As well, I'm quite aware that white people are the majority of the low-income and poor -- as I'd have to be, having been fed by school breakfast and lunch programs in public schools, had parents benefit from the EITC, and gone to college thanks to Pell grants and subsidized government loans -- and that anti-poverty programs have to be pitched as broadly as possible in order to avoid stirring up resentments, and also for simple fairness reasons. But to focus on that, as some commenters did, was to miss my point, which was different from Mark's.

My point was simply that a lot of likely Democratic primary voters (55-60 percent of whom overall will likely be female, and nearly 50 percent of whom will be black in SC -- though not Iowa, NH, or Nevada) are excited by the prospect of democratic change that Clinton and Obama -- two very qualified candidates in their own right, though perhaps more centrist than some in these parts might like -- also represent, and that we can't discount the appeal to members of historically disenfranchised groups of having a democracy where, all other things being equal, they also get to see people who have shared their social position represented in positions of power where they can help determine solutions, for good or ill, to public problems, through reasoning together with others.

It is a sad fact of American life that the populations with the most disproportionate levels of poverty have also tended to be tremendously underrepresented in elected office. That is not a coincidence. Who governs matters, and has a huge impact on policy. I have no doubt -- can anyone doubt? -- that if this country had had more than 2 percent female members of Congress and 2 female Supreme Court justices since its founding, its policies today would look very different. The same holds true for other groups who have lacked access to the reigns of legislative influence until very recently. I mean, around the same time Wilson was writing that article that Ezra cited -- just 15 years ago -- our Congress was only 6 percent female. Six percent! And there was only one black woman -- one! -- among the hundreds of members of the House in 1990.

A lot of people, including poor people, understand instinctively that their economic prospects and community problems are connected to larger questions of the representativeness of our representative democracy. That's not an argument for identity politics -- it's an argument for democracy. There is pent-up demand at the level of the Democratic base for democratic change that involves expanding the sphere of who governs.

Edwards has a great and comprehensive plan for addressing poverty, should he win office -- a plan I'd hope others would steal liberally from, should they win, instead. And maybe he has to talk tepidly about the power-structure issues than underlie the economic problems many communities have so as to avoid seeming inordinately inflammatory. Certainly neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama are addressing such issues all that much more directly, either (I disagree with Mark's take on that), because the moment you do you get into extremely unpleasant and inflammatory arguments of the sort they both need to avoid in order to be the acceptable change agents people have rallied behind.

All of that said, Clinton and Obama have one huge advantage over Edwards as they reach out to historically disenfranchised groups with disproportionately high rates of poverty, which is that they don't have to make certain arguments explicitly in order for people to hear them. They get to practice dog-whistle politics, and people with ears attuned to certain frequencies can hear their more subtle messages, loud and clear.

UPDATE: Chris Bowers has more here on ideology versus identity as a determinant of voting patterns.

--Garance Franke-Ruta