Part of the reason Democrats failed to realize the precariousness of their situation is because they talked themselves into the theory of an Emerging Democratic Majority. The idea was that racial minorities will inevitably constitute a growing portion of voters, while old white men are inevitably dying off.
So even as President Obama was elected on an illusory image as someone who could unite the country and put racial politics behind us, the Democrats’ whole electoral strategy was based on appealing to racial politics. Obama’s two election victories depended in large part on increased turnout by minority voters, who voted in unusually high percentages to elect and re-elect the first black president.
This electoral strategy fit well with the inclinations of a politician who had actually been brought up neck deep in racial politics. So we saw President Obama pass up every opportunity to be a calming and uniting figure in racial controversies from the Beer Summit to Trayvon Martin to Ferguson to Black Lives Matter. While he quietly demurred to the idea that all of his critics must be racists, he didn’t exactly go out of his way to discourage his supporters from making that argument.
It’s not just that Hillary Clinton couldn’t replicate Obama’s mobilization of minority voters. (It appears, against all logic and reason, that Donald Trump got a higher percentage of the black and Hispanic vote than the earnest, innocuous Mitt Romney.) Even worse, the Democrats’ constant stoking of racial politics provoked a backlash, often in ugly forms, among blue-collar whites who are tired of being targeted as the enemy—which once again delivered the Reagan Democrats to Trump.
Yes.
Related: Why The Latino Vote Didn’t Save Hillary: “Given the bad blood between Trump and Latinos, one of the biggest surprises on Election Night was that so many Latinos ended up voting for their tormentor. According to CNN’s exit polls, about 27 percent of Latinos voted for Trump. Exit polls from The New York Times put the figure at 29 percent. This means that Trump did better with Hispanics than Bob Dole in 1996 (21 percent), and wound up comparable to Mitt Romney in 2012 (27 percent). . . . To understand the concept of ‘Latinos for Trump,’ the first thing you have to do is to accept that Latino voters aren’t monolithic, one-dimensional, or single-issue oriented. Like the Boston Irish of the 20th century, some of us may define ourselves first by our ethnicity while others just see ourselves as Americans. Period.”
If Trump and the GOP are smart, they’ll pursue policies, and rhetoric, that encourage more of the latter.