Whites fleeing Dems, says ex-Obama aide

Jim Messina, President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, said the Democrats’ 2014 midterm drubbing exposed some serious election “challenges” the party must address if they’re to recover in 2016 and beyond.

Chief among these issues is that white voters, who make up a strong majority of the electorate, have been fleeing the party.

{mosads}“Democrats have some challenges,” Messina said in an interview with Carlos Watson of OZY. “We continue to lose a historic number of white voters, you know, white working-class voters, and we have to address that issue.”

According to various exit polls, 75 percent of the 2014 electorate was white, and Republicans won close to 60 percent of their votes. Blacks made up only 12 percent of the electorate, so the fact that nearly 90 percent of them voted for Democrats is not nearly enough to make up the gap.

The last Senate race that’s still active is in Louisiana, which is a microcosm of this problem for Democrats. Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) pulled around 90 percent of the black vote in the state, but topped out near 20 percent among whites. She trails Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) by 5 percentage points in the head-to-head match-up.

Messina said the party needs to work on getting its economic message out to the blue-collar white voters who might be open to the party’s populist message. Messina works now for a super-PAC backing Hillary Clinton, but it’s a potential Clinton challenger — Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — who energizes the base’s populist wing.

“Democrats win elections, when they understand the economic difference between the two parties, and that is not crystallized for candidates [in 2014],” Messina said.

“We have challenges about moving our economic message forward,” he added. “There was not a compelling economic contrast in that election, and that is a problem for us. We cannot continue to bleed working-class votes the way we did in 2014. We have real challenges there.”

Still, Messina said Republicans will face in 2016 the same problem Democrats had in 2014 — a difficult map.

“Looking forward to ’16, if you said, will you take the D side or the R side for 2016, every smart political operative would take the D side,” he said.

Messina said the demographic shifts in the Deep South and Mountain West are moving those voters toward the Democrats, while Republicans can’t say the same about states in any region of the country.