There will be much discussion in the weeks and months ahead about the future of the Republican Party in the age of Trump. Ronald Brownstein reminds us in an Atlantic article that Democrats also need to come to terms with their party’s post-Obama future.
Through two terms, Obama deepened the Democrats’ connection with a constellation of growing groups, namely minorities, the millennial generation, and college-educated whites, especially women. That coalition allowed him to join the ranks of Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, the only Democrats to win a presidential popular-vote majority at least twice.
But Obama also narrowed the Democrats’ appeal, both demographically and geographically, in ways that helped Republicans seize unified control of the White House and Congress and establish their biggest advantage in state governments since the 1920s.
Both these positive and negative trends for the Democratic Party predate Obama’s first campaign, and the latter trends were accentuated by Hillary Clinton’s unique weaknesses in 2016. But Obama intensified these dynamics with a distinctive strategy that bound Democrats to the political priorities of their heavily urbanized new coalition, especially on cultural issues from gay rights to immigration reform. That came at the price of further alienating the GOP’s competing coalition of older, blue-collar, and religiously devout whites, who live largely outside of urban areas. And it was those voters who mobilized to narrowly elect Trump and preserve Republican control of Congress. …
… In many ways, Hillary Clinton’s loss raised to the presidential level the same problem that hurt Democrats down the ballot under Obama. Because the Democratic coalition has grown so clustered in urban centers, the party’s capacity to compete for House or state legislative seats beyond those metropolitan areas dramatically eroded during his presidency. Similarly, Democrats have struggled to win Senate and governors’ races beyond culturally cosmopolitan states that are mostly along the coasts.
