Sorta kinda related to the last post — Thomas Edsall wrote in the New York Times —

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

Now, if you watched the video in the last post, you saw that most of the children featured in the video are white. These are families that lost jobs and homes because of the financial crisis and prolonged unemployment and haven’t been able to get back on their feet. And while you can certainly find bad actors in both parties who contributed to the mess, ultimately our deteriorating economy is the inevitable result of 30 years of Reagonomics and the “no taxes, no regulations” hysteria promoted by Grover Norquist, “free market” conservatives, et al.

And, as we all know, the politicians that brought us this mess get elected mostly because they hoodwink white working-class Americans to vote for them.

I posted something a few days about about some New Hampshire voters who had either crashed or were hanging on to middle-class status by their fingernails, and who were planning to vote Republican next year. And you can go bang your head against a wall all day long over this stuff, but unless one has some understanding of why the economy is failing, and why Washington isn’t responding, I could see why it wouldn’t seem to make much difference which party one votes for.

And you’re not going to get that information unless you’re willing to do some reading, because it’s rarely properly explained on radio or television. And if they’re watching Faux News, they’re just plain being lied to about it.

As I said in the earlier post, for years at progressive conferences the question of how to reach these voters to explain reality to them comes up again and again, and no one has an answer. I think step one is to somehow gain their trust or sympathy so they are willing to listen, but that won’t happen overnight.

Howard Dean’s “50 state” strategy allowed the Dems to take back the House and Senate, but it also saddled us with a bunch of right-wing Blue Dogs who voted with Republicans on critical legislation (and, children, that’s what killed the public option). And in 2010, the white working class voted for Republicans in record numbers, Edsall says.

So, instead, the Obama campaign team wants to put together a center-left coalition of college-educated whites and racial minorities.

There are plenty of critics of the tactical idea of dispensing with low-income whites, both among elected officials and party strategists. But Cliff Zukin, a professor of political science at Rutgers, puts the situation plainly. “My sense is that if the Democrats stopped fishing there, it is because there are no fish.”

Demographic projections suggest that the Dems could be a “majority minority” party as early as 2020. Being cynical, I’d say eventually the Dems could dominate elections simply by making sure people living in their cars and trucks can’t register to vote.