Anyway, let's first point out that this past Democratic nominee DID win "working class voters." She lost WHITE "working class voters," but she won the group overall, and within minority voters she did better with working class ones than more affluent and educated ones. As mentioned by TML, they just need Obama margins.
She not only lost white working class voters by an appalling margin even by 21st century Democratic Party standards, she also lost a large number of working class voters (but
especially working class voters "of color") who simply
stayed home. And as has been stated before, her gains were disproportionately among affluent, college/graduate-school educated Republicans (e.g. you
) living in the large metropolitan areas of states that were safely Democratic already (but not enough to offset those of the Never-Trump crowd who voted for Johnson).
And circling back to Clinton's losses among racial/ethnic minority voters, I strongly suspect that much of the small but notable defection to Trump among this demographic was among working class minority voters. Think about it; the more upscale minorities disproportionately have university degrees (and quite often graduate degrees, at that) compared to whites of the same class (particularly white men) since this population skews younger and more importantly, haven't had the multiple generations of family wealth/assets (even if only modest amounts, as is certainly true of the bulk of the white American population) that white Americans can leverage. Thus, a college degree tends to be, on average, a more important investment or "meal ticket" to a middle class life for minority populations than it is for white Americans.
All of this is to say that wealthier, college-educated minorities are either strongly liberal Democrats already or if they vote Republican, have been doing so all along (that is, before Trump) and
if anything, would have been more likely to defect to Clinton or Johnson in 2016 than other minority voters (who were either already staunch Democrats and/or only voted in presidential elections (if they voted at all), particularly when Obama was the Democratic nominee, or in a minority of cases, voted for Trump). If you haven't already noticed, these demographic patterns are very much
the same or similar to the patterns among white voters in 2016.tl;dr Clinton's losses relative to previous nominees (including Obama both in 2008 and 2012) for both white voters and (I strongly suspect) minority voters were disproportionately among the less affluent and especially less (formally) educated, while conversely, her (and Johnson's!) gains among - again - both whites and minorities were disproportionately among the more affluent and educated. These trends should worry any Democrat who wants their party to both represent and be strongly supported by the Masses i.e the poor, the working and lower middle classes, and yes, the (vast majority of) racial and ethnic minority communities who very much overlap with the aforementioned social classes.
