Reagan Democrats are no longer Democrats. Will they ever be again?

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The Reagan Democrats are now the Trump Republicans.

• Far and away, the most dominant theme in the post-election conversation about Hillary Clinton's defeat has been her underperformance with white working-class voters in the Rust Belt. Nationally, exit polls showed Donald Trump won 58 percent of the white vote - one percent better than both Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Mitt Romney in 2012.

• Macomb County, Michigan, is where Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg went in the mid-1980s for his seminal study on blue-collar "Reagan Democrats." Stan became a key adviser to Bill Clinton. As a southerner with national ambitions in the Reagan years, the then-Arkansas governor understandably obsessed with appealing to these voters, who had overwhelmingly supported John F. Kennedy and the New Deal before becoming foot soldiers in Reagan's Revolution. Clinton successfully brought them back into the Democratic fold in 1992.

Barack Obama carried Macomb, a working-class area outside of Detroit, in both 2008 and 2012. Not only did Trump win 54 percent of the vote there, but he did so on record high turnout. Without his strength there, he could not have carried Michigan by 13,000 votes.

The area has become Ground Zero of the mainstream media's exploration into how it got so caught off guard by Trump's upset win. Many news organizations - from community weeklies to theDetroit metropolitan papers, the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post - deployed reporters to query voters about how they could go from backing Obama to getting behind Trump.

• Clinton's struggles with working-class whites played out in many places beyond Macomb. The media focused way too much on the inner-ring suburbs during the run-up to the election and not enough on the exurbs and rural areas. Charlie Mahtesian, who used to edit the Almanac of American Politics, flags three other very telling examples in Politico:

In Pennsylvania: Obama took a 492,000 vote margin of victory out of urban Philadelphia in 2012. Clinton only got a 455,000 vote margin. (She lost the state by 68,000 votes.) Clinton ran close to even with Obama's pace in the Philly suburbs. She even managed to win back well-educated and affluent Chester, the only of the four collar counties which voted for Romney in 2012. "The difference makers were places like Wilkes-Barre's Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania," Charlie writes. "Obama carried the county twice, winning 52-47 in 2012. Trump crushed Clinton there, 58-39. . . . In the largest county in western Pennsylvania after Pittsburgh's Allegheny County, Trump needed a big number and he got it. Where Romney won 61 percent in Westmoreland, Trump won 64 percent amid higher turnout than in 2012."

In Ohio: Obama won Mahoning County 63-35 against Romney. Clinton won 50-47. "In similarly situated nearby counties, she flat out lost. Among them was neighboring Stark County, a bellwether in this heavily blue-collar region that went Democratic in the last three presidential elections. There, she ran 11 points behind Obama's 2012 performance."

In Wisconsin: Trump underperformed typical Republican candidates in the suburban counties outside of Milwaukee, but he more than made up for it in more rural areas like Green Bay. And turnout in the state's two Democratic strongholds, Milwaukee County and Madison's Dane County, was smaller than in 2012. Trump won 63 percent in rural Wisconsin, 10 points better than Romney.

• The Post's Dave Weigel spent the past two days in Kenosha, Wisconsin, chatting with Obama voters who turned to Trump. He has several excellent vignettes: Bob Oldani, 71, cast his first Republican vote ever for president. "We need a change in everything, and I hope he can do it," the retired machinist said. "This guy's a billionaire, so I'm thinking he can say, 'Hey, let's just get the job done. I don't need your money.'" What about the Access Hollywood tape? "As far as these rumors with the girls, and all of that," he said, "if you do your job, who cares?"

BROOKLYN IGNORED MANY RED FLAGS:

• Clinton's loss in Michigan's Democratic primary this March, despite every poll showing her ahead, should have been a bigger wake-up call than it was for her campaign.

• Many Democrats are now complaining that they tried to sound the alarm, but their warnings went unheeded. Lots of Clinton allies are faulting the campaign for failing to develop a credible message for downscale white voters. They argue that she should have talked more about the economy all along, as Bill did in 1992.

• Bill Clinton repeatedly pressed his wife's strategists to do more, but his ideas were dismissed as outdated.From Politico's Annie Karni: "Some began pointing fingers at the young campaign manager, Robby Mook, who spearheaded a strategy supported by the senior campaign team that included only limited outreach to those voters - a theory of the case that Bill Clinton had railed against for months, wondering aloud at meetings why the campaign was not making more of an attempt to even ask that population for its votes. . . . Bill's (position) was often dismissed with a hand wave by senior members of the team as a personal vendetta to win back the voters who elected him, from a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map. At a meeting ahead of the convention at which aides presented to both Clintons the 'Stronger Together' framework for the general election, senior strategist Joel Benenson told the former president bluntly that the voters from West Virginia were never coming back to his party."

• The Clintons themselves are not blameless. The farther removed they got from Arkansas, the more they lost touch as they entered the highest stratosphere of the New York elite. Bill stopped eating at McDonalds and became a vegan, a telling metaphor David Maraniss highlighted in his brilliant piece Thursday.

• Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell writes inan op-ed for Friday's Post that she repeatedly suggested Clinton was in trouble with working-class voters in her state, but she was brushed aside. "The 'Downrivers' - a collection of communities south of Detroit - mean auto plants and manufacturing with strong union membership. From the beginning, I knew the Downrivers would support Trump both in the Republican primary and in the general," Dingell writes. "[President Obama] did save my state's industry. But what many keep missing is that working men and women don't see this in their lives. They feel the system is rigged against them. And those workers are white, black, Hispanic, Muslim - all races, creeds and colors. Economic and national security fears overcame all other factors when they walked into the voting booth."

• Joe Biden was also speaking publicly about the party's problem. For example, in a discussion on Air Force Two last month, returning from a swing to Missouri, the vice president blamed the Democratic drift on what he described as the party's fixation on "pedigree."

Hillary Clinton got crushed hardest in the very places where Biden was most often deployed as a surrogate, from Youngstown, Ohio, to Scranton, Pennsylvania. "What are Republicans gonna do for you, white working-class folks? Well, guess what, they ain't gonna help your kid get to school, they're gonna cut it," he'd say. "They're not gonna help you pay the mortgage. They're not gonna help."

• There is a lot of soul searching going on inside the West Wing, and a real sense has emerged among senior staff that President Barack Obama's 56 percent job approval rating obscured his failure to connect with working-class whites after he got reelected in 2012. "He was insulated by a White House bubble and a staff with fewer ties to those parts of the country that were most alienated," the Post's Greg Jaffe and Juliet Eilperin write in a deep dive. "His executive actions, essential to advancing his agenda in an era of gridlock, inflamed an increasingly partisan electorate. . . . Throughout his second term, Obama spoke only fleetingly of the economic pain in the country caused by globalization, demographic changes and technological advances. His second-term agenda was dominated by immigration initiatives and a sweeping trade deal with Asia."

A missed opportunity: "Senior White House officials in January described ambitious plans to have the president speak more directly to Americans who disagreed with him. But those efforts were often sidetracked by higher priorities, such as the police shootings and protests this summer. . . . By early fall, Obama had shifted his focus to mobilizing young and minority voters. . . . His mocking of the billionaire as better suited to 'The Bachelorette' or 'Survivor' than the Oval Office sometimes made it seem as if he were also mocking Trump's supporters."

• The White House focused too much on mobilizing Obama's core base of supporters than persuading disillusioned white folks. A micro-targeted media strategy took precedence over speaking to the entire country. "In some instances, Obama's strategy for dealing with the polarization in the country may have made the problem worse," Jaffe and Eilperin note. "To drum up support for its policies, the Obama administration often sought out new media venues to mobilize small, loyal audiences. After his State of the Union address, for example, Obama sat for interviews with enthusiastic and often fawning YouTube stars to talk about his agenda for 2016, the tax on tampons and why he preferred rapper Kendrick Lamar to Drake."

As a senior administration official put it, "It would be a mistake if the Democratic Party didn't use this as a sobering moment of reflection on whether or not we are connecting, or if we're trying to connect in an outdated manner."

THE AUTOPSIES ARE POURING IN:

• Hundreds of thinkpieces and op-eds about Democrats turning their backs on folks who used to be central of their coalition have been written since Wednesday morning. Many more are on the way. Here are a few good examples:

The Atlantic's Ron Brownstein: "How the Rustbelt Paved Trump's Road to Victory"

William Frey of the Brookings Institution: "The demographic blowback that elected Trump"

ProPublica's Alec MacGillis: "Clinton and the Democrats were playing with fire when they effectively wrote off white workers in the small towns and cities of the Rust Belt."

The American Prospect's Steven Greenhouse: "While the Donald had a powerful message for white workers, Clinton failed to convey a robust pro-worker stance."

Former MSNBC host Krystal Ball, a Kentucky native and failed Democratic House candidate: "There was an incredibly revealing moment at the DNC. In an effort to rev up the crowd one of the speakers called out: 'Who in this room works with their hands?' Silence. It was a lot more than one candidate who led us to this place."

Henry Payne, an auto columnist for the Detroit News, penned an op-ed for National Review about the potency of Trump's protectionist message. He noted that the leader of the Democratic opposition to NAFTA in 1993 was House minority whip David Bonior, who represented Macomb County. And he argues that Trump's broadsides against trade deals, while misguided, really resonated.

Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis, a former chief of staff to West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, reflected on focus groups he conducted of undecided voters: "Many believed that their jobs and their communities were sacrificed in the name of corporate greed, globalization and trade - all to benefit a class of corporate and political elites who, in their opinion, could care less about their lives. . . . While these voters despised Trump's offensive statements - a fact that the exit polls confirm - his economic message spoke to them in an incredibly powerful way. Clinton's simply did not."

