Election 2012: The Transition To A New Political Era

It's been 10 years now since the last election night when I felt good about the state of American politics and the civic-minded health of its people.  Of the 18 election nights I've experienced since my first glimmer of interest in American politics, I can say without hesitation that the most satisfying was 2012.  Barack Obama was decisively re-elected, outperforming the polls with a comprehensive coalition of urban liberals, suburban moderates, working-class whites from the Midwest, and 80% of nonwhite voters.  In Congressional races, the Democrats weren't able to overcome merciless Republican gerrymanders put in place the year before, but won the Congressional popular vote with Democrats victorious in most of the battleground races in the House and hanging on in a few seats where their defeat seemed inevitable going into election night.  And the outcomes of 2012's Senate races were even more gratifying.  Democrats won 25 out of 33 Senate races that year, outperforming Obama in almost all of them, and in multiple cases outperforming Obama by double-digit percentages.  Nearly every race that was even in the periphery of competitiveness went the Democrats' way that year.

American politics and the voting patterns of its people made sense that year.  The face of the Republican Party was a private-equity baron who spent his life shutting down factories while his running mate's claim to fame was wanting to privatize the Social Security and Medicare of the people whose factories got shut down.  Congressional Republicans had badly overreached with their newly minted majorities a year earlier, taking the country to the brink of a financial catastrophe over ill-advised spending cuts that weren't particularly popular.  Voters responded to this tone-deaf Republican offering as you'd expect they would have based on historical precedent, rejecting the Presidential ticket and their Congressional surrogates.  

By and large, the ebb and flow of our two-party system and the electoral coalitions that made up the two-party system for more than a generation remained intact.  Not only did all seem right in American politics in the days and weeks following November 7, 2012, but it felt like the Republican Party was genuinely on its heels moving forward based on the comprehensiveness of the Democratic coalition that had soundly defeated them.  While I never bought into arguments about "permanent majorities" for whichever party won the last election, just about everybody including myself couldn't help but look at those 2012 election results and believe the Democrats had a structural advantage in elections for the foreseeable future.

How'd that work out?  The party's weakness in the next four election cycles speaks for itself.  True, they do currently hold the White House, Senate, and House, but pulled that off with an electoral inside straight decided by 90,000 combined votes in an electorate of 160 million, all during a year where every conceivable metric was pointing to a Democratic landslide based on past precedent.  Particularly in the U.S. Senate, they'll likely need that kind of electoral inside straight to ever control the body again in the generation to come.  And the same three states that cost Democrats the 2016 Presidential election (Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin) keep drifting further to the right of the country, and if the trend continues, assures the Republicans will have a considerably easier path to 270 electoral voters in the Presidential cycles ahead.

How did things go so horribly wrong for the Democrats?  As is always the case, there were a number of factors, but a combination of arrogance, flat-footedness, and lack of imagination from either Democratic Party leaders or large factions of their base were the common denominators.  While Democratic Party officials have no control of what armchair lefties spout in the increasingly divisive sewer of social media, their failure to distance themselves from strident activists who loudly endorse unpopular positions ultimately became viewed by a silent majority of voters as tacit support.  When a stage full of Democratic Presidential candidates outright confirmed the lack of daylight between the party's top national emissaries and ideologues from the furthest reaches of left-wing academia back in 2019, the limitations of the Democrats' electoral reach intensified further.

But if I'm gonna isolate a single factor that previewed the Democratic Party's long political winter following the halcyon days of 2012, it's the universal overinterpretation of the nation's demographic trendline.  A full decade before the 2012 election, the political science opus "The Emerging Democratic Majority" by pollster John Judis came out, theorizing that the country's changing demographic profile, centered around nonwhites becoming a much larger slice of the American electorate, portended future electorates far more friendly to the Democratic message.  It was a reasonable theory, and after a spattering of evidence in subsequent cycles suggesting Judis was onto something, the results of the 2012 election really made him seem prophetic.  The 2012 electorate had grown to a record 28% nonwhite, and a full 80% of them voted for Obama, all while less diverse white-majority states in the Midwest held serve with their traditional lean toward Democrats, just as Judis predicted would happen.

And thus, starting in 2013, Democratic political leaders and their base voters alike, along with many exasperated Republicans, began to behave as though the 2012 election was the end of history.  Front and center to everybody's political calculus was that increasing racial and ethnic diversity would inevitably lead to decreasing political diversity.  If 80% of 2012's nonwhite electorate favored Democrats, then assuredly 80% of even more nonwhite future electorates would favor Democrats.  In their minds, there was no possible alternative scenario.

This mindset was at the center of every policy and messaging decision the Democrats and their culturally left supporter base would make in the years ahead.  And while they didn't see Donald Trump's Presidential victory in 2016 coming, they still reassured themselves that it was the final populist gasp of a white-majority electorate that would be rapidly outmoded en route to our inevitable single-party progressive state no more than one or two election cycles away.  This cocksure electoral self-assurance guided policies on everything from criminal justice reform to racial guilt maximalism to, especially, laissez faire enforcement of the U.S. border.

