I dislike it when "working class" is used to mean "not a college graduate", with no economic variables included, as in Torie's link. This group includes plenty of small business owners and managers, among others (and is also a fairly elderly-skewed group, given the historical expansion of post-secondary education).
Of course it's kind of complex what counts as working class, but there's no need to get into this in this type of context; it would not be at all difficult, confusing, or uninteresting for journalists and pundits just to write "whites without college degrees". There's no other group where pundits routinely take the perfectly comprehensible phrase actually used in the exit poll question and substitute a much vaguer phrase with connotations that apply variably to the group in question.
Of course that's true in many contexts, but I was talking specifically about analysis of polling breakdowns. You would never see an article in a real newspaper about racial voting patterns where the categories in the article's text were "white", "Hispanic", "Asian" and "inner-city" even though the poll itself had used "black" or "African-American".
