds of different reasons. They shifted several points away from Democrats between 2020 and 2024 — but so did many different groups across the electorate, mostly because they were unhappy with the Biden administration’s performance on inflation.
The reductive analysis of working-class voters abandoning Democrats is particularly maddening because it misses what’s actually happening to those voters, which is a crisis much bigger than the temporary fortunes of a political party. This is less a Democratic problem than an American problem — but Democrats have a fresh chance to try to fix it.
For nearly half a century, and particularly over the past two decades, corporate America has plunged workers ever deeper into job and income insecurity. Employers, benefiting from weakened labor laws and lax enforcement of those that remain on the books, have been forcing workers into erratic schedules, hiring them as contractors or temporary or gig workers and stealing their wages. It’s no coincidence that all this happened while labor union membership, which peaked at one-third of the workforce, shriveled to the current 10 percent.
With the decline of unions and collective bargaining, pay has stagnated and pensions have disappeared. Wealth inequality has soared, earnings have become less dependable, and most workers report that they feel stressed, unappreciated, disconnected and distrustful of their employers. They are surveilled on the job, sanctioned for expressing themselves and subjected to dehumanizing workplaces. “Here most of us are, toiling under the authority of communist dictators, and we do not see the reality for what it is,” wrote University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson. The financial collapse of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic only deepened the insecurity and misery.
Voting patterns, not just this year’s but this century’s, reflect the discontent and instability. In nine of the past 10 federal elections, one party or the other has lost control of the White House, Senate or House. Voters, desperate for a fundamental change, punish the incumbent party and then, inevitably finding no relief, punish the other party two years later. Politics has become a depressing game of ping-pong, with no enduring wins.
“We’ve never had a period since at least the late 19th century where there have been so many knife’s-edge elections,” Podhorzer [the former political director of the AFL-CIO] told me. “So, coming out of every election, Democrats assume all we need is fine tuning, because we barely lost. We have to get past thinking we’re going to message our way out of this moment. It’s so much bigger than that. And it ignores the fact that, for all of the 21st century, we’ve been seeing that voters just want a different system, a more profound change.”
Even some on the right have begun to argue for a revival of labor unions and New Deal-style government intervention to undo the damage of the past half-century of neoliberalism, the era of the unfettered free market that began with President Ronald Reagan. The conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari argued in his 2023 book, “Tyranny, Inc.,” that the current “domination of working and middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the asset-rich,” has “drained the vigor and substance out of democracy, facilitated massive upward transfers of wealth, and left ordinary people feeling isolated and powerless.”
In the short term, Democrats could change nothing and they’d still probably do well by default in the 2026 midterms as disenchanted voters once again punish the incumbent party. President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t have much of a popular mandate: The latest figures show he got below 50 percent of the popular vote, Harris lost by about 1.6 percentage points, and Democrats may have actually gained a seat or two in the House. And he’s already overreaching with outlandish nominations and announced plans to start a trade war with Canada, Mexico and China.
But in the long term, doing nothing would be a huge mistake — for the party and, more important, for the country. We are, in some ways, back to the extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power over workers that gave rise to the modern labor movement in the 1930s and the New Deal’s government-regulated capitalism, which led America to three decades of broadly shared economic prosperity after World War II. What’s needed to relieve workers’ pain this time is no less ambitious.
Facing MAGA 