Ruy Teixeira on the Democratic majority that never emerged

What went wrong? Mr. Teixeira, 70—his Portuguese surname is pronounced teh-SHARE-uh—addresses the question in a two-hour Zoom interview from his home in Silver Spring, Md. The most glaring problem can be summed up in a four-word phrase that gained currency during the Obama years: “coalition of the ascendant.” In an article published three days after the 2008 election, progressive journalist Ronald Brownstein defined that coalition as consisting of “growing elements of American society: young people, Hispanics and other minorities, and white upper-middle-class professionals.”

That sounds a lot like the emerging Democratic majority, but something was missing. Mr. Teixeira notes that he and Mr. Judis had argued the Democrats “had to retain the loyalties and the voting support of a very significant sector of the white working class.” Instead, that support “cratered” in 2010 and again in 2016. It recovered some in 2012 and 2020, but the long-term trend is unpromising.

Democrats not only neglected white working-class voters but grew overtly hostile toward them. The term “ascendant” implied a moral judgment—a “Manichaean view of the political universe where all the good was on one side,” as Mr. Teixeira puts it. The prevailing view of the other side? “ ‘Well, look, they voted for Donald Trump. Donald Trump!’ Nobody could understand this,” he says. Instead of trying to make sense of it and win them over, “it was just like, ‘Well, this is a coalition of the descendant. These are the reactionaries, the racists, the xenophobes,’ ” or, as Mrs. Clinton memorably put it, the “basket of deplorables.”