Poll: Democrats need to win over blue-collar voters, unmarried women

◼ The poll, which was a joint project between pollster Stan Greenberg and Page Gardner of Women’s Voices Women’s Vote, will be released Friday. It focuses on the direction of the Democratic Party moving forward after a brutal midterms cycle that cost them the Senate majority and a number of governorships. - Politico

“White working class voters will be key: Whether 2016 can be turned into a big enough year to take back a lot of territory in the Congress and states and whether the presidential candidate can build a formidable wall depends on Democrats and Hillary Clinton doing better with white working class voters, both men and women,” the pollsters say in their summary of key findings....

The challenge, the pollsters found, is for Democrats to tap into persuasive economic messaging for blue-collar voters and for unmarried women, who tend to vote on policies that are appealing to families. For instance, Clinton gets just 32 percent of white non-college educated voters against Romney.

“Both unmarried women and blue collar whites see the path to the middle class as increasingly precarious and feel that they are not doing as well as they should be—Jobs do not pay enough to live on, and while the middle class pays a lot in taxes they do not feel the country works for them,” the pollsters wrote in their findings.

Still, those groups are likelier to be persuaded by a reform message about fixing a broken system and “gridlocked government” than what Republicans are offering, the pollsters say. And, in what could be critical for Clinton as she begins to formulate her messaging, discussing pay equity doesn’t appear to have a negative impact with male voters.