The Republican Party faces an array of well-documented existential crises, ranging from an inability to connect with an increasingly diverse electorate to the rise of the tea party. Outsider Donald Trump’s status as the GOP presidential front-runner highlights the party’s weakness.

But Democrats are facing a major challenge all their own. A 2014 Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who identify as Democrats is at the lowest point since the 1950s. The party hemorrhaged supporters from 2008 to 2014, falling from 36 to 30 percent of national voters in the span of six years (Republicans saw a 2 point drop in the same period.)

What’s going on? Certainly, voters are frustrated with Washington, which has been deadlocked and bitterly partisan, particularly over the past eight years. And racial animus undoubtedly drove some supporters out of the Democratic Party after the election of Barack Obama in 2008, although this is nearly impossible to verify through polling.

But a major reason is that the mainstream Democratic Party has abandoned the white working class, a segment of the population that used to make up the backbone of the party. Rather than sending a message that poorer white Americans still matter to the party, Democratic elites tend to dismiss them as racist, uneducated and uninformed.

Research shows that working-class Americans are the people who have lost the most worldwide as a result of free trade and outsourcing, with real wages dropping over time. And in 2008, the housing bubble burst, wreaking havoc predominantly in lower-income communities.

For the white working class in particular, the price has been steep. Recent research by two Princeton economists found that while death rates among all other racial and ethnic groups are falling, death rates have been rising among middle-aged white Americans, particularly those with no more than a high school degree. Dramatic increases in suicide and substance abuse, notably of heroin and prescription opioids, are the primary drivers of the additional deaths. Deepening poverty and persistent unemployment are at the root of it all. Nearly all the full-time, well-paying jobs created since the recession have gone to college graduates.

Meanwhile, Democrats have failed to support, and at times helped to destroy, the unions that used to protect this segment of society. They have failed to find ways to keep manufacturing communities alive against the forces of globalization.

White working-class people are understandably angry. They used to believe middle-class security was an attainable goal. Now they don’t. Belief in the American Dream has plummeted among white Americans. From 1986 to 2015, a period of economic stagnation for working-class communities, the percentage of young, white Americans who said the American Dream does not exist nearly tripled.