Mr. Trump’s broad racial inroads in 2024 shocked Democrats into belatedly recognizing that demographics — and a multiracial electorate — did not assure a progressive destiny. Yet it should not have taken him to see them. In 2009, at the height of the Great Recession, when Democrats controlled the presidency and Congress, identity politics blinded the party to the economic crisis among the working class.

 

Democrats Cannot Just Buy Back the Working Class

By David Paul Kuhn

Mr. Kuhn, a co-producer of the forthcoming PBS documentary “Hard Hat Riot,” is the author of “The Hardhat Riot: Nixon, New York City, and the Dawn of the White Working-Class Revolution.”