What is the biggest obstacle to Democrats truly winning a national election and pursuing a progressive agenda? What is the biggest obstacle to Democrats winning big enough, geographically broad enough, and deep enough to overcome the constitutional barriers to a governing majority in America?
I posed that first question in The American Prospect in a piece titled “From Crisis to Working Majority,” which I wrote at the time Bill Clinton was preparing to run for president. Focusing on the Reagan Democrats who lived in middle- and working-class suburban communities like Macomb County, Michigan, I came to the conclusion that Democrats needed to address disaffected white industrial workers. …
Democrats today have won the most votes in five of the last six presidential elections and are formidable favorites to win the presidency in 2016, yet Republicans hold large majorities in the U.S. House and Senate and have total partisan control in 24 of the states. At the heart of that deeply frustrating contradiction is the 36 percent of the vote Obama won with white non-college-educated voters nationally. He did get 40 percent of the votes of white workers outside the South and in most rural states, yet that number still limits the scope of Democratic gains.
The same contradiction could bedevil a Hillary Clinton election in 2016. CONT.
Stan Greenberg (Greenberg Quinlan Rosner), The American Prospect