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August 21 2024 - 7:10am
While neither the second-to-last Republican president nor the last pre-Trump nominee appeared at the GOP convention, the DNC has been only too happy to dust off its former standard-bearers, starting with Barack Obama who gave the keynote speech on Tuesday evening.
Obama’s theme last night was much less rosy than ‘Hope and Change’ and the Sorkin-esque homilies about ‘the arc of history‘ which sounded so soothing 16 years ago. Instead, the former president sounded a somewhat more fearful note, making clear that ‘it will be a fight [over] a closely divided country.’ He urged his listeners: ‘Do not boo — vote,’ and issued a warning against complacency in the face of an existential threat to democracy.
This echoes Obama’s belief that Democrats are ‘the underdogs’ of this race. Yet the sight of the 44th president, to be followed tomorrow by the 42nd, also invites reflection on the trajectory the party has taken since their respective campaigns. For the challenges now facing Kamala Harris as she attempts to assemble a winning coalition arguably have their roots in the political choices made during the Obama and Clinton eras.
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 polarization 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 globalization under the Clintons and Obama did not just mean Democratic Party 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.
