Biden has reached a critical moment in the battle for blue-collar voters

Just as Democrats face another round of hand-wringing about their erosion among working-class and rural White voters -- after last week's daunting election results in Virginia and New Jersey -- the long-delayed congressional approval of a historic infrastructure plan will test President Joe Biden's central theory on how the party can reverse that decline.

Biden and many of his advisers have long argued the best way for Democrats to regain ground with blue-collar voters -- not only the White ones, who have drifted toward the GOP since the 1960s, but also increasingly Hispanic and even some Black ones -- is to show that government can deliver them material benefits.

The bipartisan infrastructure plan, which Biden calls a "blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America," constitutes one prong of that plan, with spending designed to spur employment in such working-class occupations as construction, energy retrofits and manufacturing; the other prong is the massive spending bill the President still hopes to steer through Congress solely with Democratic votes by Thanksgiving. That proposal, experts say, tilts its benefits heavily toward working-class families across racial lines, including subsidies for child care and health care and an expanded child tax credit, as well as programs that would support potentially more than 1 million caregiving jobs. Just as importantly, the plans fund these new benefits primarily with higher taxes on corporations and the most affluent.