In many ways, Hillary Clinton’s loss raised to the presidential level the same problem that hurt Democrats down the ballot under Obama. Because the Democratic coalition has grown so clustered in urban centers, the party’s capacity to compete for House or state legislative seats beyond those metropolitan areas dramatically eroded during his presidency. Similarly, Democrats have struggled to win Senate and governors’ races beyond culturally cosmopolitan states that are mostly along the coasts.
Obama reached far enough beyond those constraints in heavily blue-collar Rustbelt states to assemble two solid Electoral College majorities. But Hillary Clinton couldn’t match that outreach and fatally retreated even further into the party’s core urban redoubts: Despite comfortably winning the popular vote, she carried less than one-sixth of the nation’s counties. Trump’s path to victory mostly ran through the non-urban areas that had already moved toward the GOP in lower-ballot races under Obama.
As Obama himself has recognized, Democrats cannot cede all that terrain and thrive. “The lesson of this election is … you have to have an overarching message for the country and it has to have a meaningful economic component,” said David Axelrod, formerly Obama’s chief strategist. A candidate more capable than Hillary Clinton of energizing the growing groups most favorable to Democrats could win back the presidency in 2020 without big gains among the culturally conservative white constituencies that powered Trump. But one clear message of the Obama years is that Democrats cannot consistently control Congress or most state governments unless they compete better among white voters, especially those without college degrees. The next generation of Democratic leaders must find ways to better align the voters Obama undeniably added to his party with more of those that he lost.
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