Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, put it this way in an email:
We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.
President Obama, Grofman wrote,
responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork.
The result, according to Grofman, was that “white less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”
At the same time, though, and here I will quote Grofman at length:
More religious and less well-educated whites see Donald Trump as one of their own despite his being so obviously a child of privilege. He defends America as a Christian nation. He defends English as our national language. He is unashamed in stating that the loyalty of any government should be to its own citizens — both in terms of how we should deal with noncitizens here and how our foreign policy should be based on the doctrine of “America First.”
He speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president. What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.
In the end, Grofman said,
Trying to explain the violence on the Hill by only talking about what the demonstrators believe is to miss the point. They are guilty, but they wouldn’t be there were it not for the Republican politicians and the Republican attorneys general, and most of all the president, who cynically exaggerate and lie and create fake conspiracy theories and demonize the opposition. It is the enablers of the mob who truly deserve the blame and the shame.
Yes, the Republicans are to blame, but so are the Democrats. I'll say it again: The Dems losing the working class in the 90s during the Clinton administration was political malpractice that has led us to this point. Their nominating guys like Gore, Kerry, and Hillary was political malpractice. Obama's choosing guys like Rahm Emmanuel, Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner and other Wall Street types as chief advisors was political malpractice, a complete misreading of the moment.
The Republicans have crossed into an area of crazy and/or bad-faith cynicism that utterly de-legitimates them, but the Dems, who should know better, have been clueless and ideologically blinkered in their own destructive, self-serving way. That being said, the Dems seem to be in a position to learn from their mistakes and to make, finally, at this late date the necessary adjustments. It remains to be seen whether first they have the will to do it, but even if they have the will, it's an open question whether it's too late for them to use it. (Source)