How does a political party with overwhelming advantages, including increasing support from the growing bloc of highly educated and affluent voters, almost monopoly support from the press and broadcast media, and with burgeoning financial and high-tech sectors of the economy, manage to lose just about everything across the board?

The Biden administration has been repudiated by voters over the inflation that resulted from its heedless spending and open border policy on immigration, and it has been discredited by recent disclosures of former President Joe Biden’s incapacity and by Democrats in and outside the White House who concealed and lied about his condition.

Most of what used to be called the mainstream media has also been discredited, long since distrusted by perhaps half of Americans, and now shown to have been incompetent or partisanshiply complicit. The Democratic Party’s hopes that President Donald Trump’s job approval rating would zoom down toward zero have been temporarily frustrated, as it has risen slightly in May and is higher than at any point in his first term.

To illustrate the pickle Democrats are in, it’s helpful to provide a little historical perspective, at least as far back as a dozen years, on the very different political climate following the 2012 election. That saw the third consecutive reelection of an incumbent president, something not seen since 1820.

The respected Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg argued that Democrats’ increased support from college graduates, plus huge margins from Blacks, Hispanics and young people, would form a “coalition of the ascendant” dominant for years to come.

Greenberg was right about trends up to that point. However, he failed to account for the Newtonian law that says for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. His coalition spurred a coalition of the nonascendant. White non-college-educated people living outside million-dollar-plus metropolitan areas spurned Democrats and elected Trump over Hillary Clinton. A similar coalition in Britain produced the unexpected victory for Brexit five months before.