The emerging Democratic majority has emerged! Or so John Judis told us in 2008, explaining that his 2002 prediction that the future belonged to the Democrats had been merely delayed by September 11. His party, fueled by blocs of nonwhites, women, and hipper young people, would soon turn the whole country blue.
“This realignment is predicated on a change in political demography and geography,” he assured us. “Underlying these changes has been a shift in the nation’s ‘fundamentals’ — in the structure of society and industry, and the way Americans think.”
But events intervene, human nature is not that predictable, and six years into the Obama experience the picture is much more complex. The black population has not been expanding. Hispanics and Asians vote less as a bloc.
Republican Sen. John Cornyn actually carried Hispanic voters in Texas, 48 to 47 percent, while Governor-elect Gregg Abbott won 44 percent of his votes. Exit polls can be prone to error with small voter populations in individual states, but they at least hint that other Republican candidates did quite well — that Gov. Sam Brownback actually carried the Latino vote in Kansas, and that Gov. Nathan Deal only narrowly lost it in Georgia with 47 percent. Nationwide, Asian voters, who backed Obama in 2012 by 73 percent to 26 percent, backed Republicans in House races this year, 50 percent to 49 percent.
And of course, the “war on women” failed this time, in Colorado and elsewhere.
Obama’s declining share of the youth vote in 2012 already suggested that disillusionment had succeeded hope and change. Taking 2008 as the benchmark may have been a mistake, as it’s not every year Democrats come up with a hip, young, biracial messiah who hasn’t had time yet to screw up the country. Obama lost 3 million votes and several percentage points in his re-election. And the question of whether the Obama coalition will turn out for a boring old white Democrat is sure to be the operative one of 2016.
If the demographic of the coalition of the ascendant is open to question, there is another demographic that is not. That is the demographic of the population dearth that has afflicted the Democrats at the state level. After Obama’s election in 2008, Democrats held 59 seats in the Senate, 257 seats in the House, and 29 governor’s mansions. After six years of Obama, those numbers will now probably be 46, 187, and 18 in 2015.
Republicans also have unified control of 23 state governments, as opposed to seven for Democrats. The Senate and the statehouses are where presidents come from; and senators and governors come from the House and state legislatures.
The state of the Democrats’ field for 2016 — which consists of Hillary Clinton and no one else — shows the effects of the loss in the most recent midterms. The loss of seats in the state legislatures presages a similar problem for years to come.
There will also be a disconnect between the younger, browner and hipper Obama coalition and the candidates the Democrats will offer up — old, white, and dull. Beneath Obama are Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, both in their 70s. The Golden State is represented by Dianne Feinstein, 80, Barbara Boxer, 73, and Jerry Brown, who was a new face when elected the first time in 1974.
The hot young faces belong to the Republican Party, which is (slowly) becoming more brown and more female, and which may appeal to the young and the restless. What will emerge from all this no one knows.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.
