Pildes cites American National Elections Studies data on white voters in the 2016 election showing that Trump won among all income categories of whites making less than $175,000, while Hillary Clinton won only among whites who made in excess of $175,000.
...Democratic support plunged from 49 percent to 27 percent among Hispanic conservatives between 2012 and 2020 and from 69 percent to 65 percent among Hispanic moderates. These changes suggest that ideology, rather than identity, is beginning to provide more of a voting basis among some Hispanics. If a marginally greater number of working-class Latino or Black voters start to vote the way that white working-class voters do, the ability of the Democratic Party to win national elections will be severely weakened.
Thomas Edsall, "Red and Blue America Will Never Be the Same"
The answer to the question posed in the title is that his accomplishments are abstract and boring for everyone who's not a wonk. They don't engage the public in a way that gets them to pay attention or to care. Not to go completely Postman here, but what grabs the attention is not that Biden was able to get something important done, as it appears he will for instance in this recent environmental legislation, but the way that Manchin toyed with Biden, and finally threw him a bone. It fits with how weak he looks physically, how weak he looked during the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, and how he didn't really end Covid decisively, and is ineffective in fighting inflation. Substance on other issues, whether the rescue plan, the infrastructure plan, or now this environmental bill doesn't matter; image and stereotyped interpretive frames do. Biden does not deserve the astonishing low approval numbers he has had for the last year, but this goes a long way to explaining why he has them.
Biden's actual effectiveness is overwhelmed by all the ways he's perceived as ineffective. He'll be remembered by historians for getting quite a lot done in a narrow timeframe with narrow majorities in an unprecedented politically polarized environment. His record so far is really quite remarkable, but that probably won't help him or the Dems with the voters in the next two cycles. Or so it seems a this juncture. If the Dems have any chance at winning, it will be because the Republican establishment loses control of what has been its winning formula or stereotype since Reagan. The crackpot Republican base might just prevent the Republicans from taking power in a cycle when ordinarily they would in a cakewalk. Stop the Steal is not a winning formula.
Republicans understand in a way that Dems don't that policies almost always have no political importance. Posture is what matters, and you have to have the right actor to play the role to enhance the illusion. What matters are stereotypes that are deeply embedded in the American collective psyche, and these stereotypes are like a string dipped in a chemical solution that draws certain facts and quasi-facts to crystalize on it while other facts can find no place to adhere.
The formula that has worked so powerfully for Republicans is captured in their self representation as fiscally conservative grownups who are strong on national defense while representing Democrats as irresponsible spendthrifts who are weak on crime and yet want a huge, intrusive nanny state to micromanage your lives. It works to their advantage in three ways--
It repels all the facts about Republican fiscal irresponsibility that led to the 2008 disaster and attracts all the facts that blame Democrats for inflation, unemployment, huge deficits.
It repels facts concerning GOP responsibility for the disaster in Iraq and its lack of support for veterans and attracts any ideas that Republicans would have done a much better job with getting out of Afghanistan.
It attracts facts that Dems are the party of racial unrest and social disorder in the tradition of the Watts riots, the anti-WTO riots, Occupy Wall Street and other examples of leftist unrest since the '60s, and it repels the idea that any upstanding Republican would ever be among the rioters on J6. It must have been Antifa, or a just a few bad apples.
Many facts, no matter how credible and well founded, find no place to crystalize and adhere on their string. The Democrats get blamed for every crazy Left thing that happens not because the vast majority of Democrats support them but because they are not perceived as strongly against them as the Republicans are. Republicans with terrible candidates can win when they use this formula effectively. Americans will vote for Glenn Youngkin but not Doug Mastriano. They will not vote again for Donald Trump. It remains to be seen whether Ron Desantis can work this formula while holding the MAGA base.
People who pay attention know that these stereotype have little or no relationship to reality, but it doesn't matter for the vast majority of voters. These are the mental habits that organize right-of-center thinking on Main Street, and it's why it's so extraordinarily difficult to get people to see or accept facts that don't fit. You have to have a truly overwhelming anomalous event to break such habits of mind, and you'd think that the Trump presidency that culminated in the events on J6 would qualify as overwhelming in that sense.
But what makes it so hard for the horror of J6 to break through is that it just doesn't fit habitual patterns of thinking for people on the center right and beyond. BLM, regardless of the merit of its concerns, fits the stereotype of Left-promulgated disorder, while on the other hand J6 doesn't fit the disorder stereotype because there is no stereotype in which conservatives promulgate social disorder. If conservatives use violence, they do it to preserve or restore order, not disrupt it. The good conservatives on J6 just got caught up in the moment. They sincerely believed they were patriots fighting to restore order to a disordered country. Maybe they went too far, but their intentions were good. They meant no harm. They're not like Blacks and other Leftists who want to upend social order with all their complaints about unfairness.
It drives Liberals crazy to think that anyone can see J6 as less significantly disruptive than the BLM protests after the Floyd killing. But it's easy to understand if you understand why facts don't matter and only the interpretive frames do. And what shapes the interpretive frames are these long-standing habitual stereotypes, which are enormously difficult to break, and certainly rational argument and presentation of evidence isn't going to do it. Such contrary evidence and arguments have no string on which to cluster.
So J6 is an anomaly whose most frightening implications simply cannot be comprehended by the old habits of mind, and so most otherwise sane center-Right Main Streeters are open to any explanation that will help them to push out of their minds the most disturbing implications of the Trump years and of the significance of J6. They don't want to believe it, and they won't if they can find a way not to.
What do the Democrats have to fight back against the way they are negatively stereotyped by the Republicans? The most powerful positive stereotype Democrats had through most of the last century was in their plausibly representing themselves as the party that fought for and cared about the little guy. That stereotype lingers, but since the Clinton administration has grown gradually less plausible as the party became increasingly dominated by Neoliberal elites.
So what's the Dem brand now? It's become the party of facts and evidence, process and legislative good order. "Hey, we don't get much done," they say, "but we do it in a sober, responsible way. Wonkish intellectuals love us, and so you should, too. And even if we do get something done, you won't notice, because it won't affect your lives in a way that you will ever associate with us. You'll probably give the credit to your local GOP pol who voted against it. So choose us because we're boring and sane and the other guys are wild and crazy."
If the Dems have a better story than this, what is it? What story do they have that is the string to which their accomplishments can cluster?
But the message that the Dems are the party of good process and rule of law fails because the old habits see the Dems as the party of social disruption and the GOP as the party of sobriety and law & order. All the actual facts about each party are out of alignment with the old stereotypes, but it doesn't matter. The more confusing things get, the more the average voter doubles down on the stereotypes.
But the problem is that even if the J6 Select Committee breaks through in a way that eliminates Trump from running in '24, which is looking more likely, it just clears the way for other less crazy seeming but just as toxic Republicans to take the field because they have a story that resonates while the Dems just don't--not with ordinary Americans anyway. The long-term viability of the Democrats as a party is thus a significant question until they find a story that works with ordinary Americans outside the educated elite. And you can't do that overnight.
Update 8/7/22: The week since I've posted this has been as remarkable for Dem Good news as last summer was remarkable for Dem bad news. That positive shift is reflected in the MSM, but it's too early to tell whether it makes a difference in the public perception of Biden and his party. How and why some things break through and others don't is rather mysterious to me. I'm old enough to remember that everybody thought Reagan was a failure after his first two years--he had a 35% approval rating, but things shifted rather quickly in the second half of his first term.