Just as Democrats face another round of hand-wringing about their erosion among working-class and rural White voters — after last week’s daunting election results in Virginia and New Jersey — the long-delayed congressional approval of a historic infrastructure plan will test President Joe Biden’s central theory on how the party can reverse that decline.
Biden and many of his advisers have long argued the best way for Democrats to regain ground with blue-collar voters — not only the White ones, who have drifted toward the GOP since the 1960s, but also increasingly Hispanic and even some Black ones — is to show that government can deliver them material benefits. …
Virtually no analyst in either party believes that Democrats, whatever strategy they follow, can win a majority of working-class White voters. (No Democratic presidential candidate has done so since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, polls show). But the difference between a normally disappointing midterm for the party holding the White House and a catastrophic result that could lock Democrats out of congressional power for years may come down to whether they can regain any ground with working-class voters of all races from the direct economic benefits that the infrastructure plan will deliver — and that the reconciliation plan could deliver if Democrats overcome the intractable internal disagreements that have stalled its approval for months. CONTINUED
Ronald Brownstein, CNN
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