…[I]t was only after (McGovern) beat Muskie in two blue-collar, hardhat wards in the middle of Manchester (NH) that he saw the possibility of a really mind-bending coalition: a weird mix of peace freaks and hardhats, farmers and film stars, along with urban blacks, rural Chicanos, the “youth vote”—a coalition that could elect almost anybody.
Now, even without making allowances for Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-and-alcohol fueled writing and for the overheated political climate (particularly on the left) of the early 1970s, what’s striking about this excerpt from the “July” chapter of Fear & Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ’72, is:
- how little changed the Democratic coalition is from 40 years ago, and;
- how much more powerful that coalition is in presidential elections that it was then—when McGovern struggled to get 37.5% of the popular vote in November.
Regardless of what happens in the next 7 months, it’s hard to imagine a scenario (short of an Iran-Israel war, combined with an EU collapse and rising US unemployment) in which Barack Obama gets less than 47.5% of the popular vote in a two-way race this fall.
That’s true for a bunch of reasons, but most of them can be traced back to the persistence of the coalition Thompson describes. African-American and Latino voters are, if anything, more staunchly Democratic than they were 40 years ago; and they constitute a much larger percentage of the electorate. While Obama in particular, and Democrats in general get a smaller percentage of white working-class votes than in 1972, the working class is increasingly less Anglo. The “youth vote” is more solidly Democratic today than it was 40 years ago.
The center-left coalition in today’s American politics may be a slightly less “mind-bending coalition” than the one Thompson envisioned. But it’s also a notably larger and sturdier coalition than its 1972 predecessor.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/