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Democrats had just absorbed a crushing defeat in the 1994 midterm elections when President Bill Clinton’s very liberal labor secretary, Robert Reich, ventured into hostile territory to issue a prophetic warning.
Struggling workers were becoming “an anxious class,” he told the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, two weeks after Republicans led by Newt Gingrich had gained 54 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. Society was separating into two tiers, Mr. Reich said, with “a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated.”
“Today, the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays and an ill-defined counterculture,” Mr. Reich cautioned. “But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?”
As a half-century-old world order organized around American-Soviet contention gave way to a more freely competitive landscape of shifting alliances, presidents from both parties sought to secure U.S. leadership under new rules for economic competition, global stability and strong financial markets.
To be sure, blue-collar voters have long been fickle. Richard M. Nixon’s “silent majority” delivered him a landslide in 1972, propelled not by a Republican economic platform but by a backlash to civil rights legislation and anti-Vietnam War protests.
William A. Galston, a domestic policy adviser to Mr. Clinton and an architect of the Democrats’ shift to the center, said that after the election debacles of 1980, 1984 and 1988, the party’s repositioning on social and economic issues was not a choice but an imperative.
But once Mr. Clinton took office in 1993, choices were made.
Then the health-care push collapsed in the late summer of 1994. The Republicans took control of Congress after their decisive victories that November, and the domestic agenda was moribund, replaced by a zeal for budget cutting.
There were also missed opportunities: Mr. Furman said the Obama administration’s timid response to the financial crisis prolonged the slow, frustrating recovery, intensifying the anger that Mr. Trump tapped into in 2016.
If any Democrat intuitively understood the voters who were abandoning his party, it was Mr. Biden, who campaigned in 2020 as “Scranton Joe,” the product of a small, deindustrialized city that epitomized the ground lost by the working class.
His victory may have been fueled by the pandemic, but his focus was on economics. He tried to undo or reverse some of the damage that had been done by his predecessors. He brought in left-leaning economists like Mr. Bernstein and Heather Boushey, who had often been voices of dissent in the Clinton and Obama years.
The Biden administration also moved to bolster the clout of unions, drive down unemployment so workers would gain bargaining power and strengthen the Internal Revenue Service to go after affluent tax cheats, Mr. Bernstein said.
Mr. Biden did not have the surplus of federal dollars to invest that Mr. Clinton had bequeathed to his successor, so he guided private investment through regulations and huge tax credits secured through Congress.
A “worker-centered trade policy” strengthened so-called Buy America commitments, maintained most of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on foreign products and pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into new American infrastructure and factories.
In November, 56 percent of voters without college degrees voted for Mr. Trump. In 1992, just 36 percent of voters with only a high school diploma voted Republican — about the same percentage that Barry Goldwater got in his overwhelming defeat against Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Republican and Democratic economists point to a single reason: inflation. Mr. Reich’s “anxious class” was as anxious as ever, unwilling to see policy shifts that might take years to bear fruit as a salve for the immediate pain of rising prices.
Democrats said the president was the political victim of a global trend emerging from the pandemic. Republicans pointed to his policies, and one piece of legislation in particular, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, saying it poured gasoline on the smoldering embers of post-pandemic inflation.
“Ana Swanson contributed reporting from Washington.
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