Democrats are still the party of the working class. Most of them are people of color.
by digby
This is wrong:
College-educated white people have left the Republican Party over the past decade, but higher-income voters are, as ever, disproportionately Republican. Wealthier people tend to be more educated, too, but now these forces push in opposite directions. That complicates the traditional relationship between Democrats and the white working class.
For decades, working-class people voted for Democrats, but recently, the difference in party affiliation between the white working class and other white people has evaporated. This trend, experts say, might make it difficult for the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee to mobilize voters by appealing to working-class identity.
Working-class people in this country are largely people of color so "working-class identity" isn't white anymore. And even where it is, it's not in the industrial trades, it's mostly in service jobs, nearly half of which are held by women.
So basically, Democratic philosophy still has the same appeal it always had to the working class. Their economic policies are far more focused on those who don't have a college education than are the Republicans' and the majority of working-class people in this country know that. The only thing that has changed is that many blue-collar whites are more worried about race than they are about their own material well-being. Perhaps that means they aren't as bad off financially as people think --- at least by comparison to the rest of the working class which benefits greatly from benefits like Obamacare and a rise in the minimum wage.
The real change that nobody is paying much attention to is that white-collar, suburban whites are leaving the GOP, especially the women. If those voters defect en masse, they are in real trouble. They can't win without them.
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