Michael Barone: Democrats are taking minorities for granted
by Michael Barone
| May 01, 2018 12:00 AM
What does a political party do for its strongest supporters? Or does it just take them for granted? This is a quandary for every political party, and especially for America’s Democratic party, which throughout its 186-year history has always been a coalition of groups aware that they are not a national majority. In its early years in the nineteenth century, the Democracy (as it was then called) was a coalition of Southern whites and Northern Catholic immigrants. In the twenty-first century, it is a coalition of groups regarded as racial minorities (blacks, Hispanics, Asians) and of culturally liberal, highly educated people in affluent metropolitan areas, sympathetic suburbs and university towns (gentry liberals and what one might call the graduate student proletariat).
This is the coalition which many, starting with the authors of the 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, have predicted will come to dominate American politics. That prediction seemed prescient as Democrats captured majorities in Congress in 2006 and Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. And it was not conclusively disproved by the election of Donald Trump and Republican congressional majorities in 2016. Trump’s margin was narrow, and Republicans are in danger of losing their majority in the House in November. It’s possible that the results of the 2020 election will make 2016 look like a temporary detour from an inexorable Democratic trend.
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