Democrats are Unlikely to Win Back Obama-Trump Voters. But They Should Still Have an Economic Agenda to Help Them.

Lee Drutman wrote for Vox's Polyarchy about the Democratic Party's strategy going in to 2018:

As Democratic Party leaders plot and scheme on how Democrats might win back the House in 2018, and the presidency and the Senate in 2020, Democrats appear caught between two strategic impulses, which seem to be in tension.

One impulse is to try to win back white-working class whites, particularly in key Rust Belt states, who voted for Barack Obama and the defected to Donald Trump.

A second impulse is to win over upscale suburban professionals, particularly in the 23 congressional districts where Hillary Clinton defeated Trump but where voters also sent a Republican to the House.

In the first strategy, the narrative goes like this: Democrats lost in 2016 because they didn’t have an economic message for working-class whites, and the Clinton campaign made a huge mistake when it decided that “we can’t win the economic argument.” Clinton didn’t present herself as a champion of the working class. And Trump did, however disingenuously. Whereas the Obama campaign went after Romney as a silver-spoon elite from the beginning, the Clinton campaign made very little of the fact that Trump inherited his wealth.

Trump also won because Obama-Trump voters held negative attitudes toward black people, immigrants, and Muslims, which Trump activated with his racial demagoguery. If Democrats had a compelling economic argument, this narrative goes, perhaps the racial stuff would have mattered less. After all, Obama won many of these voters, so how racist could they really be?

In the second strategy, the narrative is that these working-class white voters are now hopelessly lost to Democrats because Democrats can’t cater to racists when half of their party is now minority voters. But “moderate” Romney-Clinton voters are totally gettable now that the Republican Party is on the Trump train to crazytown. Add in more young voters and more minority voters (part of the rising demographic), and Democrats will have a lasting majority.