It’s 10:30 a.m. and Dave Green is home for the weekend tinkering with his car. The former president of the local UAW 1112, who once led workers at the shuttered GM Lordstown plant in Ohio, was forced to relocate to Bedford, Indiana, this past summer where he now works on the company’s die-cast production line.

Green, whom President Trump famously bashed on Twitter when General Motors announced it was closing the plant, is a devout Democrat and union man who does not care for the president. Like many of his peers across the Midwest, he is waiting and hoping for one of the Democratic presidential candidates to do something inspiring.

“The candidates who have the right message aren’t on the debate stage,” said Green of his former congressman Tim Ryan and Sherrod Brown, the US senator from Ohio who dropped out of the contest before the debates even started. “We need candidates to actually step up and do more than lip service, do something to help change some of the laws that are anti-worker,” he continued. “Because, quite frankly, we’ve been getting our asses handed to us for 20 years or more. And, if something doesn’t change …”

His voice trails off in frustration.

As social media, a socialist-leaning base and each successive debate molds the Democrats’ 2020 platform, climate change has emerged as the single most important issue, followed by Medicare for All, more government spending, free college, gun confiscation, reparations for the descendants of slaves, and banning fossil fuels and the jobs they create.

Any emphasis on pro-worker ideals, such as the extension of paid sick days, never seems to come up. “Joe Biden is probably the most pro-union person out of the group running for president. Still, he doesn’t talk about it much when he is on the stage,” said Gary Steinbeck, a retired steelworker from Ohio.

After leading the pack for months, Biden’s slipping in the polls. A recent national survey by Monmouth University put the former vice president in a statistical tie with the uber-progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Now many lifelong working-class Democrats are wondering if their party will abandon them completely in 2020.

As Ron Brownstein wrote in The Atlantic in 2012, Barack Obama mobilized both the Democrats’ new coalition of the ascendant (young people, women, minorities and college-educated whites) as well as “just enough working-class whites” to hold the critical Great Lakes region in the Midwest. But Hillary Clinton ignored that constituency at her peril. In Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania she failed to earn enough labor votes (winning just 51%, down from Obama’s near 60%) and lost the 2016 election.

Three years later, the party still hasn’t figured out if it wants these voters or not.

Some blue-collar voters, meanwhile, don’t want Trump, but they also don’t want a Democratic Party, which they have built and supported — often blindly — since the 1930s, to cede control to a radical left-wing flank.

It was the promise of “card check” legislation, which would have made it easier for workers to unionize, which first energized the labor movement for Obama in 2008, fueling donations and grassroots support.

But even with Obama in the White House and Democrats holding healthy majorities in both the House and the Senate, working-class voters were rewarded with no labor-law reform in 2009 or 2010.

As a result, non-college whites fled the Democrats during the 2010 midterms, when they supported GOP candidates by double digits, turning the House of Representatives red.

This cohort leans Republican now more than ever; a Gallup poll this year shows they favor the GOP by a whopping 25 percentage points.

It was as if the Democratic Party didn’t understand how much they needed labor. Oddly, it appears they still don’t. “The working-class voters in my county tend to wonder if the party still wants them,” says Mark Hackel, the Democratic chief executive of Macomb County, Mich., where voters favored Trump over Clinton by 11 percentage points. “They’re not really sure where they fit in.”

Mike Mikus, a Democratic strategist who helped guide Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s successful reelection last year, said it would be folly if his party didn’t start wooing the working-class voter.

“It’s a mistake,” Mikus said. “The Democratic Party policies are very helpful and appealing to working-class people. We should most definitely be delivering that message to them and courting them.”

Steinbeck, now a labor leader in Ohio’s Mahoning-Trumbull area, says he finds Trump’s presidency abhorrent and his party’s “inability to make labor part of the conversation or equation” disheartening.

But, as the nomination race starts narrowing, he is hopeful a candidate will emerge who inspires the labor voter. And he hopes labor will strongly back that nominee in the same way they did with Obama to take back the White House.

“Because that’s what we should be able to do,” he said. “Rally around someone who can beat Trump.”