Since Barack Obama’s White House wins in 2008 and 2012, political mythology has grown around the emerging voting coalition that made him president — the Obama coalition.

Hillary Clinton failed to reconstruct it in her 2016 loss to President Trump. And a scrum of 2020 Democrats now argue they’re best positioned to find Obama’s magic electoral elixir, what the New York Times called it in late 2016, “an alliance between black voters and Northern white voters, from Mr. Obama’s first win in the 2008 Iowa caucuses to his final sprint across the so-called Midwestern Firewall states where he staked his 2012 reelection bid.”