Zandar pretends not to understand why white Kentuckians have stopped self-identifying as Democrats during the Obama Era. He attempts to explain the change in a variety of ways but keeps coming up empty. But, like the dog that didn’t bark, eventually the one plausible explanation that is available reveals itself simply through its absence. The president’s race has something to do with it.
This is often left unsaid even when it is said.
“I think if Hillary Clinton were in the White House today, McConnell would be behind by 20 points,” said Todd Hollenbach Sr., a former Jefferson County judge executive whom Mr. McConnell unseated in 1977.
Maybe Mr. Hollenbach is simply wrong. But let’s proceed as if he’s correct. To what degree is the damage done to the Democratic Party in states like Kentucky and West Virginia by having a black standard-bearer an irrevocable kind of damage? Surely there is some lasting erosion to the Donkey Party’s brand? No?
Yet, perhaps it is a soft kind of erosion. If Alison Lundergan Grimes would be winning by 20 points if only the president were not black, then would Hillary Clinton carry Kentucky by 20 points?
I don’t believe that, yet I also think that the racism that has hurt the Democrats in certain parts of the country is making the Republican Party look artificially strong.
Of course, this cannot all be reduced to race. Some of it has arisen from other cultural markers. The president is urban, cosmopolitan, and intellectual. Your average white Kentuckian could relate to Bill Clinton in a way that he or she could never relate to Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton seems to carry at least some of the cultural appeal of her husband, despite having a background more like the current president than her husband’s. There’s no doubt that the Clinton family is more popular in much of the South and Appalachia than the Obama family.
It could be that a white urban candidate with coastal roots and an intellectual demeanor would suffer much if not all of the same disadvantages of the president in these regions of the country.
Cultural alienation in the Heartland is based in large part on the changing racial demographics of the country, but it has always been partly defined by opposition to the condescension of our intelligentsia and coastal financial elites.
This is why who the Democratic nominee is is as important as what they stand for. This is particularly true in our current era because the Republican Party is ferociously dedicated to convincing white people that the Democratic Party is not for them. Watch Fox News for fifteen minutes if you are not sure what I mean.
Our country seems stalemated at the moment, but I believe it is only the success of the campaign of white tribalism the GOP has been carrying out that has kept the country evenly divided. If that strategy stops working effectively, I think the right will collapse.
I don’t think the collapse would be as significant as Mitch McConnell losing by twenty points, but I might be convinced of ten.
What’s sad is that this analysis is forced to see policy as almost irrelevant, and certainly subservient to identity.
