Win or lose, the Democratic Party has crossed a threshold in the 2018 election, pointing it toward even more explosive conflict with a Republican Party that Donald Trump is recasting around white racial anxiety.
For the first time, white men do not constitute a majority of Democratic candidates in races for the House, Senate, or state legislatures this year, according to new research by the Reflective Democracy Campaign, which studies demographic change in elections. Instead, most Democratic candidates are white women or men and women of color. …
Democrats are undergoing this metamorphosis precisely as more GOP candidates are embracing Trump’s racially infused nationalism, which focuses on maximizing support among the portions of the white electorate most uneasy about demographic and cultural shifts—particularly non-college-educated, evangelical, older, and nonurban whites. It’s not hard to envision even greater tension ahead as a Democratic “coalition of transformation” that embodies the nation’s growing diversity collides with a Trump-stamped Republican “coalition of restoration” that promises to “take back the country” from the forces of social, demographic, and economic change. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic