The late Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said that “All politics is local.” He was right, and the coming local midterm elections could have a national impact on American industrial workers.

Historically, the Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt was the undisputed champion of labor unions and the blue-collar workers who rode the conveyor belt up to the middle class. But after the presidencies of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, all that changed. For more than five decades, labor unions and blue-collar workers have gradually lost influence within their own party.