Political realignment continues

Getting to 270 Electoral Votes for Democrats doesn't mean winning Wisconsin. 

It means winning Arizona.

Archie Bunker votes for Trump.  When they retire to Arizona, Edith secretly votes for Biden.

Democrats wonder if they can put together the "Obama coalition." They probably cannot, and it isn't the way the party alignment is moving. 

The Obama coalition was a mix of the two coasts and the Upper Midwest. There were liberal, diverse, mostly urban cities in the Northeast and West Coast, people who were comfortable-enough with diversity and still sore from how Bush allowed the financial crisis of 2008 to unfold. Obama added the supposed "blue wall" of the Upper Midwest states of Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.  Obama had the good policy choice to have bailed out--amid criticism--General Motors and Chrysler while Mitt Romney opposed that. Michigan and Ohio residents remembered and rewarded Obama in 2012.

2012 Obama Coalition

Obama's victories were likely the last waves in a retreating tide of realignment taking place since Lyndon Johnson linked Democrats to civil rights for Black Americans.  Republicans became a party centered on the sensibilities of the "Solid South," now solidly Republican. It was the rural party, the White party, the Christian traditionalist party. In the American South the vote is largely color-coded. Whites vote Republican; Blacks, ,college towns, and committed liberals vote Democratic. Like any generalization, there are exceptions, but Democrats and Republicans each have their niche. Race was part of the glue that held Republican together but it was a bigger, more complex mix that included support for traditional ethno-religious symbols, for gun rights, and opposition to abortion.  

Those people live everywhere in America, not just the South. They live in the Rocky Mountain west, where they are a sizable majority, and in rural and suburban parts of everywhere, but especially the Upper Midwest, where they are a minority outvoted, barely usually,by the cities in their states. Detroit tilts Michigan; Chicago tilts Illinois; Milwaukee tilts Wisconsin.

Realignment: Trump took the Upper Midwest

Trump upset that. 

Trump appealed to the non-college white voter. Manufacturing has moved offshore and Democrats took the position that the jobs would be replaced by better ones thanks to retraining and education. It works for some people, but less so for the non-college voter. Democrats have been accused of abandoning those voters, replacing them on the coasts with the college educated, women, immigrants, and people of color who felt marginalized by Trump's appeal to white males. In fact, both parties abandoned those people, but Trump voiced their fears and their interests, so reclaimed them.

Wisconsin is a special problem for Democrats. It is 90% white, "America's Dairyland" is largely rural, and 58% of its voters are non-college. Worse, some 459,000 non-college people failed to vote in 2016 according to a Brookings study. Wisconsin will be a stretch, and without it, Democrats lose in 2020.

A Democrat like Biden may be able to hold Michigan and Pennsylvania this year. The virus has hit those two states particularly hard. Joe Biden has constantly played up his Scranton, Pennsylvania roots. But the Upper Midwest is no longer a blue wall for Democrats. They have lost the Archie Bunker vote. The GOP has become the party of populist Trump, not the party of Mitt Romney.

For Democrats to win the White House they need the Upper Midwest or something else. They need to swap Wisconsin for Arizona and maybe North Carolina and Florida--and then, eventually Georgia and Texas.

A Republican Party built around blue collar ethno-nationalist populism creates backlash.   Many women, especially women in suburban neighborhoods, find Trump offensive. Urban people, educated people, people who buy coffee at Starbucks, office workers, non religious, people of color, people in college environments all tend against populist Republicanism. 

Now, amid the response to the virus, Trump chose to support the young workers rather than seniors. There is widespread acknowledgement that Americans are becoming restless and impatient with the economic shutdown. The most compliant group are seniors. The shutdown is largely for their benefit. Arizona and Florida are retirement havens. Trump's messaging could not be more clear to seniors: some extra numbers of them may need to die in sacrifice to the bigger necessity of re-opening the economy.

Biden is laying low. He is letting Trump dig his own political grave, if, in fact the net-net fallout from the virus shutdown is that voters think Trump rushed things. It may well work, but it is entirely possible that seniors will be outvoted here by young people eager to get back to work and play. In any case, Trump's policies accelerate a trend that is underway. The Republican Party is becoming the party of non college working people, of big business, of Whites, of rural areas, of traditional values conservatives, of Christians, and who win presidential elections by combining the Solid South, the Mountain West, and the Upper Midwest.

Protests in Oregon

Democrats continue their trend toward being the party of diverse urban areas, of women, of educated professionals, of college towns, of people of color, and who win presidential elections by combining the West Coast, the urban Northeast down to Virginia and North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Illinois with votes out of their cities, plus the states of Arizona and Florida thanks to Democrats' identification with support for the interests of seniors.

Either way, this will be a close run election--probably. The virus creates some of the same potential for upset that the October 2008 financial collapse did. By October, 2020 Americans can have decided we are reopening America and it is glorious morning. Or Trump could look like Nero, who fiddled while American died.

Doug Sosnik examined this re-alignment in more detail, in a paper: Click