💯 percent

who are thinking of the future and not concerns with what a women does with her vagina and her uterus.

We genuinely believe everyone will be better off in the end--including said white upper middle class suburbanites. However, on a purely transactional level our policy is to tax them to help other people.

It is much easier, politically speaking, for us to go to a rural area in West Virginia, Kentucky, or Ohio and talk about building treatment centers and addressing the opioid epidemic, about reforming the way we deal with drugs, to talk to them about giving them financial support to help rebuild their communities, etc. In short, we are taking the money from the rich whites in suburbia and giving it to the poor whites in rural areas. Whether that is in the form of treatment centers for drug addiction, health care, universal Pre-K, universal daycare--you name it. We have to pay for all this somehow, and that money has to come from somewhere, and those rich white suburbanites are not stupid--they know we are going to have to get that money from them.

The truth of the matter is that we cannot represent everyone. In economics, there are always opportunity costs. This leaves us with trying to appeal to their sense of moral decency, and I would not hold my breath. This has been the Democratic strategy for a long time, and it has never worked.

even when it's still a minority of them.

upper middle class"? What constitutes upper middle? Kinda sounds like me, frankly. Really?

I'm almost certainly upper middle class. I'm a college-educated woman. My husband's a college-educated man. We have never been anything but Democrats.
We Dems shouldn't turn ourselves inside out or change who we are in order to court any subset of voters. But don't pretend any subset is monolithic. Don't make assumptions about any group.

I have been thinking the same thing but you said it nicer than what I was thinking.

America is soul sick.

Education was the strongest predictor of vote preference.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/

In short, it appears as though educational levels are the critical factor in predicting shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016. You can come to that conclusion with a relatively simple analysis, like the one I’ve conducted above, or by using fancier methods. In a regression analysis at the county level, for instance, lower-income counties were no more likely to shift to Trump once you control for education levels.11 And although there’s more work to be done, these conclusions also appear to hold if you examine the data at a more granular level, like by precinct or among individual voters in panel surveys.

But although this finding is clear in a statistical sense, that doesn’t mean the interpretation of it is straightforward. It seems to me that there a number of competing hypotheses that are compatible with this evidence, some of which will be favored by conservatives and some by liberals:

Education levels may be a proxy for cultural hegemony. Academia, the news media and the arts and entertainment sectors are increasingly dominated by people with a liberal, multicultural worldview, and jobs in these sectors also almost always require college degrees. Trump’s campaign may have represented a backlash against these cultural elites.

SNIP

I don't know how else to put it. Normally I can identify strategy but at this point I don't think strategy applies. Bottom line we couldn't afford to lose 2016. Imagine the GOP on tilt after losing three straight and if Trump had been the most recent failure. They would be imploding everywhere.

Instead, SAMs are in absolute glory and hysteria. Those are the Simplistic Angry Males who I've battled so often. I post on many sports sites that have political forums. I sampled those forums a few minutes ago. SAMs are gleeful over the Georgia result. One thread after another, mocking Democrats and toasting Trump. I should mention that conservatives generally outnumber liberals at least 8-1 on those sites. Often I'm alone.

And anyone who discounts or downplays kentuck's "our team" vs "their team" summary is a world class idiot. Just sample those sports sites. It's like college football passion in June.

The midterms are hardly a formality. That's the misconception I see so often here. Midterm electorates are typically 51% female compared to roughly 53.5% in presidential years. That really limits our upside.

We need to pick off governorships next year. That should be at least equal priority as the House. I live in Florida. It can't be understated how much damage Rick Scott has done, and via two extremely tight wins with the wind at his back both times.

Democrats should not be crafting their message to please a small group of upper middle class professionals. That's a small constituency. They should be crafting their message to please the working class who aspire to have their kids BECOME upper middle class professionals. Transcending the class that you were born into has always been the American dream. Republican policies have consistently made it HARDER for poor and working class people to transcend their economic class; while making it easier for the wealthy to accumulate MORE wealth.

Democrats need to stop trying to please trial lawyers and stock brokers, and start trying to please working class folks who want their kids to grow up to BECOME trial lawyers and stock brokers.

Transcending your economic class was made easier by The New Deal and the Great Society, and HARDER by Reaganomics and Trickle Down Voodoo Economics.

Not all "upper middle class white suburbanites" feel that Republicans represent them. There are those who view gated communities not as privileged enclaves, but rather as glorified jails. As long as our system is set up the way it is, organizations like Emily's List, Greenpeace, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, etc etc etc all depend on contributions. The same goes for the Democratic Party. Who makes these contributions, people who can't spare a dollar because they need it to feed their family, or people who can?

Even billionaire Warren Buffet says his taxes are too low. We have nothing to offer him just because he is successful? Nothing? Higher taxes only suck if they are used to feed a bloated, corrupt and self-perpetuating bureaucracy (e.g. Venezuela, Hollande's France). If they are used to improve health care, lessen poverty, bolster education, preserve National Parks and clean up the environment, then they are nothing more than dues to remain in a pretty cool club. Put that way, only the most heartless will remain Republican.

If we are to maintain a big tent, it doesn't seem like a bright idea to declare as enemies, or exclude, the ones who willingly offered to pay for it in the first place.

Some of the voters have simple needs. If I ran as a Republican for Tom Price's seat in GA and my only answer, no matter the question, was "Abortion is murder and I intend to have Roe v. Wade overturned!", do you think I would get any votes? Damn, skippy I would.

"What do you intend to do about the economy?" "I don't know much about it but abortion is murder, etc." Yep, I would get their votes just by saying that. I'm 100% pro-choice, btw.

My point is that only certain things matter to a lot of voters and they won't be swayed. The results from tonight's election, while disappointing, are certainly not surprising.

That is the make up of that district. That's a fact. Ossoff flipped 18% of them to vote Democratic.
In a district held by republicans for 40 years. This was not a failure.

We need to be a big tent and not require ideological purity.

Despite evidence to the contrary, especially in rural, hardscrabble districts:

http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/06/20/the-ossoff-parnell-lesson-stop-chasing-romney-voters/

I gave money to Ossoff, but we'd have been better off running a populist that had the balls to stick by our agenda - Medicare for all Americans, strengthening Social Security, affordable college, equal pay for women - poll after poll after poll after poll shows that over half of Americans want these things.

WHEN WILL WE BEGIN TALKING ABOUT THEM?

WHEN WILL OUR CANDIDATES OWN THEM?