MANCHESTER, New Hampshire—Karl Savage is the kind of guy that makes top Democrats nervous.

He lives in a working-class neighborhood, with a cigar-store Indian perched on his front stoop and a carved Harley-Davidson sign on his garage. He's voted in Democratic primaries, he's older, he's white—and he does not care for Hillary Clinton. Not one little bit.

He made this very clear, in fact, to a Clinton campaign volunteer who rang his doorbell recently only to watch the front door close on him just seconds into his pitch. A short while later, his wife, Pamela, offered this explanation before similarly shutting the door: "We're not interested. We don't like her."

So while Republicans fret about their party's outreach to Latinos and other minorities, this one Saturday morning door-knock encapsulates the fear among leading Democrats: Their party no longer speaks to white people, particularly white men, and they could lose the White House because of it.

"Democrats are hemorrhaging those voters and need to figure out how to stop the bleeding," said Mo Elleithee, a former top Democratic National Committee official who now runs Georgetown University's Institute of Politics and Public Service. "There could come a point where Democrats cannot afford to lose any more white voters. It's in the interest of Democrats to be taking steps to reverse that now."

Elleithee pointed to Florida, where President Obama's 2-and-a-half-point 2008 victory narrowed to a 1-point 2012 win, which then became a 1-point loss in Democrat Charlie Crist's run for governor in 2014—even though the Crist campaign hit its turnout targets for African-Americans and Latinos.

Steve Schale worked on all three campaigns. He said it makes more sense to increase support from whites just a little bit than trying to boost support from minority groups a lot. "Take Hispanics alone: Every point of white share you lose, you have to win Hispanics by 4 to 5 points more" to make up for it, Schale said. "In '08, we knew if we really focused on keeping whites above 40 (percent), we couldn't lose. To me, that makes more sense than always trying to cobble out a tight win. And at some point we are going to max out (with) Hispanics."

Meanwhile, Republican pollster Bill McInturff scratches his head while watching all this hand-wringing over a demographic group that will continue to decline in significance. For one thing, he said, the 27-percentage point advantage Republicans built among white men in 2012 is probably about as bad as it can get for Clinton, given that a sizeable percentage of white men are white-collar liberals.

McInturff has prepared an analysis that even increases the Republican advantage with white men, to 31 percent, and decreases the GOP's disadvantage among black and Latino voters slightly. But it still shows Republicans losing the next election by 3 points.

So to him, it's not even worth debating whether Clinton should work to appeal more to white men, which her husband Bill Clinton

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