How do you gain votes from an electorate convinced that tax cuts spur economic growth, and that healthcare costs can be lowered by letting insurance companies operate beyond state lines (whatever that entails...), that unionization of the manufacturing sector lowers workers' standards of living -- and all that other rot -- that their deeply held political principles are just shibboleths? Efforts by the Democratic Party to argue otherwise just amounts to Democrats lecturing voters that their false beliefs are indeed false -- and no likes a lecturing hectoring know-it-all.
Well, for starters, the Democrats could study how the Republicans convinced these voters of those things in the first place.
I think it's a form of aspirational politics (ok, magical thinking) -- people making less than 40k a year voting for "Paul Ryan" (not that he himself represents all that working class a congressional district) because policies that favor the rich now will benefit those who hope to become rich later. The idea of voting for "Paul Ryan" to stick it to the layabouts and welfare queens was a potent motivation for voting GOP in the 1980s, but I don't think that revenge politics is so strong nowadays. In those interviews with the Midwestern Trump voters, you here a good of "Trump's rich, so he knows what to do" rather than the divisive welfare queen rhetoric.
Another aspect is identity politics, especially In TX and the rest of the South. But I don't want to go into that because I think that Democrats' attempting to change the political discourse there is mostly foolish and doomed to fail, no matter how much hope they put into NC and the Atlanta suburbs.
