But it shouldn’t have been.
Last week’s presidential defeat and insufficient Senate showing has reminded the party of Obama that while there are more Democratic voters than Republican voters in the country, there are more Republican states than Democratic ones in the Union.
This cycle of forgetfulness and painful recollection stretches back to at least 1968, when Democrats shifted away from their traditional New Deal-era coalition built on the white working class. Riven by race and opposition the Vietnam War, Democrats traded the countryside for the cityscape.
It has been enough to keep the party more than competitive in the fight for Senate control, even though the House has slipped away. But presidential victories have only usually come when Democrats have suffered enough to reach beyond the city suffered enough to reach beyond the city limits.
Post-1972 Democratic victories include two Southern governors with broad rural appeal, and interestingly, the first African American president.
While some Democrats would like to believe that Obama’s success is because demography has overwhelmed the middle-class, Middle American, white majority, the president took pains this week to remind his party how he won.
Obama spoke of his time spent in Iowa at fish fries and American Legion Halls, hinting at his remarkable success with white voters in the Midwest and even places like Montana and Nebraska. Obama didn’t win just because he ran up the score among minorities and affluent suburbanites, but because he did so well in rural counties and small towns.
Now, Democrats are scrambling to reengage with white working class voters. The elevation today of Sen. Chuck Schumerto Senate Minority Leader is part of that. Schumer may be the Senator from Wall Street, but he has a track record as a pragmatic lawmaker who tries to keep his party away from liberal pet causes that alienate heartland voters.
We see it also in the discussion of Ohio Rep.Tim Ryan as potential replacement for beleaguered San Franciscan Nancy Pelosias House minority leader. Ryan, who represents part of Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, is exactly the kind of Democrat facing extinction if the blue team has lost its last footholds in the Rust Belt.
But nothing says it better than the custody battle over West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.
Manchin stood up for Donald Trump when outgoing Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid attacked him, as a rumor was circulating that he might switch teams. Given that Trump won West By God Virginia by 41 points, it wasn’t so far-fetched.
But as Democrats scramble to rediscover their roots, Manchin is not just going to remain a Democrat, but was elevated to leadership as part of Schumer’s new team.
Funny how everyone expected Republicans to be the ones looking for a new identity after this election. Instead, the red team isreinstating its leaders by acclimation, while Democrats are trying to reinvent themselves. Somebody call Joe Biden and ask him what they like in Scranton! Somebody lend Pelosi a hard hat!
It was a mix of forgetfulness and wishful thinking that brought Democrats here.
Following the party’s 2004 loss, which came as almost as much of a painful shock as this one, Democrats were doing much of what they are doing now. Names floated for the future included meticulously moderate Virginia Sen. Mark Warner and, of course, then-centrist Sen. Hillary Clinton.
Liberal author Thomas Frank asked “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” and told his fellow Democrats that the only way Republicans won in the heartland was by tricking rubes on social issues.
Having been laid out by George W. Bush’s values voters, Democratic mandarins called for moderation and outreach on “God, guns and gays,” with a heavy dose of muscular foreign policy.
But that’s not what happened, as you may recall.
Democrats instead nominated the most liberal member of the Senate, an African American with less than a single term under his belt who made his bones as an outspoken critic of Bush’s aggressive foreign policy.
Now, we shouldn’t take anything away from Obama’s prodigious political gifts or his former gift, recently reasserted, for bipartisan tone. His 2004 convention speech was one of the finest pieces of modern political oratory. “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America,” he said. “There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America – there’s the United States of America.”
That’s not how Obama would govern, of course. But his shift from uniter to wielder of wedges eight years later is reflective of the shift in thinking inside his party.
The same year that Obama thrilled with his call for unity, star demographer Ruy Teixeira, co-author of the hugely influential book “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” told Democrats a different story.
Teixeira and John Judis explained that while the Bush team was reveling in what they thought could become a near-permanent Republican majority, the GOP’s doom was already written in the census results.
Republicans were strong now, they wrote, but the rising tide of Hispanic voters would swamp rural and small-town whites. The future was a minority majority America and the Republicans would find themselves shut out.
Teixeira argues in a new piece that Trump’s victory reflects a last gasp of these white voters and that while Republicans have won this battle, they will lose the demographic war.
He has a point about the future of the GOP, but he and his party are basing their suppositions on a couple of constants: First, that white support for the GOP has topped out and, second, that the party can’t maintain such high numbers with white voters while broadening their coalition.
The authors may yet be proven right, but this promise of demographic destiny has already cost Democrats their House and Senate majorities and now, the White House.
When we believe that our success is inevitable, we begin to take things for granted. And Democrats assumed that since eventual supremacy was a given, they could cater only to their coastal and big-city base. Gainsaying Rust Belt Democrats who warned about global warming regulations, gun control and the embrace of free trade were marginalized and urban elites were given free rein.
Now, the party finds itself at its lowest ebb on the state and federal levels since at least 1989 and without a clear path forward.
There’s no question that the next 20 years hold plenty of peril for the GOP and its tall, narrow base. But demographic arrogance has certainly left Democrats with a long way to go.
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