In Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown, a longtime champion of working-class voters, was toppled by a rich Republican former car dealer.

In Washington, President Joe Biden — who won the Democratic nomination four years ago with the help of blue-collar voters — must now hand back power to Republicans and surrender leadership of a party increasingly dominated by highly educated voters.

And in Pennsylvania, Sen. Bob Casey, whose family name has for years been synonymous with white working-class Democrats, is confronting the real possibility of defeat.

Eight years after fury among white working-class voters propelled Donald Trump to victory, Democrats swore that this time, they would try to do better with that group.

Instead, the party’s staggering challenges with blue-collar voters have only worsened.

Widespread frustration with high prices and alienation from Democrats have turned the party’s lawmakers in Trump territory into an ever-more-endangered species.

“When the change doesn’t show up, the hope for change turns into anger,” said Rep. Matt Cartwright, a battle-tested Pennsylvania Democrat from the Scranton area who narrowly lost this month. “The anger showed up.”

The new inroads that Trump made this year with working-class voters of color, particularly Latino ones, have alarmed Democrats. At the same time, the party’s Trump-era Achilles’ heel — its struggle to earn the trust of white working- class voters — was even starker this year, especially in the Industrial Midwest, where the “blue wall” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin all broke for Trump.

In many of those states’ blue-collar counties, Vice President Kamala Harris lost by greater margins than Biden did in 2020.

Certainly, a number of Democratic House and Senate candidates significantly outran Harris. She also contended with many political barriers Biden did not face four years ago, including racism and sexism, along with the extraordinary challenge of running a 107-day campaign after the unpopular president was forced out of the race.

But she and other Democrats also faced a deepening, newly worrisome perception problem: a widespread belief among working-class Americans that the Democratic Party does not fully grasp their struggles — and in some cases, disdains them outright.

“This doesn’t have to be the end of white working-class Democrats,” said Justin Barasky, a Democratic strategist who was Brown’s 2018 campaign manager. “But it will be if we don’t start being more inclusive.”

Democrats have not been shy about offering diagnoses for their devastating losses.

Voters, sour about pandemic-era inflation and bothered by the migrant crisis, punished the party in power. Republicans effectively caricatured Democrats as overly liberal and “woke.” Democrats needed a stronger populist message. Misinformation thrived in a fractured news environment. The country was simply not ready to elect a woman, especially a woman of color.

There is some truth to each theory, according to Democrats who have thought deeply about politics in blue-collar America.

But one of the biggest problems, these Democrats say, is that voters in white working-class neighborhoods now see the party as unresponsive to their most pressing daily troubles.

Rep.-elect Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Mich., won a district that is home to many white working-class residents, even as Harris struggled in many counties there.

McDonald Rivet said that for many voters in her area, high costs were not just an inconvenience. They raised “fear in people, right, about their ability to make it,” she said.

To those voters, she said, litigating other subjects — whether Trump was a “fascist,” for example, or the violence of the 2021 Capitol riot — simply felt less urgent.

“Those sorts of conversations don’t impact what is happening in their lives on a daily basis,” she said. “It comes down to, what is the price of a gallon of milk?”

Frustration with the cost of living was not unique to one demographic or one state, said Patrick Murray, who directs the polling institute at Monmouth University. But it made it harder for Harris to meet a Democratic goal of holding or improving on Biden’s 2020 margins in strongly pro-Trump territory.

To some extent, voters signaled in interviews this year, Trump benefited from nostalgia for the prepandemic era — while the chaos of his previous administration receded for some.

“I don’t like the rhetoric from the Democrats,” said Jeff Markey, 66, a former airport technician from Wyoming, Michigan, a more blue-collar city outside Grand Rapids. He said he had supported Democrats until Trump’s 2016 candidacy, and supported him again this year.

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who campaigned for Harris in conservative areas, also conceded that Republicans were sometimes effective at painting the Democrats as out of touch.

He cited a widely aired, anti-transgender Trump ad that concluded: “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

The ad was the “ultimate ear worm of this cycle,” Fetterman said. The last beat, he argued, could be interpreted by voters not just as anti-trans bigotry, which he deplored, but also as a subtler promise to help Americans economically.

“It’s reprehensible to weaponize and to pick on members of a marginalized community,” he said. But, he added, “I can understand why it was very effective.”

Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, campaigned in white working-class areas, promising that they did care about their struggles.

In a barrage of advertising, Democrats also vowed to lower costs and protect working people, and attacked Trump as a plutocrat beholden to other wealthy Americans.

But some Democrats argued that efforts to engage moderate suburban Republicans who abhorred Trump’s style and saw him as threatening democracy came at the expense of a more full-throated populist message.

“They shied away from the populist economic stuff, which they thought would turn off those voters,” said Mike Lux, a longtime Democratic strategist who has spent years studying blue-collar workers. “That was a real mistake. Because it made all of those folks back in Bethlehem and Scranton and Erie think, ‘Well, I guess they really don’t care about me very much.’ ”