Dear Democratic pals: Good to see you are still untrumped, though maybe not in the same way as I am. Instead of complaining about Donald Trump’s victory, I’m more concerned about the Democrats’ failure.

Not our failure to win our case against him, but our failure to succeed with the people at the bottom of the economy, whom we intend to represent (sort of), and whom we have lost massively over the past decades (largely through not representing their interests as much as those “middle class” people who don’t have their problems).

I heard Paul Clark, a Penn State economist, on the radio pointing out that for families earning less than $50,000 a year (a quarter of our population), the difference between those voting for Barack Obama and his Republican rival in 2008 was 28% more voting for Obama than the GOP. And that that difference dropped to 22% in Obama’s second election. In Joe Biden’s 2020 election, it was only 16%. And in this election it was 0.5 % in Trump’s favor!

Democrats as a whole believe that the Biden policies were better for the economy as a whole. But those at the bottom, whose interests were not keeping afloat, not getting further ahead, couldn’t see that the Democrats meant anything much for them at all. I think it is time for all of us who see ourselves as liberals (with compassion for our fellow citizens) to demand a realignment of our Democratic Party from slightly-to-the-left-of-the-most-moderate-Republicans, to a genuine progressive party.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ro Khanna are where we need to be. Harris was a far better choice than Trump for us, but she wasn’t meaningfully different for all the people who needed us to rein in the runaway profits for food prices and rents and housing. You know, survival.

Good Democrat that Harris was, she could not honestly see further left than making abortion available. Why not make health care available in the richest nation on earth like it is in most European countries? As my wife said when Ronald Reagan was running against Jimmy Carter: “Maybe it would do us some good to have the wolf in wolf’s clothing, for a change.”

Meaning: however better the Democrats are than the Republicans, from our point of view, they were hardly different from the Republicans on the cost of surviving in America.

Or, take the defense budget, the largest portion of the budget by many measures. The Democrats are no different than the Republicans in raising it just about every year. What if the Democrats were to take up Trump’s argument with NATO, by not forcing them to raise their contributions, but by lowering our contribution. If it is fear of the Russians that makes NATO necessary, maybe the U.S. shouldn’t be more fearful than Germany, France and England.

What if the Democrats were forced to become a truly working-class-supporting party, instead of a middle-income party with lots of very rich backers, that has abandoned any real interest in people at the bottom? Why isn’t first-rate public education guaranteed and free for all, instead of first class for those in middle-income neighborhoods and distinctly second-class for those in poorer neighborhoods?

Why isn’t public college free or close to it as it is in England, France and Germany? Why not tax the capital gains (income for middle class and wealthy people) the way we do wages (income for common people)? And why not have the sort of progressive rates of taxation that will pay for everything I just mentioned, that we actually had between Theodore Roosevelt and Reagan?

Why? Because the middle-income people (who are the current interest of the Democratic Party ) are more interested in getting a little more than they are in helping those at the bottom to get enough. Living in Iowa during the 2008 campaign, I enjoyed Michelle Obama more than I did Barak. She always said “working class.” While he always said, with conscious care not to frighten: “middle class.”

Middle-income people are part of the working class. But a lot of low- to no-income people are not part of the Democrats’ “middle class.”

Gary Michael Tartakov lives in Amherst.