The Democratic establishment’s swift consolidation behind Joe Biden’s presidential candidacy in March 2020 — and against Bernie Sanders’s insurgency — was an impressive show of strength. But the decision to back the seventy-seven-year-old DC insider also reflected fears about the inability of other leading Democrats to reach working-class voters.

Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren: all were creatures of modern liberalism’s professional-managerial class (PMC) — consultants, attorneys, professors. They were precisely the kinds of elites Donald Trump could easily paint as aloof and out of touch. For all his time in Washington, DC, and despite his training as a lawyer, Scranton Joe had never been fully scrubbed of his folksy, working-class shtick. Faced with the potential for an extinction-level loss of white working-class support, party leaders hoped Biden could put a hard hat atop the Democrats’ thoroughly PMC style.

And so he did. In 2020, Biden embraced the rallying cry that “this election is Scranton versus Park Avenue,” spotlighting his blue-collar bona fides and dismissing Trump’s populism as a charade. In office, Biden frequently claimed to be the most union-friendly president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His fall 2023 trip to Michigan to walk the picket line with striking autoworkers was meant to symbolize his differences from Trump. And in some corners, there was hope that Biden was beginning to remake the Democratic Party’s tarnished image in the eyes of workers. Since at least the Bill Clinton era, the party had grown increasingly distant from (and sometimes hostile to) unions, manufacturing jobs, and their associated strands of working-class voters.