The play for Democrats should be obvious: Make a serious appeal to Trump’s voters, take back the Blue Wall states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and win the presidency. In other words, go with Joe Biden or someone like him with a Midwestern or working-class sensibility (newly re-elected senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota come to mind).

Biden still talks of himself as a scrappy kid from Scranton, even though he became a U.S. senator soon after Beto O’Rourke was born. No one calls him “Middle Class Joe,” as he likes to refer to himself. Yet, he has roots in the Democratic party of yore that had a solid base among working-class whites.

His gruff manner, Catholic faith, Irish ethnic background, union-friendly politics, and upbringing in Delaware via Pennsylvania make him as close as the contemporary national Democratic party gets to a working-class match for the Great Lakes states that Trump stole from it in 2016.