More than a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, it’s clear that the president is not, as some had anticipated, the “second coming of FDR and LBJ.” His signature infrastructure bill, which the White House touted as being “twice as big” as the New Deal, is no New Deal at all — it doesn’t even hold a candle to the Great Society.

Biden’s failure to fulfill the liberal punditry’s most breathless predictions about his administration is bad news for America’s working class, most of whom are living paycheck to paycheck. It’s also bad news for the Democratic Party, which has been hemorrhaging working-class voters for decades and has now entered triage.

The Democratic Party’s top brass has portrayed this shift as a conscious strategy. As New York senator Chuck Schumer put it, “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.” But those numbers don’t add up electorally. To stay afloat, the party needs to win back the working-class voters it’s lost. And to do that, it needs to demonstrate that it’s able to enact policy in workers’ favor, which the Biden administration has so far been unable to accomplish.