For years, the Democrats have known that they are losing the white working class. Their complacency has issued from the conviction that they can make up for it by gaining among the college-educated while retaining a grip on the minority vote, which really means black and Latino voters.

This has been the social base of the weakly populist identitarianism of the post-Obama era; trickle-down anti-racism for the minorities and suburban college crowd and a few crumbs to the white working class, just enough to keep them tied to the millstone. What we see in this election is the demise of that strategy. The white working class exit from the party is now largely complete; even more, Donald Trump appears to have pulled up just about even among Latinos and has made inroads with black men too.

But the real story lies deeper. It isn’t minorities per se who are defecting. It appears to be especially concentrated among working-class minorities. Kamala Harris still beat Trump in the appeals to minority non-college-educated voters, but exit polls indicate that her lead shrank by 33 percent compared to Joe Biden’s. The Latino vote went from 71 percent Democrat in 2008 to 66 percent in 2016 to 53 percent this cycle. The media focus has of course been on its gendered nature, but the real story is that the rejection of Democrats is basically an economic phenomenon. It’s working-class Latinos who are leading the march into the Republican Party, and if you want to know why, just ask them — they say it’s their economic worries.

Taken together, this data shows that the party’s alienation from the working class is now extending across racial lines. It isn’t just losing white workers but all workers, regardless of race. This changing composition of the Democratic Party will only strengthen the inclination to marginalize its Bernie Sanders faction and to concentrate ever more fiercely on pulling the “Liz Cheney Republicans” into the electoral base, since they will coalesce with the professional-class voters that the party caters to.

Can socialists still use the Democratic Party ballot line as a springboard into mainstream politics? Only if it listens to the blindingly clear message the voters have sent them: white, black, or brown, it’s the economy, stupid. It is the lesson of a century of struggle; we just need a Left that is capable of understanding it.