Tony Jones, 58, a truck driver and a member of the Teamsters union, drove from his home in rural Maybee, Mich., to see former President Barack Obama campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris last week in Detroit.
Jones, a Democrat, had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and as he stood in the tightly packed convention center, he felt the energy he remembered when so many of the people he knew wanted change and voted for Obama.
This year, though, he said many of them won’t join him in voting for Harris.
“They think there’s a change to the negative with the Democrats,” Jones said. “It’s a hard fight, and I’m not sure how to get through to somebody like that, that doesn’t understand.”
As Obama, who is headlining another rally tonight in Philadelphia, hops from swing state to swing state campaigning for Harris, Democrats have flocked to see him and relive the heady days of 2008. His presence on the campaign trail as both an orator and a wisecracking foil to Donald Trump has delighted her supporters — but it is also a reminder of their party’s failure to hold his coalition together.
Some of the assumptions that followed Obama’s victories — namely, that an “ascendant coalition” of the young and nonwhite voters who supported him heralded a long-term shift toward Democrats — did not bear out through the upheaval of the Trump years. Instead, Democratic support among some of the key groups who helped to send Obama to the White House, including Black and Latino voters, has dropped off somewhat.
Harris and her allies say they are not trying to recreate the Obama coalition, and that they do not need to. “Elections are different. Coalitions are different. Obama last won 12 years ago,” said Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist of Michigan, a state Obama won by more than 16 percentage points in 2008. “The goal is to win in 2024.”
Harris is knitting together her own coalition, her allies say, concocting a recipe that they hope will look a lot like President Biden’s winning coalition in 2020 — along with a healthy contingent of disaffected Republicans who might have backed Mitt Romney or John McCain in the past. The Obama coalition is no longer the road map.
“It’s just not, and I don’t think it was for anybody not named Barack Obama,” said Amy Walter, the publisher and editor in chief of the Cook Political Report. “The Obama coalition, only Obama could win.”
The Obama coalition, revisited
The understanding of who makes up a candidate’s winning coalition can be somewhat imprecise — and it can shift over time. In 2008, Obama lost among white voters overall, but it later became clear that he performed much better with white working-class voters, like Tony Jones and his friends, than Hillary Clinton had. They, it turned out, had been a key part of his coalition, who helped him in 2008 to win states like North Carolina, Ohio and even Indiana.
He also won 95 percent of Black voters and 67 percent of Hispanic voters, and 66 percent of voters between 18 and 29 years old, according to exit polls. The latest national poll by The New York Times and Siena College found Harris trailing Obama’s pace with all of those groups. She wins 81 percent of Black voters, 52 percent of Hispanic voters, and 55 percent of voters between 18 and 29 in a head-to-head matchup with Trump, the poll found.
Some of the electoral headwinds Harris is facing are part of long-term trends that point to a larger realignment of voters in the age of Trump, said Tom Bonier, a Democratic political strategist who is the senior adviser to TargetSmart, a polling and data firm. These days, he said, voters are divided more by educational attainment than they were in the days of Obama’s campaigns.
“It’s undeniable that Democratic support among Hispanic voters has eroded in the last 12 years,” Bonier said. “There has been a fairly constant erosion with white working-class voters since 2012.”
Harris certainly does not need to perform as well as Obama did with each group to win the election. There are some signs, including from The Times’s polling, that she is lagging behind Biden’s 2020 results with some key groups, including Black and Latino voters, although other polling has shown her performing better.
“Every candidate wanted the Obama coalition, but now we’re talking about, ‘Can she put together the Biden coalition?’” Walter said. “Harris can win people these other guys couldn’t. Is it enough? That’s what we don’t know.”
A different coalition
Harris has shown considerable strength with a group Obama lost to Romney in 2012: white, college-educated voters. In 2012, Romney won 56 percent of those voters to Obama’s 42 percent; in the most recent poll by The Times, Harris won 56 percent of those voters to Trump’s 40 percent. She appears to be performing considerably better with voters over 65 than Obama did in either of his elections.
Her allies are also hoping that an advantage with women will carry her over the top.
“We’re likely to see, or almost certain, to see, more Republican women voting for Harris than voted for Obama, and then potentially younger women,” Bonier said, adding that there has been a surge of voter registrations by young Black and Latino women this year. “Both in terms of turnout and persuasion, it’s almost certain that women will be a larger share of a winning Harris coalition than they were in Obama’s 2012 coalition.”
Harris is also working hard to shore up her support with Black and Latino voters, men and women alike. She spent yesterday in Philadelphia meeting voters of color and visiting their businesses.
Trump, by contrast, held a Madison Square Garden rally where a comedian told racist jokes about Latino and Black voters, prompting a wave of condemnation from celebrities like Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican megastar, and even some Republican elected officials.
Will.i.am will not be doing a Harris song
Back in 2008, the Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am wrote songs for Obama’s presidential run, but he won’t be doing that for Harris this time, he told my colleague Maya King. She explains why.
Staring down a polarized electorate poised to vote in a weighty presidential election, will.i.am, 49, told me that musical artists can still play an important role in galvanizing voters.
But the last thing this moment calls for, he said, is a catchy tune.
“You bring an umbrella out when it rains. Sometimes you use it when it’s sunny to protect you from the sun. Not every tool is for every time,” he said in an interview. “So to assume that a song right now is what is going to move people — people are different now.”
The videos for two of his Obama-related songs, “Yes We Can” and “It’s a New Day,” have garnered a combined more than 10 million views on YouTube. He performed at Obama’s first inaugural concert, too.
He did not write a song in 2012, he said. “And then we tried our hardest in ’16, but a song wasn’t — there was nothing to pull from to use that muscle,” he said.
And these days, he said, voters “need something else,” he said. “What that something else is — it’s community. We need dialogue. We need belonging.”
The post Obama Is the Same. His Coalition Isn’t. appeared first on New York Times.
