The recrimination game among Democrats and pundits is on in a big way, and a major theme is the idea that the party has lost working-class men—especially white and Latino men who don’t have college degrees—because of the way its candidates look and talk. You know: fancy, elite college types trying to shove social-justice jargon down the throats of every firefighter and auto mechanic in the country.

Semafor’s Dave Weigel and Politico’s Jonathan Martin are among those who’ve made versions of this critique. Longtime Dem strategist James Carville, who has previously complained that his party is “too feminine,” is another. There’s also writer Matt Yglesias, whose advice is known to have been taken quite seriously by members of the Biden administration. On Wednesday, Yglesias posted a list of rules that he thinks Democrats should follow going forward; several of them boil down to rejecting the inclusion jargon used by activists and academics.

Here’s my pitch, one iPhone screenshot’s worth of principles for Common Sense Democrats to reform governance in the blue zones and be competitive in the red zones — delivering a coalition that can win on health care, reproductive rights, the safety net, and quality for all. pic.twitter.com/uCXUC4Jr8L

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias)November 7, 2024

Yglesias is a Manhattan native and Harvard graduate who publishes a private newsletter that costs $80 a year to see, so he might not be the first person I’d turn to for advice about how to communicate with people who didn’t go to college. But we should also consider the fancy talk/elitism argument in light of what polls and election results tell us about how individual Democrats are viewed by the public. And the problem for elitism- and wokeness-blamers is that the least popular Democrat, President Joe Biden, is a guy who can’t reject wokeness, because he never heard of it to begin with.

Look at this chart of Biden’s approval rating. It’s 18 points underwater. This is the figure who successfully sold himself in the 2020 presidential primary as a plainspoken, throwback backslapper from Scranton who would be able to win over blue-collar voters. There was even a primary news cycle—damaging at the time, but perhaps we’ll soon see Democrats’ embracing of this kind of thing in order to appeal to the casually racist and misogynistic Twitch streamer demographic—about Biden’s history of getting handsy with women in ways that made them uncomfortable.

One of the Democrats winning a Senate race in a swing state that Kamala Harris lost, by contrast, is Ruben Gallego. Gallego is a Harvard graduate married to a real-estate lobbyist, and was once described by the New York Times as “a blunt-spoken liberal who is politically in tune with young progressives.” (Granted, he also served in the Marines and sprinted away from some of his past positions this year.) Another winning Senate Dem, Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin, is a double Ivy League graduate, former CIA agent, and consultant who actually attended the private high school (Cranbrook) that is used as a punch line in the culminating scene of the Eminem movie 8 Mile.

Other up-and-coming swing-state Democrats are famous for taking after Barack Obama, the apotheosis of the elite American success aesthetic, to a sometimes embarrassing degree. One is Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who looks more like a lawyer than anyone has ever looked like a lawyer. Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff is a former documentary filmmaker with a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. He seems at any given moment as if he is preparing to host a New York Times podcast with Ezra Klein. Shapiro and Ossoff are both popular, so far as we know.

There are, also, successful Democrats who project a “blue-collar” image, like Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman. Democrats might broaden their appeal by recruiting more candidates from working-class professions, and there are demonstrably some young men who are attracted to Trump because they associate Democrats with social-justice scolding. But this year’s results suggest that if there is a single deal-breaker for Democrats in the current environment, it isn’t having “elite” characteristics or having used phrases like structural racism or white supremacy in the past.

What the results and exit polls suggest instead is that the deal-breaker was being president (or vice president) during a period of generationally high inflation. It wasn’t just that blue-collar candidates overperformed the top of the ticket; everyone overperformed the top of the ticket. Yes, Kamala Harris is a woman who registers as white-collar; a lot of other female professionals running as Democrats did better than she did, and thanks to the polls, we can be all but certain that if Scranton Joe had run in her stead, he would have done much, much worse than Harris, even if he’d made fun of the phrase Latinx or complained about “biological males” playing girls’ high school basketball. Biden, again, has an approval rating of negative 18—and although his age likely plays a role in that, the drop from his initial approval upon taking office (53 percent-ish) to the area he’s been stuck in for most of his term (38 percent-ish) corresponds almost exactly with the April 2021 to June 2022 mega-surge in U.S. inflation.

The good news, such as it is? Donald Trump’s own favorability rating, as the guy who just won the presidential election, is minus 9. If that holds, it would be even worse than it was the previous time he took office, and about the same as it was just prior to COVID—the period of relative economic calm that this year’s crucial swing voters apparently remember so fondly. In addition to the personal unlikability the nation will once again be exposed to on a daily basis, Trump’s plans to impose heavy taxes on imported products and deport undocumented immigrants—who make up a significant portion of the labor force—would likely lead to price inflation and shortages reminiscent of the 2021–22 period that appears to have permanently damaged Biden. (Mortgage rates, which are among the indicators that anticipate future inflation, have ticked up in the past week.)

On Thursday, the Financial Times published a chart showing that every incumbent party facing reelection in a developed-world country this year lost vote share for the first time since 1905, when the data started being recorded. Why that is, and why the U.S. is part of the trend despite a surging stock market and GDP, might be interesting to try and figure out—is it inflation, is it home prices, is it wealth inequality, is it something more ambient about the loss of meaning and direction in a largely virtual, service-oriented world? Who knows! Whatever it is, though, it’s Donald Trump’s problem now.