This is nonsense...did you mean to cite it to refute it? Even the most cursory examination of that "new base" reveals that they are a minority, and it's doubtful in the extreme that a political party made the "conscious, calculated decision" to abandon the majority of the population to court the minority.

I wonder if you were there through those years. It's oh so easy to look back and ascribe motives to people you never knew in meetings you never attended. The fact that you don't know of any policies intended to boost the middle class is evidence only that you don't know of any, not evidence that none existed.

To know what brought about a hypothetical decline in the middle class you might have to look at what forces caused its rise in the first place, and of course how long the golden era actually was. You would also have to look at the exclusions from that middle class to separate myth from reality of the supposed golden age.

Given that neither minorities nor women were allowed to participate in middle class occupations when I was young, given that many of those barriers have been broken down in my lifetime and that doing so has radically remade the workforce, it seems facile and frankly lazy to attribute voting patterns so strongly to political parties and their actions. Politics and government are just a slice of the factors in these changes, and not necessarily a large one.