One of the realities that's a bit too treacherous to get into before the election but will surely feature into a lot of post-election analyses is the fact that John McCain is probably going to win whites and lose the presidency. Even now, 10 points down in the polls, McCain has a seven point lead among white voters. But white voters are not the only voters. Rather, they're 68 percent or so of the populace (though probably somewhat more of the electorate).You can lose them by a couple points and still win the election handily. The question will be how that win is understood. I've been struggling for awhile to put this into words, but there's definitely a odd demographic weighting among DC pundit types wherein white voters -- particularly white working class voters, and even more particularly older white working class voters, and even more particularly older white working class voters who live in between California and New York and in sparsely populated cities -- are somehow a more "authentic" foundation on which to build an electoral majority. And this is true among liberals as surely as among conservatives. A couple older writers have asked me what happens if Obama wins the election and loses the white working class, and seemed confused by my reply that "he becomes president." The emergent post-McGovern coalition uniting the professional class with minorities with the young and with the poor is not, as far as I can tell, considered a particularly legitimate demographic coalition. Too many of its members drink Starbucks coffee or something. And on some level, I get it: The Democratic Party has long understood itself to be the party of West Virginian coal miners and Pennsylvanian machinists, and deviation from those voters marks a failure of that strategy. But those voters are a declining slice of the electorate even as they're increasingly sold as its crucial center. And my hunch is that's going to create some serious tensions and resentments in coming years as electoral outcomes increasingly reflect those demographic realities and Republicans work to leverage the cultural dissonance to sow a sense of unfairness about the outcome.
