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Last week alone, Michigan Democratic congresswoman Debbie Dingell said "I don't know where I belong" and "I'm not sure where I fit in" over the course of two different media interviews, ruminating on her place in a party she believes is splintering in too many different directions.

Dingell, who believes Democrats are alienating the working class voters they once represented, is disillusioned by her party's impulse to segment itself into the categories of identity politics. "We've become this identity politics. The Women's Caucus, the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus," Dingell observed on MSNBC after Jon Ossoff lost his bid for a seat in Georgia's 6th District. "We've lost the sense of we,' that our strength comes in community."

In an interview with the Washington Post published one day earlier, Dingell said that her party was in "disarray," pointing to its failure to connect with the working class voters who once saw Democrats as their voice in government. "We took people for granted. We, for a long time, thought we had that worker, men and women, that union worker. We've lost them because we stopped talking to them." The congresswoman also relayed in the interview that voters in her Michigan district "don't think we understand them."

"Nobody listened to me in the last election when I told them they weren't talking about the issues that really mattered in the Midwest," Dingell lamented, adding later, "I sometimes feel like I have no home even in the Democratic Caucus here."

After losing the presidency and the Congress in addition to a host of down-ballot races over the course of the Obama years, Democrats are pledging to do better. But with a base split between progressives fixated on intersectionality and the #Resistance defining liberal opposition to Donald Trump as eagerly obstructionist, it will be difficult for Democrats to unify around solutions to the problems Dingell understands better than most in her party.

Leaders like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and DNC Chairman Tom Perez have resorted to a bizarre and insulting schtick of peppering their speeches with curse words in a transparent bid to appeal to blue-collar voters with whom the canned rhetoric of Hillary Clinton or the lofty language of Barack Obama never resonated.

For her part, Dingell recognizes the value of connecting with voters based on their backgrounds. "We need to understand each of these groups have issues. I'm a woman, I've been discriminated against," she conceded, continuing, "But I know my power and strength is being part of a broader community where we all pull together and fight for an issue."

Especially in the wake of Ossoff's loss last week, Democrats are paying a lot of lip service to the notion of reforming the party and getting serious about speaking to working class voters. But unless they are able to reconcile their increasingly radical, and increasingly vocal base of fervent anti-Trump resistors with Dingell's constituents, a monumental task by any standard, she may never be able to find her place in the party again.

And her voters won't either.

Emily Jashinskyis a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.

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Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell: 'I don't know where I belong' in the party of identity politics - Washington Examiner