One day a majority of minorities may put the Democrats permanently on top. But not yet

The elusive progressive majority

IN BOXING they call it the tale of the tape. Before battle is joined, fight fans and managers compare the height, weight, reach and record of the contestants. This, roughly, is the equivalent moment in American politics. One year out from a presidential election is the point at which big strategic decisions about the shape of the forthcoming fight are being made. It is also the time when a bad strategic decision can turn out to be fatal.
Is the campaign to re-elect Barack Obama about to make a mistake of this kind? One person who thinks it might be is Bill Galston, a former member of Bill Clinton’s White House. He has just explained why in a paper for the Brookings Institution, of which he is now a senior fellow. But to understand his worries you need first to look back more than a year at a different argument set forth by another political analyst, Ruy Teixeira, not long before the Republicans captured the House of Representatives in November 2010. In the long run, Mr Teixeira argued then, and unless the Republicans changed their ways, the great tectonic plates of American society were moving against them.


Mr Teixeira’s point was not that the Republicans were necessarily on the wrong side of the argument. It was more that they were on the wrong side of demography. Simply put, most of the parts of American society that have tended to vote Republican are shrinking in size. By 2050, on current trends, the United States will no longer have a white majority. The Latino share of the population will double from 15% to 30%, and the share of African- and Asian-Americans will grow from 19% to 24%, so turning America’s minorities into a proportion of just over half by the middle of the century. Since minorities vote disproportionately Democrat (80% voted for Mr Obama in 2008), that is bad long-term news for the Grand Old Party unless their preferences change.
If you slice the population by age and occupation, the prospects for the Republicans look no better. By the end of the decade 90m voters will be so-called “millennials” (roughly, the generation born between 1978 and 2000), almost four out of ten. In 2008 this cohort supported Mr Obama by 66% to 32%. Mr Obama also scooped up a handsome majority of the votes of unmarried and college-educated women, white college graduates with “professional” careers, and religiously unaffiliated or “secular” voters. One thing that all of these groups have in common is that they are growing fast as a share of the population, at a time when traditionally pro-Republican groups, such as the white working class and conservative white Christians, are shrinking fast.
Mr Teixeira’s paper was about the long term: the shifting tectonics of America were putting the Democrats in a more comfortable position than the Republicans, but to press this advantage home Mr Obama would still have to perform effectively in government. So far, in the eyes of many Americans, he has not. Over half disapprove of his job performance. Moreover, this failure is not just turning “independent” voters against him. It is also weakening his support among some of the fast-growing groups who helped him win in 2008.
The young offer an example. The Pew Research Centre reported last week that the age gap that emerged in the 2008 election remains wide. The millennial generation continues to favour Mr Obama by 61% to 37% overall (though Mr Obama and Mitt Romney, his most likely challenger, score evenly among young whites). But will they vote? The young have been faster than the old to lose faith in politics. According to Pew, the engagement of millennials is much depleted. At this time four years ago, 28% said that they were giving a lot of thought to the presidential candidates, and 24% that they were following election news closely. These numbers have slumped to 13% and 17% respectively. The enthusiasm of Latinos seems to be waning too. At the same time, Pew reports a surge in the interest shown by older Republicans.
Colorado versus Ohio
Turn back now to Mr Galston. His fear is that Mr Obama, who has lately moved sharply left to energise the party’s base, is focused too much both on Mr Teixeira’s alluring but distant future and on his own victory of 2008. That victory was built on a new coalition of minorities, young people and college-educated white women. A similar coalition re-elected a Democratic senator in Colorado in last November’s mid-terms, bucking the national trend. It was a victory that David Axelrod, one of Mr Obama’s closest political advisers, who has quit the White House to work on the campaign, called “particularly instructive” in an interview in January with Ronald Brownstein of the National Journa l.
What if Mr Obama tries to win in 2012 by relying more on this new coalition of progressive voters in states like Colorado than on the traditional Midwestern battlefield states such as Ohio, which contain a large share of white working-class voters who by all accounts are even less keen on Mr Obama this time than they were in 2008? That, says Mr Galston, could be “a mistake of epic proportions”. Obamamania is over. And although in theory Mr Obama could lose in Ohio and several other Midwestern states and still gather enough electoral-college votes in other states to be re-elected, Colorado, where nearly seven out of ten voters in last year’s mid-terms had at least one degree, was a “total outlier”. Ohio, with its increasingly disgruntled white working-class, is far more representative of the rest of America.
Mr Galston notes that the last Democrat to win the White House without Ohio was Kennedy—but he won a swathe of southern states, including South Carolina and Texas, which are nowadays beyond the Democrats’ reach. One day, perhaps, demography will favour a “progressive” coalition. But this president needs Ohio and its ilk, which means addressing the concerns of its voters, and moving back to the centre.