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John Judis has a great piece revisiting the idea of the Emerging Democratic Majority and outlining the composition of the majority political coalition that took shape before us last night. In a way, his piece is the analytical cousin of Adam Serwer's commentary arguing that we're all Americans now. There's been a sustained effort in recent years to locate "American-ness " among a certain species of churchgoing, middle-income, white, suburban or rural Republican. It was a very narrow idea of what it meant to fully belong to this country. Empirically, it never made much sense, and last night, the country decisively proved it false. As Matt Yglesias argues, Obama did not win because he figured out the key to the white vote. Rather, it's because the white working class declined in importance:
John Kerry won 41 percent of the white vote, and Barack Obama improved to 43 percent of the white vote. But the white vote declined from 77 percent of the electorate to 74 percent of the electorate. As a result, 31.57 percent of voters were white people who voted for John Kerry in 2004. In 2008, the tally was very similar — 31.82 percent of voters were white people who voted for Barack Obama.The big difference is that Obama increased the share of the black vote from 11 percent to 13 percent, increased the share of the “other” vote from 2 percent to 3 percent, grew his share of the black vote by seven percentage points, grew his share of the Hispanic vote by 13 (!) percentage points, grew his share of the Asian vote by five percentage points, and grew his share of the “other” vote by 11 percentage points. Consequently, while just 16.12 percent of 2004 voters were non-white for Kerry, fully 20.15 percent of 2008 voters were non-white for Obama. That 4.03 percentage point increase was the difference maker.This was not an inevitable coalition, incidentally. The theory of the John Edwards candidacy, for one, was that Democrats could win the white working class by the application of a culturally appropriate populism. That they could, in other words, recapture the coalition of yesteryear. Clinton's candidacy relied heavily on its white working class appeal -- particularly in the latter stages -- but build heavy support from Latinos, and potentially increased support from women, into the theory. But Obama was like a Democratic candidate from 50 years into the future. Indeed, in a memo to the Clinton campaign, Mark Penn wrote, "All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050." It's not that Obama wasn't the right candidate, but that he was not the right candidate yet. His coalition -- young voters, professionals, minorities, etc -- had not yet emerged, and would not emerge for some time. The problem here, in part, was simply that Penn and others underestimated Obama's appeal to traditional Democratic constituencies. But on another level, it was an analytical error born of a basic belief that the majority coalition of this country was the same as it had been in the Reagan years. That that was what America looked like. But the majority revealed in last night's election looked very different. It looked like the America we expected to see tomorrow, not the America we remembered from yesterday.
