Obama’s Popularity Slide has Made his Coalition Dangerously Shallower

“[T]he entire concept of realignments/permanent alignments, which underlay much of the misbegotten analysis of the 2008 elections, is bankrupt and should be abandoned.”

So wrote RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende in his 2012 book, The Lost Majority. One of the book’s main theses was that “the permanent majority” — that great white whale hunted and claimed by both parties over the last decade (and long before that) — is an unsustainable illusion in the long run.

Few pundits heeded Trende’s warning after the 2012 election. The editors of The Week made an argument typical of the moment when they wrote that Obama’s coalition of “white liberals, blacks, Latinos, younger voters, blue-collar workers, and moderate women … has lots of room to grow, whereas Mitt Romney’s core base — much older and whiter — is doomed to shrink.”

The flaw in this thinking lies in the nature of Obama’s coalition. As Trende notes (writing of the 2008 election), Obama’s coalition is actually a narrower one than Bill Clinton had, but its much deeper margins of victory among its constituent groups amply made up for that, delivering Obama two majority victories.

Obama obtained his decisive yet modest four-point victory margin in 2012 by running up unusually large (and in some cases historic) margins among Hispanics (44 points), blacks (87 points), moderates (15 points), the young (23 points), the poor (28 points), women (11 points) and those who never attend church (28 points). Not all Democratic candidates — even strong ones — can replicate many of these results.

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