In policy terms, Joe Biden’s presidency has been a resounding success. Entering office as the pandemic still raged, he presided over the creation of almost 17 million jobs with inflation nearing the Fed’s 2% target. Productivity is up, wage inequality is down, small business formation is at record levels and wage growth is outpacing inflation.

And yet, in political terms, Biden has failed. He leaves office with among the lowest presidential approval ratings in history and his party having lost the presidency, the House and the Senate in the 2024 elections.

Biden’s presidency has been an important test of a powerful theory that has animated Democratic Party elites for almost two decades — that the party’s shift to more market-friendly economic policy was a mistake and that the way to win back the working class was to change that orientation. The Biden presidency pursued economic policies infused with this new interventionist spirit. It passed massive infrastructure and climate spending bills, explicitly designed to help the noncollege educated Americans.

And that is where the money flowed. Take the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the largest climate-related investment program in American history. Of the $346-billion-worth of clean energy investment that had been announced between the law’s passage and last March, almost 78% had gone to Republican congressional districts, according to a CNN study of data from the nonpartisan Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The infrastructure bill has been less lopsided, but much of that spending funds jobs in fields typically seen as working class, such as construction. And the Chips and Science Act has resulted in a huge spike in manufacturing investment in the country.

And yet, Americans without a college degree voted 56% to 43% for Donald Trump against Vice President Kamala Harris. That is an increase from four years ago, in the 2020 election, when they voted 50% to 48% for Trump against Biden. Even places that have received mountains of investment haven’t moved toward Democrats.

Ever since Bill Clinton’s presidency, Democrats have moved left on economic policy. As Ezra Klein has noted, Barack Obama was to the left of Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton campaigned to the left of Obama, and Biden was to the left of Hillary Clinton. And yet, during that period, Democrats’ working class support has cratered.

This is not simply a Trump phenomenon. In the 2022 midterm elections, when MAGA candidates did badly and Democrats did surprisingly well overall, Democrats lost White noncollege educated voters by 34 points nationally in House elections — 10 points worse than in 2018. Biden keeps touting his pro-union credentials but is increasingly speaking of a bygone era. In 2023, only 6% of private sector workers belonged to a union.

In a perceptive essay in the Atlantic, Jonathan Chait notes that Democratic activists and intellectuals have tried to explain away the failure of post-neoliberal policies with various justifications that strain credulity.

Despite being the biggest burst of federal spending in 50 years, some argue it wasn’t big enough; others point to Harris’s small and hesitant move to the center on a few issues or to Biden’s age and lack of communication skills. None wish to consider, as Chait writes, that “the post-neoliberal theory of politics was wrong all along.”

There is an alternative theory that I would propose. Ever since the Democratic Party embraced civil rights in the 1960s, it has been slowly losing the votes of the White working class, largely on issues related to race, identity and culture. This shift accelerated over the past 20 years as the party moved further left on social and cultural issues. The two successful Democratic presidents of the past 60 years, Clinton and Obama, pursued market-friendly economic policies but recognized that the average Democratically inclined voter was culturally more centrist than party activists and elites. Biden campaigned as a centrist but moved sharply left on a host of these issues, from immigration to diversity, equity and inclusion to transgender rights. Those policies led a significant number of working class Hispanic and Asian Americans — many of whom are culturally conservative — to shift their votes in 2024 to the Republicans.

Democrats have many electoral advantages. They have a solid base of college-educated professionals, women and minorities. Many of the swing voters who have helped them win the popular vote in seven of the past nine presidential elections are registered independents and suburbanites. Perhaps they should lean into their new base and shape a policy agenda around them, rather than pining for the working class Whites whom they lost decades ago.

Email: fareed.zakaria.gps@turner.com.