“Hope and change” is back on the trail. Barack Obama this week launched a new fundraising campaign, and is soon to embark on a high profile (and high-priced) appearance in London.

Last month, his YouTube channel uploaded its first video in more than a decade. The former president may be angling to fill the Democrats’ leadership vacuum, but he was himself instrumental in bringing the party to its current political impasse.

Since last November’s election, the Democratic Party has lacked a clear leader. Dispatched by his own party a year ago (reportedly at Obama’s own urging), Joe Biden has been transformed into a scapegoat for the Democrats’ political travails. Kamala Harris remains a hazy “vibes” avatar. The party’s congressional leadership has not yet been able to unify around a central message. All this suggests an opening for Obama, still vital at only 63. Having served two terms in the presidency, he is ineligible to return to the White House, but he might hope that his continued prominence allows him to play a kingmaker role in the 2026 midterms as well as the 2028 Democratic primary.

Yet Obama was largely responsible for formulating the paradigm that has become a strategic box canyon for his party. At the core of his pitch in 2008 was the idea that he would dispense with the triangulation of the Clinton years and instead create a more ideologically uniform Democratic Party, especially on social issues.

In terms of coalitional transformation, Obama was successful. Democratic politicians became increasingly hostile to any restrictions on abortion. Especially during his second term, the party began to swing far to the Left on immigration. More broadly, the “Great Awokening” began to consolidate during his presidency. As journalist John B. Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira documented in their 2023 book Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, the Obama years saw an accelerated migration of affluent suburbanites into the Democratic coalition, and the dissatisfaction which followed the Great Recession helped lay the groundwork for waves of populist unrest, from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street to the Trump phenomenon. The Obama dispensation birthed a more ideologically unified but also narrower Democratic Party, one that was increasingly unable to compete in rural and exurban areas and has now lost ground even among working-class urban voters.

Despite the generational differences between the two men, the Biden presidency was to some degree the extension of the Obama paradigm. On economics, Biden leaned in a somewhat more populist direction than his Democratic predecessor, but he continued Obama’s rush to the Left on many social issues. Biden’s equity agenda enshrined radical identity politics throughout the federal government, and the breakdown at the border realized the vision of progressive immigration activists from the Obama years. Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas, the man deputized by Biden to detonate border controls, served as deputy secretary of DHS under Obama. He was also a principal actor in implementing Obama’s DACA program, which was a revolutionary use of executive discretion to grant legal status to a bloc of illegal immigrants.

Yet the very strength of the Obama paradigm within Democratic circles has invited backlash from voters. On social issues ranging from gender to immigration, the party’s elites remain out of step with the American public. Democratic leaders may hope that they can return to power by riding an anti-Trump wave, and Obama sounded some “Resistance”-like notes in the appearance uploaded to his YouTube channel last month.

This could prove a fraught gamble, however. In part because of the failures of the Biden presidency, Trump remains more popular than he was during his first term. The narrowness of the current Democratic coalition limits its ability to win in many rural states. Unless it addresses the structural causes for its current weakness, the party is set for a prolonged political exile.

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Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

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