Hillary vs. Trump: The Cycle Where Coalitions Get Upended

The 2012 Presidential election cycle seemed custom-made from the beginning as a cycle in which the Democratic Party had a pretty powerful message to send to blue-collar America.  Jobs were slowly but surely rebounding from the depths of the Great Recession and Barack Obama's signature action in that recovery was to bail out General Motors and Chrysler, a decision that seemed risky at the time but paid immediate dividends in the form of rebounding jobs in the industrial Midwest, when the almost inevitable consequence of not bailing out Detroit would be a complete collapse of the entire auto manufacturing industry and the supply chain that fed it. 

Meanwhile, the opposition party's frontrunner for President and eventual nominee was a guy who spent his entire professional career shutting down factories and passing the savings on to the corporate boardroom. After getting into Presidential politics, Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed entitled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt", opposing the auto bailout endorsed by the rookie Obama administration and vowing to do to General Motors and Chrysler--and its workers--what he had done to every other company he laid his fingerprints on.  And months after unofficially getting the nomination, Romney's choice for running mate was a man whose top priority in public life was to take away working people's Medicare.  How, I thought to myself in August 2012, could Obama possibly get so lucky as to be running against the Romney-Ryan ticket?

And just in case the message to working-class America hadn't been made abundantly clear by the GOP's nomination of the Romney-Ryan ticket, Romney made sure to give them one more reminder with his videotaped screed to a room full of rich Republican megadonors that he had no interest in representing "those people" who didn't earn enough money to fall into his tax bracket.  A half century earlier, a Republican ticket like this would have been laughed out of the room by dominant margins by working-class voters.  Instead, the Romney-Ryan ticket held the Democratic Party to a mere 39% of the white vote, and even that 39% number was propped up by upscale whites.  Working-class whites supported Obama with numbers closer to 33% nationally, a nearly 2-1 victory in favor of the guys who took away their jobs in the past, wanted to take away even more of their jobs if given half a chance, thinks they're parasites mooching off the government, and just for good measure, wants to take away their Medicare so that the richest 1% can get more tax cuts.  Even in the best-case scenario environment for Democrats, the tide was turning rapidly against them among working-class whites....but it's about to get much, much worse.

The reason it's gonna get worse is that heading into the 2016 cycle, the Republican frontrunner is running on a campaign of "making America great again, sticking it to China, and demanding immigrants get in the back of the line" while Democrats' campaign is centered around gun control, immigration liberalization, and Black Lives Matter.  If Donald Trump was less of a loose cannon and an asshole personally, his message would probably be enough to win him the 2016 election against likely Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton.  But since Trump is loose cannon amateur, I suspect the same upscale whites who turned against John McCain in 2008 because his running mate was not ready for primetime will vote for Hillary in supersized margins.  But as long as Trump keeps running a campaign touching the themes his primary campaign is centered around, I think he not only maintains the GOP's 2-1 grip on working-class whites, but grows upon it, picking off potentially millions more two-time Obama voters in the Midwest who held on for the Democrats one last time in 2012 when the Democrats were still running as the party of the working guy while Republicans were running as the party of the management.

These divergent coalitions are likely to result in a sweeping Hillary win, at least in the popular vote as she'll undoubtedly dominate in LBJ vs. Goldwater-style numbers in the northeast and the West Coast, and probably do well enough among upscale conservative-leaning whites in the Midwest to hang on to the blue states of 2012 and offset likely losses among blue-collar whites in the same states.  It'll be a pyrrhic victory though because, just as with Goldwater's loss in 1964 that realigned what would become an ascendant future coalition, Trump's loss will win over millions of new converts to the GOP while positioning the party to get back most of the defectors who vote against him in two short years.  In other words, Trump's message is likely to flip working-class whites into a near monolithic bloc of Republican voters who won't flip back....whereas the Greenwich, Connecticut, and Wayzata, Minnesota, crowd that defects to the Democrats in 2016 will likely be on loan for one cycle only, flipping back to the Republicans in the 2018 midterms and staying there far more often than not to give them a dominant majority.

Now it's still too early to declare Trump the Republican nominee.  If GOP primary voters suddenly get their act together and nominate Rubio or even a generic Republican like Jeb!, Christie, or Kasich, they're likely to poach the majority of the voters Trump would be poised to pick up in 2016....white working class voters bristling about Democrats who can't stop talking about gun control, immigration, and Black Lives Matter.  If this were to come to pass, I suspect the Democratic share of the overall white vote would drop from 2012's 39% to something more like 35% in 2016.  If the GOP nominates Rubio, they'll get far more than the 27% of the Hispanic vote that Romney got.  And no matter who the Republicans nominate, I suspect that Obama not being on the ticket ensures both lower turnout among blacks and a Democratic share of the black vote that drops from 93-94% to 91-92%, a consequential amount given that the party is mortgaging its future on permanently overperforming among nonwhites and giving themselves virtually zero margin for error in doing so.

For all the talk by the Democrats about "demographics being destiny", their coalition has only delivered for one man in the last four election cycles, a man who will never be on the ballot again.  If the Republicans further strengthen their hold on whites because of a tone-deaf Democratic Party pushing the last remaining blue-collar whites off the ledge, the GOP's dominance in Congressional and legislative districts will be unbreakable for at least a generation, allowing Republicans to dominate an overwhelming majority of the legislation coming out of statehouses and Congresses that Democrats' best hope of stopping is occasionally squeezing out just enough a coalition to win a few Presidential elections.  At least in the near term though, the rate at which the Democrats are hemorrhaging working-class whites won't be enough for them to even pull that off.

And it's an open question whether the upscale whites that have trended Democrat in the last generation will continue to align with the party either.  I'm not sure how prolific the culture of white-shaming so prominent on college campuses today is in the real world, but if upscale whites are openly and endlessly excoriated in the national conversation for their "privilege" to the point of rendering their voices silenced, that will come with a backlash as well.  The events of recent years seem primed to trigger racial polarization throughout society that will inevitably reach out into our politics.  There's no tangible economic benefit for upscale whites to be aligned with the Democratic Party so if the party base starts villainizing them in public discourse, their reversion to the political party of their parents is likely to be an easier transition than working-class whites generation-long walk away from the Democrats has been.

The Republicans have problems of their own as the unhinged nature of their leading candidates and the primary voters who are supporting them indicate, but they are succeeding in continually moving the goalposts of American politics rightward.  Six months ago, Ted Cruz was considered an unimaginably radical Senator and an unmitigated disaster for the party in the unlikely situation he'd ever be their nominee.  But at the dawn of 2016, Cruz is now seen as the guy who the Republican  establishment will breathe a sigh of relief about if he's able to beat Trump.  Ultimately none of this matters though as long as Democrats choose to forfeit the voters who they successfully appealed to in 2012.  A lot of otherwise smart people seem to think Obama's impressive coalition in 2012 will be locked in place moving forward, with demographics only increasing their advantage.  Common sense says the historical patterns of partisan voting tides will hold and that coalitions within each party will keep evolving and realigning.  Common sense also says that betting the farm on consolidation of a nonwhite voter base with historically lethargic turnout and which is centrally located in a select number of urban areas that greatly dilutes its distributionary benefits is a good recipe for losing the overwhelming majority of elections.  And frankly the fact that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are even in the ballgame in this election contest speaks volumes about how rough of shape the Democrats are really in.