Clifford Orwin is a professor of political science, University of Toronto
U.S. party nominating conventions have evolved into festive coronations. Yet the gaiety at this week’s Democratic gathering was forced, and the coronation beset by grumbling. Some deemed the new queen insufficiently progressive, others, spooked by recent polls, feared she was a loser. (Oddsmaker Nate Silver had just pronounced Donald Trump a 57.7-per-cent favourite to win the election.)
The eight years of the Obama presidency have not been kind to the Democrats. They have lost control of both houses of Congress, and languish at historic post-New Deal lows in governorships and control of state legislatures. This paucity helps to explain the dearth of credible candidates in the Democratic presidential primaries. It dovetails with the party’s desperate need for renewal. Their presidential candidate is 68; her sole challenger, Bernie Sanders, is 74, and even firebrand Elizabeth Warren is 67. After eight years of Barack Obama, the party has reverted to the tattered Clintons. Is this what Mr. Obama meant by “change you can believe in”?
Not only are the Democrats tired, but many Americans are tired of them; about 70 per cent believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, with only 23 per cent maintaining the contrary; 40 per cent claim to want change whatever that change might bring. These numbers favour Mr. Trump, whose greatest rhetorical triumph has been to position himself as the candidate of change.
In his stirring speech Wednesday night, Mr. Obama pitched Hillary Clinton as his designated successor, who would take up where he left off. This worked as preaching to the converted, many of whom would doubtless welcome a third and fourth term of Mr. Obama. The problem is that he has rivalled Richard Nixon and George W. Bush in his divisiveness as President. Ms. Clinton in her own speech emphasized inclusiveness as if (unlike Mr. Obama) she actually meant it. Time will tell whether independents will accept this as more than a partisan buzzword.
One large group milling restlessly outside the Democratic tent is all those less-educated white males. These (who number about 20 per cent of voters) have become the mavericks of this campaign. Those who voted in Democratic primaries strongly backed Mr. Sanders; those who voted in Republican ones backed Mr. Trump. According to a recent CNN/ORC poll, up to two-thirds of this demographic now support Mr. Trump. If this astonishing figure persists it could spell doom for the Democrats in key states. As the gender gap between the parties yawns ever deeper, the first female nominee for president squares off with the first pseudo-hypermacho one.
As Ronald Brownstein argued recently in the Atlantic, this campaign both reflects and will accelerate the “class inversion” of U.S. politics. Since the 1960s, less-educated white voters have drifted toward the Republicans, while more-educated ones have drifted toward the Democrats.
This has been accelerated by the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, on the one hand, and the culture wars, on the other. The Democrats have struggled with deindustrialization, but as was evident at this week’s convention, have doubled down on cultural issues.
This has posed an enormous obstacle to their recapture of the white working class, and of its men in particular. Conspicuous also at the convention were heroic attempts at damage control through tributes to manual labour, the police and the military.
Never has this reciprocal drift been as obtrusive as now, in part because Mr. Trump is the first Republican candidate to personify it. On the Democratic side, Bill Clinton was the successful bridge between the party’s past and its future; Hillary lacks his easy gift for melding them. While an old-style politician, her loss to Mr. Obama in 2008 taught her the primacy of the new core constituencies. Rather than beginning with the white working class and seeking to broaden her appeal beyond it, she finds herself in the now typically Democratic predicament of struggling to re-enlist it.
This is a crazy election. The Democrats should defeat Mr. Trump easily given his penchant for defeating himself: All they had to do at their convention was quote him. Yet they seem peculiarly vulnerable to him. Where it will end not even Nate Silver knows.
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