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(Star-Ledger file photo)

Everyone’s got a favorite reason for the Democratic Party’s disaster last week: poor turnout of young and minority voters, over concentration on women’s issues, failure to trumpet up-beat economic news, a shameless abandonment of President Obama that played into Republican depiction of him as a liability.

Take your pick. My favorite is something overlooked and maybe more fundamental _ the growing alienation of white voters from the Democratic Party.

It gets lost sometimes by a media used to measuring elections as special interest contests (socio-economic stuff) but we’re are still an overwhelmingly white nation -- some 75 percent white if Hispanics who identify as white are included, over 65 percent even if only non-Hispanic whites are counted.

Democrats can’t win elections, presidential or mid-term, without a substantial black and Hispanic turnout. But it’s become clear they may not even prevail in mid-terms without a much larger share of the white vote.

And, if the loyalties of African-Americans and other minorities cool -- say after Obama leaves office -- the deficit with white voters could imperil Democrats even in presidential years, at least in the short run.

The white alienation from the Democratic Party is not new (remember Reagan Democrats?); its been losing white males for most of the last 40 years, making up that deficit with support from white women (especially singles) and minorities.

Last Tuesday, however, Democrats lost even white women in some key Senate races (Georgia and Colorado, for example) and got fewer than expected in the states they won. The party of women and the “little guy” suffered political hemophilia last week.

It hemorrhaged the once loyal working class white voters. Why? The decline of labor unions and the great urban Democratic machines is a partial explanation.

The hired-for-the day turnout organizations do a decent job, but they lack the personal, round-the-clock links with voters that labor and old Democratic machines boasted. They can’t call on that “throw one in for Barney” tie to the voter, especially when Barney, the local Democratic precinct worker, is also a drinking buddy or friend of the family.

But there’s something else, too -- a sense of fear and foreboding among middle-aged and older whites, especially men.

The America of their youth is vanishing. It even looks different; it’s browner. Often it doesn’t even speak English. And it fights political wars that no longer produce victory parades and the glory that accompanies them.

What they’re feeling is a toxic mix of nostalgia and more than a little hostility. Democrats must begin to acknowledge this and work to dispel these white fears and feelings if they’re to recover their election mojo.

I know working class America. It’s the kind of family I come from. Most whites I’ve talked to appear to sympathize with Hispanics who’ve been here a while, sometimes years, and yearn for citizenship. But many also are put off by the organized Hispanic campaign for citizenship now -- right now -- and for rights to which those here illegally are not entitled.

No one understands this better than the leaders of the GOP -- and this gives them an election link to white voters, even Democrats. A common interest, in short.

Republicans leaders and the party’s rank and file oppose immigration reform (despite hypocritical protests to the contrary) because it would likely mean more Democratic voters; lots of whites oppose reform because it would mean…well, more immigrants who don’t look or talk like them.

Change is almost always unsettling so it’s understandable, this hostility to immigration among middle-aged and older whites. But it’s also pathetic -- and a losing hand in the longer term.

If surveys have it right, the same whites who resent the influx of non-European immigrants are losing their own children and grandchildren on this and other social issues. Younger whites just don’t feel the same threat their elders do.

Their world includes black and brown acquaintances, work colleagues and friends -- even marriage mates -- to a degree the world of their elders never did. The country is full of gaps these days, but none wider than that between middle-aged and older Americans and their children and grandchildren, especially on social issues, including immigration.

And Republicans? In the short run they’re “no” on immigration might be a winner, say in 2016. Politics, after all, is a notoriously short-term trade. But if demography is destiny, the white population of America is fated to decline ­-- to 50 percent or less within a generation.

What then, Republicans?

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