The Obama coalition has been called "McGovern's Revenge" if that's what you're referring to, but it's not as simple as "gave up economic issues for social issues". The Watergate Babies still cared about economic issues, but they preferred elitism and privatization (a new sort of liberalism) and worked hand in hand with Reagan to help disassemble the New Deal. Clinton crushed the antitrust laws, deregulated large industries, and pushed to emphasize the economy more on high-wage tech and financial work while shifting formed high wage manufacturing jobs and other backbones of uneducated labor abroad. He wasn't the same as Reagan, obviously, he shifted our taxation to be more progressive, he attempted healthcare reform, etc, but fundamentally he was different from the New Dealers before him. Business was an ally to work with, not something that had to be restrained.
I see, but I wasn't saying give up on it. How I intercepted it Watergate Babies wanted more focus on social issues that will effect their new bloc of voters.
While you're certainly right that class-only populism is bad and won't work unless you're running as an ethnonationalist, the big banks *do* hurt these communities. When Illinois imposes harsh austerity measures, who do you think the benefits and consequences most heavily weigh on? Rich people love austerity, it means they have to pay less taxes. It's poor black kids in the South Side of Chicago whose schools are further underfunded that suffer. When unions get broken up, it disproportionately affects the low-wage workers who are people of color. Zephyr Teachout talks in
this interview about how our obscenely expensive and privately funded elections keep out women and people of color from running for office.
I never said they didn't. I stated that left-wing populist never connected the issue and have failed to have done so. The hostility of banks and corporations, in my view, is mostly seen in the younger generation, but it is not seen in mostly in minority groups. Proponents of left-wing populism has not gave a reason to support this cause. How I see it, there is casual level of support of some progressive issues. They support some of the causes, but that is not their main voting reason. A young liberal voter that voted for Bernie in the primary and WWC conservative voter that voted for Trump may think the upper class needs to be taxed more, but I think it is less likely that they think it is the same priority and their voting habits will stiff differ.
While this isn't to say that breaking up the banks would "end racism", concentrating power in the hands of an increasingly small number of hands hasn't been beneficial to people of color. And luckily, Bernie and other left-wing populists have remained steadfast in their commitments to protecting immigrants and PoC. It's Warren who was reading the letter from Coretta Scott King to protest Sessions. Bernie was saying that we need more women, more people of color, and more LGBT representation in the government. Their messaging might not be perfect but their goal isn't to abandon all non-class issues for a class only focus.
Let's not pretend Hillary's messaging wasn't tone deaf either, considering she began her campaign off visiting a black church in Missouri and said All Lives Matter.
I'm likely to applaud Hillary for consistently talking about racist injustice slightly before her campaign and during it, than Bernie who seemingly got the picture only after getting his mic getting taken away. The issue still is they are bad at connecting the issue and in terms of Bernie, especially , is really bad at doing it. His criticism of "identity politics" in my opinion was tone deaf, and not getting the picture.
The WWC aren't a homogenous blob and didn't all immediately exit the Democratic coalition. They were an important part of it just four years ago! An Obama that loses the Rust Belt entirely but wins NC and FL is still a loser. These were (along with black voters, obviously) one of the Democrats groups to stay loyal after the New Deal fell apart. They stuck it out with Dukakis, Clinton, Kerry, and Gore before. They didn't leave when Obama said gay people should be able to get married. But when their communities are dying of opioid addiction as wealthy people fire them, the messages they get from the people they've loyally supported are "America is already great" and "we'll just replace you with wealthy suburbanites".
Who is to say that working class also only represents the WWC? This a problem that gets brought up when (wrong) people say that we need to focus only on the WWC, but the response from the black working class this election was largely to stay home. Hillary's share of the black vote was worse than Gore's. Before anyone comes out to say this, I'm not trying to blame them because obviously the election was decided by flipped WWC voters. But the idea that their problems can be largely ignored in a campaign that spends its first GE month with wealthy donors and then a large amount of targeted messaging trying to peel off Romney voters who want someone who won't crash their stocks but otherwise just want tax cuts and the status quo, their answer is to stay home. Some of that was due to voter suppression.
The WWC certainly doesn't only represent the working-class, but the the certainly do make the make it majority of it. Similar to how when Dems when the women vote it is mostly because of minority women. The WWC is not a monolith, but in my view many of them they do believe in certain things that aligns them with the GOP and Trump, of course not all of them do and many can be won back, but they aren't the future of the party and most of them are very against a few Democrat ideals. It should be stated that the Black and Hispanic working class aren't necessary the ones that isn't leaving the Dems and I don't think, overwhelming voted for Trump, a lot did stay at home yes, but they didn't vote for Trump.
My first point is that the election being close to begin with should be a big warning flag and that even winning the extra necessary 40k votes in WI/PA/MI only puts off the pain.
But as to the idea that as the country becomes less white the Democrats will be unstoppable, we should look at the case of the ethnic Catholic immigrant. When they came to this country, they were like Hispanics! They didn't speak English, they had the wrong religion, they formed their own communities, and anti-immigrant sentiment swelled. No Irish Need Apply was a thing. Eventually, the northern Democratic party (a very different creature than the south at the time, unsurprisingly) pulled them into their wings, gave them jobs and were rewarded for it politically. These workers became a large part of the labor backbone of the New Deal and were key to the unstoppable coalition, along with black voters and white southerners. When one of their own (kind of) Kennedy ran, he had to make a big speech declaring that he firmly believed in the separation of church and state and that he wasn't an actor of the Pope, such was the distrust of Catholics. It was not unlike the A More Perfect Union speech.
But as they became more integrated into the white population and became to be considered 'white' unlike before, their political opinions diversified. They were less defined as a bloc by their outsider religion status and more by other factors. It's not that they just "became conservative" it's that they became white and their political interests were defined by other factors, like income and geography. A unionized Great Lakes Catholic in Wisconsin was probably still a Democrat, but the white Catholic was suddenly much less politically married to the Democratic party than it had been before.
My point here is that hispanics becoming a larger portion of our population doesn't guarantee that they'll remain politically defined by being hispanic. They might even become white! That was the Republican strategy before Trump won, to get hispanics to vote less homogenously and peel off those who vote Democratic because of anti-immigrant sentiments but otherwise don't necessarily correspond to Democratic ideologies.
You have a point, especially on the first part, however, Hispanics as a whole are much more close to Democrats they they were Republican and really little sign of shifting to the Republicans considering the younger generation has been left and Hispanics has voted for Democrats for years now. I am skeptical the same thing is going to happen is Hispanic whom are already a ethnic diverse group, and cultural diverse group. The Republicans have been trying to grab minority groups for years know, but it seems their is to much differences for them to go over to the GOP.
Obama's right that you shouldn't rely on demographics, and he is also right that his coalition is still important. The demographics are changing you have to account for that no matter what, but you need a winning message to keep up and bring them together.
