WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Everyone knows the best place to find Democratic voters – the Hamptons, right?

At least that’s what some of the Democratic wannabes seem to think, because that’s where they’ve been spending their time, raising money. If you have time to take in Martha’s Vineyard, bonus points.

Freshman Sen. Kamala Harris of California, with some eight months of national politics under her belt, managed to hit both, according to a report in the New York Times. New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand held two fundraisers in the tony Long Island enclave.

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Democrats clearly have learned nothing from the Hillary Clinton debacle. Instead, they are following her playbook — cultivating donors rather than voters, peddling influence instead of taking a stand on issues, and building networks and campaign teams before establishing a bond with voters.

In airbrushed colloquial language, it is rear-end-backwards.

Gillibrand at least is a bona fide candidate, who has been toiling away in the Senate for eight years. She won re-election in 2012 with 72% of the statewide vote.

One has to wonder whether supporters of Harris, on the other hand, realize just how much baggage she is carrying after a state political career marked by her liaison with California kingpin, Willie Brown.

No wonder then that top advisers from Team Obama are planting stories in support of former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who conspicuously was not in the Hamptons hustling money this summer.

Moreover, the two-term governor actually has a record of accomplishment to run on. His fiery speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention showed he has oratorical talent in abundance.

On the face of it, there is no question that Patrick would make a stronger candidate and a better president than Harris.

But that of course is not the way our electoral system works. Patrick has shown little interest in playing the game that Harris is enthusiastically embracing — the crony politics she knows so well from California.

Barack Obama and his inner circle, whatever their faults, have shown they have pretty good political instincts, and preferring Patrick over Harris is probably an astute choice.

But it shows again that Democrats have failed to absorb the lessons of Donald Trump’s victory — or Bernie Sanders’s popularity. They cannot win the White House by snubbing the white working-class voter, and no candidate from the liberal enclaves on the coasts, black or white, is likely to win that voter.

“At a time when it should be downplaying its image as an out-of-touch bicoastal party, it deepens that image by pushing one more San Francisco radical forward,” George Neumayr recently commented in American Spectator on the push to anoint Harris.

It is not about race, it is about class. And the class Democrats need is not in the Hamptons.

In their article about the Democrats’ shadow campaign, the Times’ reporters mentioned Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, but gave him short shrift. Maybe because he was not in the Hamptons, but rather doing retail politics in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

Ryan, who is most famous for having challenged Nancy Pelosi for the Democratic leadership in the House, would be a long shot to be presidential nominee in 2020. For one thing, lowly congressmen hardly ever get nominated, and Ryan has to win re-election in 2018.

At 44, though, Ryan has time and may just be looking for some seasoning or perhaps a vice-presidential slot.

Be that as it may, he seems to be on the right track. He has ventured out of state as a campaign surrogate, speaking to the mostly Republican Lions Club and attending a fish fry in South Carolina.

For Ryan, the objective was to appeal to voters who might not think a Democrat understands them. “To provide another view — that there are Democrats from Ohio that are part of our team,” Roll Call quoted him as saying.

At the South Carolina event, Roll Call reported, an African-American activist said of Ryan, “He’s at home here. He knows to adjust to whomever.”

Ryan’s main flaw, according to this report, is that he’s not a “prodigious” fundraiser. What a shame. Connects to voters but misses the Hamptons crowd. It’s a hard row to hoe in today’s Democratic Party.