JEANNETTE, Pa. – When Joe Biden visited this corner of southwestern Pennsylvania in the final weeks before the election, his goal wasn't to win it so much as to show the area's overwhelmingly white working-class electorate that his party was at least willing to try. “A lot of white, working-class Democrats thought we forgot them,” Biden said after touring a union training facility during a late September swing through Westmoreland County. "I get their sense of being left behind.” Democrats have offered paeans like that since President Franklin D.
Roosevelt delivered the New Deal and cemented an alliance with working-class voters. That bond was rooted in the notion that the Democrats' policies would improves workers' lives.