A COMING DEMOCRATIC CRACKUP:

The 2008 Obama campaign assembled a large pan-ethnic coalition of young, non-affluent, and non-white voters. But as his first term failed to deliver on the promise of rapid economic improvement, many of those 2008 voters fell away. Beginning with Andrew Jackson, every twice-elected president has seen his vote total rise at his second appearance on the ballot: Lincoln, Grant, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton. Barack Obama was the first and to date only exception. He received almost 3.6 million fewer votes in 2012 than he did in 2008. Where did these votes go? Not, mostly, to his Republican challenger. Mitt Romney won only 900,000 more votes than John McCain. Nor was there any significant exit to third- and fourth-party candidates. Rather, some 2.5 million 2008 Obama votes just … didn’t show up in 2012. . . .

For the black voters who saved Barack Obama in 2012, the Great Recession and the slow recovery have been one long continuing catastrophe. Between 2007 and 2009, black homeowners were 70 percent more likely to suffer foreclosure than whites. Higher-earning black families were 80 percent more likely to lose their homes than their white counterparts.

The evanescence of black homeownership explains why post-recession the wealth of the median black family tumbled to 1/13th the wealth of the median white family—a disparity wider than any at time in the past quarter century.

The black middle class depended more than other groups on the state and local public-sector jobs that vanished in post-recession budget cutting. The income of the median black household dropped 9.2 percent between 2007 and 2013—as against 5.6 percent for the median white household.

Despite three years of supposed economic recovery, black children were as likely to be poor in 2013 as in 2010—and more likely than at any time since the early 1990s. Almost four out of 10 black children are now growing up in poverty, as against one in nine white children. More than 25 percent of the black poor now live in areas of concentrated poverty, triple the rate for poor white people.

The uniquely harsh African American economic experience since 2007 has divided black opinion further from that of other elements of the Obama coalition. Only 29 percent of Latinos under age 30 think illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans—but 48 percent of African Americans under 30 think so.

Sounds like a . . . Trumpportunity!