Despite this week’s pending presidential nomination, the Democratic Party’s current base has no great love for Hillary Clinton. Luke Thompson explores the reasons for the disconnect at National Review Online.
Hillary Clinton is the standard-bearer of a party coalition explicitly constructed to deny her access to the office she now seeks as its leader. She has become the face of the very amalgamation of groups that eight years ago handed her the worst defeat of her career. At the same time, a significant portion of her former support has forsaken her party and turned against her personally with bristling hostility. What are we to make of this peculiar arrangement, and how will it shape Clinton’s agenda should she attain the White House?
For much of the last century, the white working class was the Democratic party’s base, a force to be reckoned with in any contested Democratic primary. Republicans golfed; Democrats bowled. George W. Bush’s administration shifted the party coalitions somewhat, pulling many blue-collar churchgoers into the GOP while pushing away some socially moderate northern suburbanites. Labor unions have weakened steadily since their apex a half century ago. Nonetheless, when Clinton faced off against Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries, blue-collar whites were most likely the largest section of the Democratic primary electorate. …
… Clinton’s coalition should have put her over the hump and secured her the nomination. Her alliance of white-collar centrists and blue-collar whites voted reliably and was well distributed geographically. The nomination was Clinton’s to lose. It took diligent incompetence on her part to do so; yet lose Clinton did.
Obama’s primary victory thus had significant implications for the Democratic coalition once he reached the Oval Office. His policy priorities have been those of his primary supporters, priorities that have in some instances come directly at the expense of Clinton’s blue-collar backers. Five policy areas in particular have distanced the Obama administration from working-class whites: gay rights, free trade, illegal immigration, environmentalism, and Obamacare.
