Does the Democratic Party Offer Anything to Low-Income Whites?

This is not what Senator Bernie Sanders needed to be doing yesterday:

Bernie Sanders on Monday attempted to clarify his suggestion that white people "don't know what it's like to be living in a ghetto."

"What I meant to say is when you talk about ghettos traditionally, what you talk about is African-American communities," Sanders told reporters.

Sanders comments, made during Sunday's Democratic presidential debate,drew sharp criticism on social media for suggesting that only African-Americans live in poverty.

A couple of things strike me about this:

1. This doesn't help the perception that everything Sanders is talking about is theory, not practice. Clearly there are a lot of downscale whites in this country.
2. If your message is all economic populism, you probably don't want to be speaking in demographic terms, to be honest. He's trying to ignite a political "revolution" here by appealing to class issues. It's hard to do that while also separating people.
3. And we wonder why we don't win downscale white voters.

Look, all of this begs the question- why would downscale economic white voters vote for Democrats? I understand why the perception is there- in both directions- that there's not much to talk about here. That doesn't make it any more strategically sound or right.

The experience of impoverished white and minority voters are different in some profound ways. Their main similarity is that the experience is not pleasant, and both could use some government intervention to improve their lives. Both would see improved lives if we raised the minimum wage, negotiated better trade deals, re-wrote the tax code to be more favorable to them, and invested in their communities. In other words, both white and non-white low-income earners would have a better life with a progressive economic agenda being enacted in the United States. The Democratic Party is better for all low-income earners.

White low-income earners don't think they do though, because of Democratic rhetoric. Unforced errors like that of Senator Sanders on Sunday night do not help the cause. Rhetoric that tries to adopt solid, across-the-board policies like the minimum wage to specific subsets of the population leaves a lot of people who should be supportive out of the cause. It loses votes, in plain English. 

Democrats need not adopt the kind of racist appeals that Donald Trump has taken on in their own rhetoric. This doesn't mean they shouldn't even try to appeal to groups that haven't been supportive. There is a case to be made, and when Democrats are perceived as dismissing white poverty in their debates, they aren't making it. Perhaps this is just one reason why we still haven't seen that "political revolution" take hold.