By all indications, the Democratic Party is headed for electoral Armageddon in the November midterm elections. President Joe Biden’s approval rating has plateaued in the low 40s, his domestic agenda is stalled and the party’s message clearly isn’t resonating.

While high inflation and the pervasive pandemic — two external forces that are not entirely within the president’s control — are contributing to voters’ dissatisfaction, Biden’s poor ratings are due in large part to Americans not feeling like the Democratic Party’s priorities align with their own.

According to a recent CBS poll, two-thirds of Americans say that Biden and Democrats are focusing on issues that they either don’t care about (39%) or only care a little about (28%). Just one-third say that Biden and Democrats are focusing on issues they care a lot about.

Ultimately, Americans are moving further and further away from a Democratic Party that they feel is out-of-touch and no longer meshes with their economic or cultural values.

In their recent piece, William A. Galston and Elaine Kamarck aptly describe the Democratic Party as engaging in a “new politics of evasion, the refusal to confront the unyielding arithmetic of electoral success.” Specifically, they argue that Democrats have been led “astray” by the myth that a “progressive majority is emerging.”

Indeed, Democrats have embraced this “myth” at their own peril. The “Progressive Left” — voters who are very liberal and believe U.S. institutions need to be rebuilt because of racial bias — comprise just 7% of registered voters, per Pew Research Center. Only 8% of voters fall under the similar “Outsider Left” group, which is made up of discontented liberal voters who were very supportive of Bernie Sanders.

Moreover, “Establishment Liberals,” who are liberal but are supportive of a more measured approach to societal change than the Progressive Left — which is in many ways the approach that President Biden has taken with his domestic agenda — make up just 13% of registered voters.

By catering their agenda to a small fraction of the electorate, the Democratic Party is ignoring manifest political and electoral realities — specifically, the fact that swing voters, who have been “swinging away from Democrats” as of late, “will decide the 2022 midterm elections,” as former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who I’ve worked as an advisor for, wrote in a recent opinion piece.

Mayor Bloomberg’s pointed criticism of the Democratic Party was written in the aftermath of the recall of three left-wing school board members in San Francisco, one of the most liberal cities in the country.

In his piece, Mayor Bloomberg points out that the school board seemed “more concerned with political correctness than educating children.” Instead of reopening schools when doing so was safe, the school board focused on catering to the demands of leftist activists to rename buildings of historical figures, while “parents struggled to keep their heads above water.”

To be sure, this school board recall is evidence that the “woke” politics dominating the Democratic Party are out of step not only with swing-voters, but also with many Democratic constituents. And if the Democratic Party continues to associate itself with fringe-left social policies and movements — by prioritizing political correctness and “wokeness” over the real issues that matter to most Americans, and especially to swing-voters — the party will suffer electorally in 2022 and 2024.

In addition to losing touch with swing-voters, the Democratic Party has also been weakened by cracks in its own coalition, which are turning into gaping holes.

As Galston and Kamarck note, Democrats embrace the problematic notion that “‘people of color’ think and act in the same way.” This has hurt the party’s position with Latino voters in particular, who are not a monolithic group, but have collectively drifted from the Democratic Party.

Between 2016 and 2020, support for Donald Trump among Latino voters increased by 10-points, per Pew Research Center’s validated voter survey. Biden’s 21-point margin of victory among Latinos in 2020 marked a significant decline from Hillary Clinton’s 38-point win in 2016.

The trend of Latino voters moving away from the Democratic Party has continued during Biden’s presidency: only 35% of Latino voters approve of Biden’s job performance, while 56% disapprove, per a recent Emerson poll.

With the election of Donald Trump in 2016, whose policies and rhetoric demonized immigrants, Democrats began taking Latino voters for granted to their own detriment.

The Democratic Party’s theory of the case holds that Latino voters will support them based on the party’s advocacy for racial and civic equality — even as the party moves further to the left on economic and cultural issues — and will oppose Republicans due to the nationalistic rhetoric that often emerges from the Trump-aligned wing of the G.O.P.

But as Galston and Kamarck note, Latino voters tend to embrace conservative values — and reject progressivism — in the sense that they are “family-oriented, religious, patriotic, striving to succeed in their adopted country and supportive of public policies that expand economic opportunity without dictating results.”

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With just nine months until the midterm elections, the Democratic Party can no longer afford to prioritize progressive priorities while overlooking larger political forces at play.

Furthermore, unless Biden is able to rally the West to stand firm against Russian aggression in Ukraine, foreign policy could also be a flash point against the Democrats in November — especially given the wide-ranging political fallout from Afghanistan — in the absence of firm and unyielding policies against Russia as well as China vis-à-vis their potential aggression in Taiwan.

Ultimately, Biden and Democrats should embrace a more moderate approach involving a limited and focused amount of government that delivers targeted and practical policies. If Democrats do not embrace this strategic shift, they risk historic defeats — worse than 1994 or 2010 — in this year’s midterm elections.

Douglas Schoen is a longtime Democratic political consultant.