At a rally outside the U.S. Capitol last Thursday, Bernie Sanders stated the obvious: “When you lose the White House to the least popular candidate in the history of America,” he said, “when you lose the Senate, when you lose the House and when two-thirds of governors in this country are Republican, it is time for a new direction for the Democratic Party!”

What’s not so obvious, of course, is what “new direction” the party should take. So far, most of the Democrats’ election post-mortems have focused on one particular group that gave Trump his Electoral College edge: white working class voters who backed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but went for Trump by more than two-to-one. Hillary Clinton’s most surprising (and decisive) losses came in the so-called “Blue Wall” of Rust Belt states she was expected to win easily—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and lost by less than 110,000 votes combined. Those losses could just as easily be blamed on a lack of enthusiasm by nonwhite and young voters. But so far, it’s a voter cohort that is shrinking over time, rather than growing, that Democrats have fixed on.

Sanders himself gave voice to this impulse when he tweeted, “I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from.”

Sanders is among those calling for overhauling the party and its leadership to win back those voters. Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, whose district is full of blue-collar voters who supported Obama but cast ballots for Trump this year, is challenging Nancy Pelosi—the ultimate “coastal liberal”—for House Minority Leader. As BuzzFeed reported, ideas for blue-collar outreach range “from a complete reform of the party’s infrastructure to changing up communication tactics and espousing more progressive policy ideas.”

For Democrats of a certain age, this might feel like deja vu. The last time the party faced an existential crisis, after losing three straight presidential elections in the 1980s, so-called white “Reagan Democrats” became the party’s obsessive focus for several election cycles. Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council responded to the Reagan-Bush years with a “New Democrat” strategy that helped him win blue-collar voters (and the White House) in 1992 and 1996.