… Many observers have posed an intriguing question: Can Democrats win national elections with their growing national coalition—Millennials, minorities, grad-school-educated whites, and so on—without targeting or addressing the needs of white working-class voters? Implicitly, they are asking whether Democrats can build a national majority by primarily addressing the identity and values issues that appeal to this new coalition—such as racial and gender equality, immigration, and gay marriage—while paying scant attention to the so-called lunch-pail economic and material issues that are traditionally of greatest concern to working-class whites.
But white working-class voters could not be more central to Democrats. And not only are they winnable for Democrats with attention to the right set of issues, but there were already sizable numbers of them voting Democratic as recently as 2012. CONT.
Stan Greenberg, Washington Monthly