No longer did the left have to pander to working-class whites, the thinking went.  Democrats could afford to lose them en masse and still win elections because a more diverse electorate would inevitably see the world differently than those grumpy old whites heading to the demographic graveyard.  Concerns about the electoral consequences of crime, immigration, and the culture wars would soon enough be a thing of the past because all people of color were a monolith of unwavering progressivism who could for generations to come be counted upon to agree with the worldviews of diversity study professors at Ivy League colleges.  

Voters of color were assumed to always tolerate rising crime in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion, accepting that repeat criminal offenders in their neighborhoods not be prosecuted and champion that as a victory for social justice. It was similarly assumed that voters of color would always associate themselves as the "victims" in the ever-escalating morality play of racial guilt at the centerpiece of every civic conversation, rubber-stamping culpability for trillions of dollars in slavery reparations without protest, as one key example.  And as I eluded to above, Hispanics and Asians were assumed by pretty much every bean counter in the political universe to be more or less single-issue voters motivated by unbridled immigration expansionism.  The upscale white liberals who prioritize these themes were convinced that voters of color would reflexively follow them as they pursued these priorities in recent years.  It wasn't even a point worth considering within progressive circles.  It was an article of faith.  Under no circumstances could the party of Trump get a foothold among any voters of color, centuries worth of electoral data to the contrary be damned.  

And by the time 2019 came around, most Democratic Presidential candidates had become convinced they could adapt these principles as part of their official campaign platform and do so without consequence, despite polling showing 65% opposition among the electorate for several of the above-cited policies.  Enough voters of color would have their backs to overcome this overwhelming sentiment of opposition, it was assumed.  There wasn't a moment's hesitation by this stage full of Democratic Presidential candidates to raise their hands in favor of decriminalizing illegal border crossings and including foreign nationals in their plans for free government health care.  After all, what person of color would ever be against that?

As it turns out, quite a substantial number.  Racial subsamples in polls have too high of a margin of error to be reliable, but preliminary polling indicated even greater opposition to these progressive cultural priorities among voters of color than among whites.  And when given the opportunity to vote, people of color backed up the polling subsamples in a way that Democratic Party leaders and progressive activists never considered as even a remote possibility.  Donald Trump got the highest percentage of the black vote in 2020 since Richard Nixon in 1972.  The Hispanic and Asian vote shifted nearly double-digits in Trump's direction, with one out of every nine Hispanic Hillary Clinton voters going for Trump four years later.  Precincts populated mostly by blacks have repeatedly voted on behalf of enhanced police enforcement in every community where policing has clashed with equity priorities on the ballot in the last two years.

And most critically, the closer one gets to the Mexican border in four southwestern states, the greater the collapse for the Democratic Party in the last 24 months.  The Rio Grande Valley of Texas, which is more than 90% Hispanic, is currently experiencing the most rapid electoral realignment witnessed since the Deep South flipped to the GOP after the 1964 civil rights law passed.  There are four Texas Congressional districts bordering Mexico.  In 2012, all four were held by Democrats.  Today one is Republican and the other three are all seen as imminently vulnerable in 2022.  One Texas Democrat--Filemon Vila--saw the writing on the wall and resigned early, setting up a special election next month that will give us an early preview of just how screwed the Democratic Party is among the very voters they've cluelessly thought they were pandering to for the past several years with a border policy that has gotten incrementally more radicalized and cartoonish.  The Democratic Party bet that the singular political motive of Hispanics was to enlarge the number of voters "who look like them", at any cost to their safety and financial well-being, will likely go down in the history books as the most ruinous self-own misinterpretations of voter priorities in my lifetime.

Unfortunately, this all goes back to 2012, when a national election was won by the Democratic Party based on near-unanimous support from a long list of identity groups.  The party got lazy and arrogant with its messaging soon thereafter, and remains hopelessly entangled in a campaign strategy relying upon near-unanimous support from those same identity groups, and as this strategy continues to come apart at the seams in front of their eyes, they are paralyzed on how to change course.  Even the most rudimentary understanding of long-haul voting patterns of immigrant groups, along with a rudimentary understanding of the priorities that motivate voters generally, made it clear that the 2012 coalition would not be sustainable.  All it required to crack it the first time was a populist reinvention of the Republican Party to poach millions of working-class whites.  And all it will requite to shatter it completely is the inevitable pitting of racial and ethnic identity groups against each other with the same brand of populism that won over working-class whites.

I said before that the increasingly likely prospect of a repeal of Roe vs. Wade could save the Democratic Party from complete collapse in November by re-energizing upscale suburban women. But even in that scenario, I still believe 2022 will be the cycle where we witness the comprehensive dissolution of the 2012 coalition that Democrats have been betting everything on in the decade since.  The drift toward Republicans we saw among Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters in 2020 is probably about to become a tsunami.  And as someone who still identifies with Democratic priorities on the majority of bread-and-butter issues, I'm extremely concerned that it will take the party another decade to figure out a new strategy to bounce back from this self-inflicted shotgun wound.