Tom Edsall, longtime reporter for the Washington Post, is a liberal by conviction and a pessimist by temperament. This has enabled him to produce some excellent journalism and books about the problems of the Democratic party over the years. His latest blogpost at the New York Times website is a good analysis of Barack Obama’s attempts to propitiate various liberal constituencies. He identifies the problem this poses:
“The difficulty for the Democratic Party and its candidates arises when voters perceive that elected officials are granting special, non-universal privileges or preferences for political gain. With some regularity over the past four and a half decades, many voters — moderates and conservatives in particular — have demonstrated an aversion to contemporary liberal public policy that provides benefits and protections to groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.”
Edsall also cites Jay Cost’s recent piece arguing similarly that the Democratic party has become too beholden to interest groups.
Edsall’s analysis is bracing and well worth reading, especially for Democrats. I’ve noticed that Democratic analysts tend to take the 2008 election numbers as a benchmark, as if Obama still had a hold on the 53% of the electorate that voted for him. But there’s another possible benchmark, the 2010 elections, in which Republicans won the popular vote for the House by a 52%-45% margin. As I noted in my Examiner column last July, since the mid-1990s the popular vote for the House has become a good proxy for the standing of the president and his party, and in the last three presidential elections the winning candidate has won the same percentage of the vote, or within 1% of it, as his party won in the House popular vote two years before. If that is the case in 2012, Mitt Romney will be elected by a popular vote margin similar to Obama’s in 2008. (And don’t worry about the electoral college in that case: when you win 52% of the vote, you win a majority of electoral votes.)
Near the end of his piece Edsall writes the following:
“The campaign will require Obama to reinvigorate support among core constituencies – minorities, single women, the young, “knowledge workers” and “creatives”– without antagonizing moderates. It will not be easy.”
This suggests to me that he may be making the mistake of using 2008 as the only benchmark. “Minorities, single women, the young, ‘knowledge workers’ and ‘creatives” are by themselves to constitute a majority of the electorate. You need “moderates” too. I would go farther than Edsall here: Obama needs just to not antagonize moderates; he needs to win them back or win them over. He doesn’t have enough of them now. Or at least his party didn’t have nearly enough of them in 2010.
Historically, the Democratic party has been a coalition of very different people, with different priorities and sometimes clashing interests and opinions—white Southerners and big city Catholics in the years between the Civil War and World War II, gentry liberals and blacks more recently. Holding that coalition together has often been difficult, and amassing more than 50% of the vote has been achieved by only four Democratic nominees in history—Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama. Obama’s 53% in 2008 was a considerable achievement, well above the historical norm. That’s another reason why it’s a mistake to use 2008 as your only benchmark.
