While the media obsesses over Anderson Clayton’s age, Democrats should focus on her message.

The state Democratic party chair told The New York Times: “People with me all the time are like, ‘I wish you’d stop saying we’ve left Democrats behind.’ I’m like: ‘We have. We’ve left people behind’.”

She’s right.

Democrats have lost touch with blue-collar, rural and small-town, non-college, working people who used to be the party’s base.

Some of the problems are racism and cultural resentments that can’t be overcome in the short term.

But the party has become largely urban and university based, too often elitist and looking down on people Hillary Clinton called “deplorables.”

Clayton said there’s a “separation between politics and everyday people right now, and folks are inherently disengaged with it.”

She and her team at the party are attacking that separation the right way, organizing in all 100 counties and leaving out no one.

People in rural and small-town North Carolina have been hammered the last 20-plus years by NAFTA-shuttered factories, the recession that began in 2008 and never ended for some, the opioid epidemic, the Covid epidemic and closures, and the globalization and technology that lifted some people and places but left behind others.

Many young men and women from those places did multiple tours of duty in Iran and Afghanistan.

Democrats talk about “educating voters” and “getting out our message.”

No, they talk too much already. They should listen more.

They should listen to Clayton – and to the people they’ve left behind.

Times story: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/04/us/democrats-north-carolina-anderson-clayton.html