At the Corner, Rich Lowry wonders if either Barack Obama or John McCain can connected to working-class voters:

It’s odd how the loser in the primaries, Hillary Clinton, would be
better-suited to the current political environment than either John
McCain or Barack Obama. Neither of them are connecting with
working-class voters or persuasively speaking to economic anxieties at
this extraordinary moment when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are at the
edge of collapse. In 2000, John McCain was the feisty—angry
even—crusader against Washington and the status quo. The trouble was
that it wasn’t the ideal message for a Republican primary audience at
that time, but now that voters desperately want that kind of candidate,
McCain can’t quite find his old 2000 mojo.

Lowry should probably pay more attention to polling data.  Contrary to what the primaries may have suggested, Obama is doing better than expected among voters with a high school education or less (which usually correlates with being low-income):

Since March, Obama has become increasingly competitive with McCain
among men and women with less formal schooling, as well as among white
and nonwhite voters who did not attend school beyond 12thgrade.  Among each of these subgroups of voters, the Obama-McCain gap
has moved 6 or 7 points in Obama's favor over the past four months.

Gallup does kind of skew things a bit.  Lowry is mostly referring to lower-income white voter,
and Gallup didn’t disaggregate their results by race, so it’s not clear
what those numbers would be if it was only lower-education white voters
being polled.  Here comes political science to the rescue!  In his 2006
paper “What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas,” Larry Bartels shows that Democrats have historically taken a significant portion of the lower-income white vote:

Since 1976, Democratic presidential candidates have
received 50% of the votes from the lower-income segment of Frank’s
white working class, 43% from the middle-income segment, and 35% from
the upper-income segment. (The corresponding Democratic vote shares
from the lower, middle, and upper thirds of the white electorate as a
whole are 51%, 44%, and 37%.)

The pattern of income polarization in Figure 3 is consistent
with Stonecash’s (2000, 118) finding that “less-affluent whites have
not moved away from the Democratic Party and that class divisions have
not declined in American politics,” and with McCarty, Poole and
Rosenthal’s (forthcoming, chapter 3) finding that income has become an
increasingly strong predictor of Republican partisanship and
presidential voting since the 1950s. In the white working class, as in
the electorate as a whole, net Republican gains since the 1950s have
come entirely among middle- and upper-income voters, producing a
substantial gap in partisanship and voting between predominantly
Democratic lower income groups and predominantly Republican upper
income groups.

The voting behavior of Frank’s white working class in the 2004
election suggests that, if anything, the partisan divergence between
its richer and poorer segments is continuing to increase. John Kerry
received 49% of the two-party vote in the poorest third of Frank’s
white working class, virtually identical to the 50% received by
previous Democratic candidates over the preceding three decades.
However, his support fell to 40% among middle-income whites without
college degrees, and to 30% among those in the top third of the income
distribution. Thus, insofar as Kerry’s performance reflects a
continuing erosion in Democratic support among Frank’s white working
class, that erosion continues to be concentrated among people who are,
in fact, relatively affluent.

If this holds true, then Barack Obama shouldn’t have any more of a
problem gaining lower-income/education white votes than any other
Democrat.

(Cross-posted at my blog, The United States of Jamerica)