Why are working class Americans turning to the Republicans?

Yesterday, I watched a rather depressing Economist briefing on the upcoming US mid-term elections, which merely repeated the conventional wisdom that the Democrat majority in Congress is doomed, and the right-wing Trump-loving candidates of the Republican party are in the ascendency. 

No-one seriously questioned that the Republicans would regain control of the House of Representatives and probably the Senate, hence my depression. But no-one had a particularly cogent explanation for why. The conventional wisdom was again trotted out, that non-college educated white people, once the preserve of the Democratic Party, are increasingly flocking to the Republican Party, and, perhaps even more inexplicable, non-college educated Latinos (and that is the vast majority of them) are following, despite the vitriol spouted by many Trumpian Republicans against immigration, and their often racist tendencies.

But why should this be? The best analysis I can find is this article in The Atlantic, which suggests that poorly-educated people, and Latinos in particular, are inherently socially conservative by nature, and that they may be perceiving Democrats' preoccupation with issues like abortion, LGBTQ right, climate change, defunding the police, etc, as overshadowing their traditional concern for the working poor, the fight against inflation, etc, issues that rend to resonate more strongly with them.

What is interesting in the article is that, on many of those "fringe issues", Latinos actually agree more closely with Democratic values than Republican ones according to polls and studies, suggesting that they are perhaps not as innately conservative as may have been thought. And yet, for reasons unknown, they are still lapping up the Republican Coolaid.

All of which leaves me just as confused (and depressed) about this apparent swing in American politics. Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised by the mid-term election results but, if all these pollsters and pundits are right, the USA is headed back into a Trumpian Dark Age.