Yet the same factors that lowered the turnout of the Democratic base also cost the party votes among whites: the failure of government to remedy, or even address, the downward mobility of most Americans. Democrats who touted the nation’s economic growth did so at their own peril: When 95 percent of the income growth since the recession ended goes to the wealthiest 1 percent, as economist Emmanuel Saez has documented, voters view reports of a recovery as they would news from a distant land. Even though it was the Republicans who blocked Democrats’ efforts to raise the federal minimum wage or authorize job-generating infrastructure projects or diminish student debt, it was Democrats – the party generally perceived as controlling the government – who paid the price for that government’s failure to act.

But with the exception of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who has been plenty outspoken about diminishing the power of Wall Street, the Democrats have had precious little to say about how to re-create the kind of widely shared prosperity that emerged from the New Deal. The regulated and more equitable capitalism of the mid-20th century has morphed into a far harsher system, just as Americans told the exit pollsters, and the Democrats, whose calling card to generations of voters was their ability to foster good economies, are at a loss for how to proceed. Like their counterparts in the center-left parties of Europe, they had crafted national policies that bolstered the power and income of the majority of their citizens. But globalization, technology, financialization and the erosion of workers’ power have undermined those policies and fractured their electorates.

Democrats can’t rely simply on their demographic advantages and their edge on cultural issues to win the White House in 2016, much less retake Congress. They need to go where they haven’t gone before – increasing workers’ power and incomes within corporations, say – if they are to create an economic platform credible enough to win back the country.

• Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.