All 50 states hold elections, but only New Hampshire raises the dead. John McCain and Hillary Clinton, like Bill before her, have now been saved from political extinction by Granite State voters, who have managed in the process to set up a protracted contest for the Democratic presidential nod. (The Republicans were never going to avoid one.)
The battle in the Democratic Party features divisions that the world's oldest political party has never before experienced, just as it has never before seen candidates like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The gender gap, up to now a phenomenon that distinguished one party's supporters from the other's, has become a phenomenon that distinguishes one Democrat's supporters from another's.
But beneath the profound novelties of the Democratic race lurk the same rifts that have characterized the party's presidential contests for 40 years. Breaking down Tuesday's vote, the old divisions of class, and the sometime divisions of age, are plain to see. Like Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore before her, Clinton is winning downscale and older voters, and the support of party regulars. Like Eugene McCarthy, Gary Hart and Bill Bradley before him, Obama has the backing of more upscale and younger voters, and independents.
Obama carried the college towns. Clinton swamped him in working-class Manchester. Among voters who told the exit pollsters that they were getting ahead economically, Obama won 48 percent support and Clinton just 31 percent. But among voters who said they were falling behind economically -- and there were twice as many of those as the "getting aheads" -- Clinton led 43 percent to 33 percent. She led Obama among voters from union households, and she led among voters who said the economy was the most important issue -- which a plurality did.
Over the past week, Clinton showed a keen eye (not just a damp one) for the economically anxious. In Saturday's debate, she was the only candidate to bring up the sharply rising unemployment figures, and in one campaign stop after another, she waded into the weeds of proposals that would generate good jobs. Obama spoke brilliantly of changing history, Clinton prosaically but empathetically of providing employment. There was nothing prosaic, however, about her victory.
But it doesn't follow that because Humphrey, Mondale and Gore all won the nomination, Clinton should be favored, too. Obama, for one thing, is no McCarthy, Hart or Bradley. His ability to command African American support is obviously vastly greater than theirs. (Running against Mondale -- and Jesse Jackson -- in the 1984 Alabama primary, Hart actually won 0 percent of the black vote.) Obama's ability to inspire -- and to pull young voters to the polls -- exceeds that of his upscale-vote predecessors; it exceeds anything American politics has seen in a long time.
Moreover, Obama's appeal should be able to cross barriers of class as it has barriers of race. He was, after all, a community organizer on Chicago's South Side and has longtime fervent admirers among Illinois union leaders and activists. His election-night concession speech in New Hampshire came complete with references to South Carolina textile workers and Las Vegas hotel dishwashers, and with an English-language version of the old United Farm Workers battle cry: "Yes, we can" (" Si, se puede"). With each passing day, Obama incorporates more of John Edwards's attack on corporate power into his stump speech. (As does Clinton, who went after pharmaceutical and oil companies in her own election night speech.) In short, Obama clearly intends to contest Clinton for at least some of her working-class base.
(Obama also has an important edge, not of his own making, if the election comes down to California on Feb. 5. In California, it's up to the state parties to decide whether independents can vote in their primaries, and while the Democrats invited the independents in, the hard-right purists who control the state GOP locked them out. Advantage Obama, to the detriment of both Clinton and McCain.)
Despite their divisions of age and class, the Democrats hardly seem poised to reenact the catastrophic rifts of 1968 and 1972, when the Gene McCarthy and George McGovern kids and the Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson regulars actively hated each other. Then, the Vietnam War and a host of social issues divided the two camps; today it's hard to find an issue on which Obama's and Clinton's supporters disagree.
But electoral politics is a zero-sum game; a new establishment threatens to supplant an old one. Hopes (for Clinton's backers no less than Obama's) have been raised and, for one camp or the other, will be dashed. The Democrats won't fracture, but some bitterness will surely come.
This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.
