Why the white working class matters.

• Author: Greenberg, Stanley

THE BAD NEWS: DEMS CAN'T GOVERN WITHOUT THEM. THE GOOD NEWS: BLUE-COLLAR WHITES ARE FAR MORE DIVERSE THAN DURING THE ERA OF THE REAGAN DEMOCRATS.

Can the Democrats be an effective governing party without winning more support from the white working class? We asked two top strategists to weigh in, and are also happy to publish in this issue a special section on the subject put together by our friends at the Democratic Strategist.

Conventional wisdom holds that President Barack Obama and the Democrats have a deepening problem with white working-class voters, akin to the one that gave us Reagan Democrats. In the last election, Obama did particularly poorly with non-college-educated white men, a group that, as Ron Brownstein has observed, was "once the brawny backbone of the New Deal-era Democratic coalition." It's also widely held that the Democrats' problems with the white working class are partly responsible for the party's poor performance in most rural parts of the country, as well as the reason that it struggles during off-year elections, when voters of color and Millennials are a smaller share of the overall turnout.

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.

You would not know that by most of the press coverage. That's because the competitiveness of Democrats among white working-class voters overall has been obscured by the hostility of the subset of those voters who live in the South, Appalachia, and the Mountain West. According to 13,000 interviews that Democracy Corps conducted in 2012, Obama received a pathetic 25 percent of the vote with whites who lack a four-year college degree in the South and...