Race is a very important factor in voting and cannot be ignored. The country is tribal. Republicans gain by keeping racial animus alive. Trump condemns black NFL players but finds kind words for torch carrying white supremacists.

Bernie Sanders is going to do white outreach and no one has a problem. Mention that black voters need outreach and I am told they need to fend for themselves. Sanders is going after voters who don’t vote their interests. Black voters who Are unenthusiastic because they are taken for granted are dismissed. We are advised that the Democratic Party should not be involved in culture wars. The Democratic base is multicultural. Republicans are bigots who will make culture an issue. Culture award R Us is the basis of the modern Democratic Party. Ignore ethnic groups and lose elections.

We are given myths of how well Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama did with white voters. The peak percent of the white vote was 12% for Jackson and 43% for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Black voters gave each man overwhelming support. Hillary Clinton did extremely well among women except for white women. When it is suggested that Democratic candidates avoid culture wars, it is a slap in the face of the base of the party. Nationally, whites do not vote for the Democratic Party. 

In Georgia, Jon Ossoff ignored black voters and lost. In Virginia, volunteers knocked on the doors in black neighborhoods and Northam won. The party has to do massive outreach to minority voters. The party has to engage in the culture wars.

Yesterday, the man occupying the White House sent out tweets that originated with a racist organization in Britain known as “Britain First”. The woman who leads the ground has been arrested for violence against minorities. One member stabbed a pro- immigration of Parliament to death. The tweets showed fake crimes allegedly committed by Muslim. White voters who get their news from wingnut sources are susceptible to believing these tweets. Muslim lives are put at risk. I expect most a Republicans to remain silent. Democrats have to condemn the guy in the White House.

If you are not a member of an ethnic minority, especially a minority with darker skin, you might be able to ignore the culture wars. If you are an ethnic minority with darker skin, you are in the culture war. If the Democratic Party turns from culture wars, they are turning from ethnic minorities. It is a recipe for losses on mass scale. A majority of white voters nationally do note vote for the Democratic Party.

I wish Bernie Sanders well in his quest.

Seems to me that much discussion on this thread is ignoring the main point of Edsall's piece on how Trump won, most pointedly in this excerpt and graph. Trump won via electoral college by targeting small towns and suburbs.

These are not communities where blacks or other minorities are a majority so they cannot affect the results in those areas without some white votes to go along with them. You can have 100% turnout for a Dem presidential candidate by "the black community" in a community that is largely of color, and this will not stop a Trump. It's because these small partly xenophobic or partly racist communities have a larger influence than they should have on the presidential race. Turnout of more black voters from largely black communities or more immigrants from a largely immigrant community will not affect the presidential race a whit, not without some of these whiter districts:

Dravosburg and Elk County are representative of the thousands of overwhelmingly white communities that shifted sharply to the right in 2016. This shift can be seen in the accompanying graphic, provided to The Times by Myron Orfield, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity there.

The graphic ranks, left to right, the percentage of whites in every municipality within the nation’s top 50 metropolitan areas. The red line shows where Trump did less well than Romney and where he did much better.

Trump trailed Romney in the majority of municipalities, just as he did in the national vote: Trump won 45.93 percent of the total vote last year, 1.2 percentage points less than Romney’s 47.1 percent in 2012 (third party candidates in 2016 picked up slightly more of the vote than they did in 2012). At the point when the percentage of whites in a municipality in the chart reaches 85 percent, Trump’s margin begins to soar, hitting its highest point in those municipalities that are close to (but not quite at) 100 percent white.

Will Stancil, a research fellow at the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity who created the chart, explained to me in an email that

nationally, Trump mostly lagged behind Romney. But in the limited selection of communities where his message hit home, it really hit home, with large gains over Romney really running up the score. These places were very heavily white.

Orfield described the charts in an email:

Trump’s vote skyrocketed in very white suburbs. In the more racially diverse suburbs, particularly those that had been diverse for more than a decade, the white vote for Trump did not increase over Romney’s vote. But in the very white suburbs, particularly in very segregated areas of the Midwest and Northeast, Trump’s vote jumped enormously over Romney’s.

The very white municipalities that voted so strongly for Trump believe that they have reason to worry about the racial stability of their neighborhood.

In the end, it's the same thing as for most blue staters: turnout in presidential doesn't really count for much.

As for the long term prognosis: continual integration of ghetto communities of whites, blacks or inbetween. That means, along with Indian or Mexican or Khmer immigrants coming to a small white town near you, BUT ALSO not bitching about those gentrifying white lesbians who move into the black 'hood, those are the kind of things that are going to beat the gerrymandering problem. As is the continual growth of the demographic of mixed race citizens who are so mixed that they no longer identify with a single racial or ethnic identity group. Give up the physically-based tribalism and a Trump can't play his physically-based culture wars games. (And then we'll move on to real genuine economics and class based games! Education uber alles. Once robotization really gets moving, I'm willing to bet on uneducated blacks and whites with solidarity against the educated elites like we've never seen before. H.G. Wells Eloi and Morlocks finally come to fruition.)

That's my view of it. Just offering an interpretation, take it or leave it. Not interesting in debating it. Those interested in debating it should take it up with Edsall and the political scientists he quotes.