It’s that time again. Every election that ends in a Democratic defeat seems to produce the same breathless analysis: Democrats have lost the working class!

In 2004, we heard that “working-class Americans, once the core of the Democratic Party, are voting Republican.” In 2016, we were told: “Democrats once represented the working class. Not any more.” And inevitably, headlines over the past three weeks have been revealing the same startling discovery all over again:

“Democrats’ working-class exodus sets off reckoning within party.”

“Is This the End of the White Working-Class Democrat?”

This is getting tedious. It’s not that the conclusion is wrong as much as it is woefully outdated. Working-class voters, roughly defined as those who aren’t college educated, haven’t been reliable Democratic voters since the New Deal coalition dissolved - decades ago. So why do political analysts keep concluding that the Democrats have, all of a sudden, lost the working man and woman?

I asked someone who has studied the voting attitudes of the working class: Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO and a prominent figure in progressive politics. He said, “The idea that working people would vote for Democrats goes back to the New Deal era, when being a worker was an actual identity that [Franklin D.] Roosevelt and the Democrats appealed to by saying that when corporations want to do bad things to you, we’re on your side,” Podhorzer notes. But “in the current two-party structure, where both parties are dominated by billionaires and corporations, there isn’t an actual place for working-class identity.”

The reductive analysis of working-class voters abandoning Democrats is particularly maddening because it misses what’s actually happening to them, 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 a half 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 unappreciated, disconnected and distrustful of their employers. 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 last 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.

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.

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. But in the long term, doing nothing would be a huge mistake - for the party and, more importantly, 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 WWII.

For ages, Democratic leaders have tried to have it both ways, calling for marginal improvements to the tax code but shying away from anything that might repel the corporate interests that are also in their coalition. But, at some point, the worsening suffering of tens of millions of workers must convince them to take the risk.

Maybe if Democrats take that risk it will free them, and all of us, from the dreary cycle of the past two decades in which frustrated voters turn from one party to the other and then back again, never finding the change they are seeking. And then, for the first time in decades, maybe working people will again vote reliably Democratic.

Or maybe such an effort will fail. But isn’t it better to do the right thing for the country regardless of what it does to the party?

Dana Milbank is a Washington Post columnist.