Consider that when Obama last ran, the Midwest was still known as an impenetrable Blue Wall, while Florida and Ohio were still purple states. When Bill Clinton gave his acceptance speech in 1996, the Democrats were competitive throughout large swathes of the South. During that period, they had gone on to win not just Clinton’s Arkansas and Al Gore’s Tennessee, but states such as Kentucky and Louisiana too.

The story of the last three decades has been one of political success for Democrats, who have won the popular vote in seven out of the last eight elections. Yet it is also one of narrowing political constituencies and pyrrhic victories, as the party attracted college-educated professionals at the expense of the non-college-educated majority. In particular, non-college-educated whites were lost, but in recent years they have increasingly been joined by significant numbers of non-college-educated minorities. As recently as 2007, “56% of voters without a degree were Democrats or leaned Democratic, while 42% were Republicans or GOP leaners”; today, Republicans hold “a six-percentage-point advantage over the Democratic Party,” according to Pew Research. These are precisely the voters that Harris must win back. But how did the Democrats lose them in the first place?

One could explain that these trends are part of a broader process of educational polarisation which is beyond the control of either party, or one can instead look at how the last two Democratic administrations made conscious decisions to encourage such a realignment. The party’s fulsome embrace of finance, tech, and globalisation under the Clintons and Obama did not just mean Democratic assent for policies that hollowed out the industrial economy in which non-college-educated workers found gainful employment. It also effectively pressured working-class Americans into adopting four-year college diplomas as the ultimate standard of moral validation and economic success.

And while Obama’s efforts to save the economy after 2008 may have earned him a second term, the lopsided nature of that recovery, which preserved the structural status quo — and his administration’s inability to discern the depth of social displacement in its aftermath — is what directly led to his repudiation in 2016 via the election of Trump, who stood against both party’s elites and consolidated the non-college-educated vote for the GOP.

The last eight years have amounted to a protracted continuation of this contest and 2024 will decide how it is settled. As a belated concession, perhaps, Obama acknowledged halfway through his speech that Americans “shouldn’t need a degree” to get ahead in his vision of “a country that is more secure, more just, and more equal”.

Much will depend now on whether the Harris-Walz campaign is able to recapture just enough of these disaffected non-credentialed voters with promises of a more economically populist future. In light of this, the task of Democrats is not to try to relive the glory days of Obama and Clinton, but rather to exorcise the ghosts of those eras as a necessary step toward genuine political renewal.

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Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Associate Editor at American Affairs.

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