General Discussion

and I've never seen an election in which people didn't vote their wallets.

There was a time when the Dems were aligned with workers, and a majority of them believed Dems would look out for their economic interests.

But by the time Trump came along, workers felt betrayed – and imho, rightly so. The repeal of Glass-Steagall, the failure to regulate credit derivatives, the evisceration of labor protections, and many other changes during and since Reagan's & Clinton's presidencies had allowed the 1% to start scraping off every bit of the increase in worker productivity since the 80's. Wages stagnated while the wealth of the 1% skyrocketed. Obama's appointment of the same executives who caused the 2008 global financial crisis to take charge of the bailouts, Treasury, etc., was the cherry on the sh*t sundae.

We'd gone from a world in which a single income could afford a home, college for two kids, and retirement for two adults to one in which two incomes couldn't afford any of that.

I don't care what you "message"; words can hide those realities for only so long. By the time of the Occupy Movement, many workers identifying with either party were disgusted with both parties, and traditional Republican and Democrat voters both showed support for the Occupy camps, despite traditional media's efforts to denigrate or ignore the movement.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Trump actually co-opted a lot of Bernie's schtick, promising to help workers; and voters took note. Unfortunately, the media gave Trump about a hundred times more coverage than they gave Bernie, apparently in the benighted hope that voters would realize how awful Trump was. Perhaps they saw, but they also heard Trump promise to help them.

The time when the Dems can continue to coast on their history of support for workers is OVER. Continuing to fiddle with the "message" without actually fighting for the economic welfare of workers will only reinforce voters' perceptions of Dem hypocrisy.