Responding to my earlier post, James Joyner notes that "no Democrat has won a majority of the white vote for president in my lifetime, much less Ezra’s." This is absolutely true, and points to a paragraph that I basically forgot to write. Democrats have dealt with the "authenticity problem" of a non-white working class majority by nominating decidedly white candidates. Namely, they've won by running white Southerners with populist backgrounds. That fits for Clinton, for Carter, and for Johnson (I don't know if James Joyner was around for Kennedy). When Bill Clinton won the election but lost whites, it wasn't exactly a moment that inspired fear among conservative white voters as to their place in a post-racial electorate. Clinton may not have been their white guy, but he was a white guy. Those were hard victories to racialize. That's not true when it's an African-American who wins the presidency despite losing white voters. And what I've been hearing in Washington from liberals over the course of the election makes me rather concerned about what I'll hear from conservatives when it finishes. There's no reason an electoral majority that includes a narrow win among white working class should be more appealing than the same percentile majority that has a slight loss among the white working class but compensates with a lot of young voters. But my hunch is it will be viewed differently, and there are no end of folks who will opportunistically exploit that sentiment. Hopefully I'm wrong.
