Confidential to Democratic Planners and Pollsters...

White Catholics are likely not coming back to your party any time soon...

It's not the skin color of the candidates, or systematic racism.  It's the results of your policies, that failed badly to lift the majority of the country during the economic recession years of 2008 through 20012.

According to Pew Research Center’s analysis of the exit polls, [Hillary Clinton] earned only 37 percent of the white Catholic vote.... As poorly as Clinton did, the largest percentage point decrease for a Democratic candidate occurred between 2008 and 2012, which suggests that white Catholics had “soured” on Obama’s presidency before Trump declared for the presidency. Clinton should have seen this coming...

While it remains unlikely that Biden, a Catholic, will be able to pull a majority of white Catholics towards the Democratic Party in November, were he to garner 45 percent of their votes, it seems likely that Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin will again be colored blue...

When Hillary Clinton was asked what she would do, while running for president to help America, she doubled down and said she would continue many of the Obama policies, which led many voters to believe she was delusional and had no clue on how the country as a whole was hurting from systematic inequality and still in need of big fixes, despite Democratic tinkerings.

The policy steps she described had mostly been put forward by her campaign already, so it is hard to describe the speech as a step toward the left, in hopes of corralling Sanders voters, or to the center, in hopes of broadening her appeal to the general electorate. Rather, the speech framed her place in the race as being the candidate who understands the populist discontent but will react to it with practicality. That carries risks, too.

After all, President Obama has spent his entire second term following the same basic strategy of looking for lanes for bipartisan cooperation on things like infrastructure spending and immigration overhaul, while using the federal bureaucracy to try to tilt the playing field toward workers within the confines of current law. As the election advances, Mrs. Clinton will be vulnerable to the charge that she is promising to do the same things as Mr. Obama has, but with the hope of getting better results for American workers.

 She lost a lot of formerly Democratic voters that way, and it appears Joe Biden -- still in hiding? -- is continuing on with the party's mistakes...