Requiem for the Obama coalition

The Democrats have known for years that they are losing the white working class. Their complacency stems from the belief that they can make up for this by gaining an advantage among the college-educated while maintaining control of minority votes, which really means black and Latino voters.

This has been the social basis of the weak populist identitarianism of the post-Obama era; trickle-down anti-racism for the minorities and suburban students and a few crumbs for the white working class, just enough to keep them tied to the millstone. What we are seeing in this election is the demise of that strategy. The exit of the white working class from the party is now largely complete; in fact, it seems that Donald Trump has almost even penetrated among Latinos and reached black men as well.

But the real story lies deeper. It is not necessarily minorities that defect. It appears to be particularly concentrated among working-class minorities. Kamala Harris still beat Trump in the appeal to non-college minority voters, but exit polls indicate her lead has shrunk by 33 percent compared to Joe Biden’s. The number of Latino voters went from 71 percent for Democrats in 2008 to 66 percent in 2016 and to 53 percent this cycle. The media focus has of course been on its gendered nature, but the real story is that the rejection of the Democrats is essentially an economic phenomenon. It’s working-class Latinos who are leading the march toward the Republican Party, and if you want to know why, just ask them; they say it’s their economic concerns.

Taken together, these data show that the party’s alienation from the working class now extends across racial lines. It’s not just about the loss of white workers, it’s also about… all workersregardless of race. This changing composition of the Democratic Party will only reinforce the tendency to marginalize its Bernie Sanders faction and focus increasingly on drawing the ‘Liz Cheney Republicans’ to the electoral base as they unite with voters from the professional class that the party has. focuses on.

Can socialists still use the Democratic Party’s ballot line as a springboard into mainstream politics? Only if it listens to the blindingly clear message the voters have sent them: white, black or brown, it’s the economy, stupid. It is the lesson of a century of struggle; we just need the left capable of understanding this.