• Many people are also turning to book-length explorations of white disillusionment for deeper answers. These are five of the tomes generating the most buzz:

"The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America," by George Packer (The New Yorker staff writer had a relevant piece in the Oct. 31 issue about " Clinton and the Populist Revolt.")

"Hillbilly Elegy," by J.D. Vance

"Coming Apart: The State of White America from 1960 to 2010," by Charles Murray

"The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker," by Katherine Cramer

"Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right," by Arlie Russell Hochschild

WILL DEMOCRATS OVERREACT?

• Many inside the party fear that there will be an overcorrection as 2020 approaches.

• Not only did Clinton win the popular vote, but if marginally more African Americans had shown up in Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee, the narrative now would be all about the emerging Democratic majority. Consider this: Black voters accounted for 19 percent of the electorate in North Carolina on Tuesday, compared to 23 percent in 2012. Clinton lost the Tar Heel state by four points.

• The Latino vote might have been overhyped in the days before the election, but they still voted in record numbers. And four in five supported Clinton,according to two academics, who also estimate that between 13.1 million and 14.7 million Latinos cast ballots. That's a significant increase from the 11.2 million Latino votes cast in 2012.

• The electorate of tomorrow couldn't win the election of today for Democrats, but that does not mean it will not win the election of tomorrow. Ruy Teixeira co-authored a famous political science text in 2002 called "The Emerging Democratic Majority" about how demographic changes benefit Democrats. In an interview last night, the senior fellow at the Center for American Progress pointed out that, because of demographic changes alone, if Democrats in 2020 garner the exact same share of every racial group that they got in 2016 they will win Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida - and come close in Arizona. That's how relatively close the election was and how fast the complexion of the country is changing.

"The minority vote and the white college-educated vote would have been perfectly adequate to win this election . . . but the working class white vote did not stay the same," he said. "If we assume that Trump has promised the sky to the white working class and if we speculate that he might not actually be able to deliver, there may be some opening to reach these voters if you take them seriously."

• In "Brown is the new white," a book that has been widely read by progressive elites in Washington for most of the year, Steve Phillips argues that Democrats lost in the 2010 and 2014 midterms because they chased white swing voters at the expense of minorities. The African American consultant argues at length that turnout dropped off because minorities did not think politicians were speaking to the issues they cared about. "When you ignore them in a futile fascination with white swing voters, they will ignore you," he writes. "The worst possible thing Democrats could conclude is that the country's voters have moved to right." Phillips quotes Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy saying after his narrow 2014 win: "The only middle-aged white men who voted for me were myself and my brothers. We have to speak to minorities. And we're probably never going to have a majority made up of middle-aged white men."

THE DEMOCRATIC CIVIL WAR HAS ALREADY ERUPTED:

• Tensions erupted at the first post-election staff meeting of the Democratic National Committee yesterday. One guy named Zach reportedly "screamed" at interim chair DonnaBrazile, eviscerating her for being "part of the problem.""Why should we trust you as chair to lead us through this?" he said, faulting her for backing "a flawed candidate," three sources told the Huffington Post's Jennifer Bendery.

• The opening salvos in the battle for the soul of the party are already being fired. "Much of the talk since Tuesday's election has focused on selecting a new chairman, with the most frequently mentioned successor being Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), a leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who backed the primary bid of Sanders," John Wagner reports. He has the support of Sanders and some from the establishment wing.

Former DNC chair Howard Dean also announced that he wants the job again:

• Elizabeth Warren channeled Ted Cruz at an AFL-CIO meeting yesterday. During a question and answer session before a formal speech, one union leader said she feared that her members were uninspired to work hard this year because they're seeing Democrats "rolling over" on issues they support, like single-payer health care. "I have been so frustrated for so long with Democrats," the Massachusetts senator replied, according to the Boston Globe's Annie Linskey (who was allowed into the closed-press meeting). "There are times, there are times when I think, the Republicans -- when they're wrong -- they fight harder. For Democrats, we're like the reverse. . . . I want to see my representative, and my senator, out there fighting even if they end up losing. I'd rather see them fighting!"

• Bernie himself opened the door to running for president again in 2020 Thursday, when he'd be 79. "Four years is a long time from now," the Vermonter told The Associated Press. "We'll take one thing at a time, but I'm not ruling out anything."

• The 2018 governor's race in California may wind up being a significant proxy battle in the fight over the future of the Democratic Party. Yesterday former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa formally announced his candidacy by saying that he wants to appeal to those who have been "left behind" in the new economy, along with promising to repair the state's deteriorating infrastructure. (Sound familiar? Trump made the same points. . .) He's starting his campaign with an extended "listening tour" through the drought-ravaged Central Valley (not the population centers). He will face former San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, the current lieutenant governor and a longtime political rival, who announced his candidacy to succeed Jerry Brown back in February of 2015. The Asian state treasurer and a woman who used to be the superintendent of the state's school system are also expected to run. The Los Angeles Times notes that billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer is also considering getting into the race.