Amid the confusions of the election, it is easy to overlook the fact that the percentage of eligible voters showing up at the polls was the lowest ever recorded. This both explains and reflects choices made by the Democratic Party and there is little sign those choices will change. PNS associate editor David Bacon writes widely on immigrant and labor issues.

Their hands sewed the clothes you're wearing and the ones in your closet. They picked the vegetables on your plate, stuffed chips into your computer, and steadied your grandmother when she went to the bathroom in her convalescent home.

But those hands didn't punch the wrong hole on a presidential ballot in West Palm Beach. In fact, they didn't handle any ballots, in Florida or anywhere else.

These hands didn't vote. Voting is rare among low-income and immigrant workers.

"Mainstream national politics basically ignores our needs," says Stacy Kono, youth organizer for Asian Immigrant Women Advocates in Oakland, California.

Kono is too kind. Nationally, less than half the eligible population voted in this election. This pool of actual voters gets comparatively smaller every decade, and older and whiter than the population as a whole. Its median income, already above average, goes up as well.

This is fine for Republicans, traditionally the party of the better-off. But for Democrats, it has forced an historic choice -- whether to expand to include the people on the bottom, or move to compete for the votes of the shrinking pool.

Behind a rhetoric of populism, national Democratic Party strategists, like the Democratic Leadership Council, made the second choice.

When President Clinton, coming into office, had to choose between an all-out fight with the insurance industry and national healthcare (which would have benefited the poor more than anyone), he gave up. In 1996, fighting with a revived Republican Party over a small pool of conservative suburban voters, he decided to outdo it in advocacy on its own issues.

"Welfare reform" pushed the poor off social benefits into the low-wage workforce, often without childcare and with an even smaller family income. "Immigration reform" cut immigrants' benefits, shoving them further into the shadows.

Administration trade policy closed doors too - an expanding economy of low-wage, temporary contingent jobs replaced millions of stable, high-paid union ones.

Even with this record, two key constituencies stuck with Al Gore. African-Americans, even in poor communities, voted large numbers. And the AFL-CIO mobilized its members to an unprecedented degree to vote for a candidate who, despite his opposition to the unions on some basic economic questions, they still viewed as preferable to the alternative.

In states where unions still represent a considerable proportion of the population, like Michigan, that effort proved decisive. But nationally the labor movement now represents only 13 percent of the workforce, and a growing part of that consists of immigrants ineligible to vote.

Mobilized union families cannot fill the gap left by excluding low income people from the political process. And without new political coalitions with immigrants, the African-American vote is not enough either.

A party that cannot, or will not, fight for low income communities of immigrants and people of color, can't attract them to the polls. A party which uses them as political scapegoats doesn't stand a chance.

To end exclusion, a party would have to do more than support issues. It would have to spend resources, political and financial, to bring those potential voters into the electorate. Democratic national strategists aren't moving in this direction.

An immigration amnesty, for instance, would open the door to eventual citizenship (and voting power) for millions of undocumented immigrants. This year the AFL-CIO even came out in support of it. Instead, the administration appealed for Latino votes by supporting much more limited immigration reform -- and backed away from that.

National Democratic and Republican strategists could agree on one thing, however. They both supported expanding contract labor programs for industry, giving employers a vulnerable labor supply while avoiding legalizing the immigrants already here and guaranteeing their workplace rights.

"Industry and its ties with government are too strong," Kono concludes.