As Ruy Texeira pointed out after the 2024 election, VP Harris tried, with lots of help from former President Obama, to put the band back together. I’m talking about that emerging majority band known as the Obama coalition. In fact, they tried and tried, but somehow it did not happen again. You could see the level of frustration in Mr. Obama’s face when he spoke in Philadelphia to a bunch of black men who couldn’t remember that this guy had people fainting in 2008. The times they are changing, or whatever Bob Dylan said.
Things are not going to get better, as Mr. Texeira is reminding us again:
There’s no sugar-coating it: these are disturbing data for a party that thought it was on the verge of a lengthy period of political dominance and now can’t beat a deeply flawed and widely disliked candidate like Trump.
Black voters. Obama carried black voters in 2012 by an amazing 93 points. Harris managed only a 71-point margin. Democratic decline: 22 points.
Latino voters. Obama carried Latinos by 35 points; in 2024, the Democratic margin was down to just 8 points. Democratic decline: 27 points. It is interesting that the overall decline since 2012 is fairly similar between blacks and Latinos; however, essentially all of the decline for Latinos was post-2016 while the black decline has been more or less continuous.
Working-class (non-college) voters overall. Obama was the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the working class as a whole (2-point margin); every presidential election since then has seen steadily worsening Democratic performance among these voters. In 2024, Democrats lost them by a solid 10-point margin. Democratic decline: 12 points.
White working-class voters. The traditional trouble spot for Democrats; Obama lost them by 20 points, which went up to 27 points in this election. Democratic decline: 7 points (which contrasts with the 8-point gain over the time period with white college-educated voters). However, the white working-class decline pales in magnitude when compared to the decline among nonwhite working-class voters.
Nonwhite working-class voters. Obama cleaned up among nonwhite working-class voters, carrying them by 64 points in 2012. In the 2024 election the margin was down to 32 points, exactly cutting the 2012 Democratic advantage in half. This is perhaps the most remarkable trend of them all. A Democratic Party that can’t keep voters that are both nonwhite and working class in the fold is a Democratic Party whose presumed purpose is rapidly vanishing.
Latino working-class voters. The primary locus of this decline was among Latino working-class voters. These voters gave Obama a 38-point advantage in 2024, much higher than among the Latino college-educated. In 2024 this crashed to a mere 6-point advantage for Harris. Democratic decline: 33 points, two and a half times the decline among the Hispanic college-educated.
Young voters. Obama carried voters under 30 by 25 points; in 2024, the Democratic margin fell to 11 points. Democratic decline: 14 points.
The band just doesn’t have any chemistry, as I recall some reporter saying when Paul quit The Beatles. In this case, it was the voters who quit the Democrats.
What happened? As Mr. Texeira has pointed out, this is not a party talking to the people. In other words, this is a band that started playing music that none of the fans recognized or wanted to hear.
They were talking transgender rights when most Americans were worried about walking the street.
They were calling for immigration reform when 20 million were let in with a piece of paper to see a judge.
It was the classic case of disconnect, like when two people are talking a different language.
So can they get their act together and become a political force again? My guess is yes, but change is needed.
Maybe they need to split and form another band with a center-left repertoire and drop all the San Francisco stuff.
Maybe they can go on TV and admit that they blew it by pretending that President Biden was doing OK.
Maybe. Maybe. Let’s see what happens. Don’t expect any quick results because they still think they lost, because we didn’t hear enough from Jasmine Crockett.
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