The Harris Coalition Is *Not* the Second Coming of the Obama Coalition

Not even close.

These are heady days for Democrats. After a near-death experience with the fading Biden candidacy they have been revived by the Biden-Harris switcheroo. The presidential race has tightened considerably and, though Trump is still favored to win, they’re feeling mighty good about themselves. Inspired by their historic standard bearer, exuberant partisans proclaim the second coming of the Obama coalition, which will decisively sweep away Trump and his deplorable legions. They’re getting the band back together!

Or are they? In truth, the Harris coalition bears more resemblance to the Biden coalition…but without as many working-class voters. Or to the Hillary Clinton coalition…but with far fewer white working-class voters. Indeed, that people would analogize Harris’ emerging coalition to Obama’s shows how much they’ve forgotten (or perhaps never knew) about the Obama coalition and how little they understand about how the party has changed in the last 12 years.

Here are some facts about the Obama coalition (based on 2012 election data from Catalist):

1. In 2012, Obama carried both college-educated and working-class (noncollege) voters. And there wasn’t much difference in the margins; he carried the college-educated by 6 points and the working class by 4 points.

2. Obama carried the nonwhite working class by 67 points; overall he carried nonwhites by 64 points.

3. Obama lost both the white working class and college-educated whites, the former by a comparatively modest 20 points and the latter by 8 points.

All this is very far from the Harris coalition today and how it seems to be evolving. The following data illustrate this. I use the post-switcheroo New York Times/Siena poll (one of only four pollsters rated “A+” by Nate Silver) for comparison. I also provide intermediate figures—Clinton, 2016 and Biden, 2020—so that the political evolution from the Obama coalition to today can be clearly discerned.

Start with the working class. While Obama carried them by 4 points, four years later Clinton lost them by 3 points. Four years after that, Biden lost them by 4 points and, four years later, Harris in the Times poll is losing them by 15 points.

Contrast this with the trajectory of the college-educated vote. As noted, Obama carried these voters by 6 points. In 2016, Clinton carried them by 13 points and four years later Biden carried them by 18 points. Today, Harris’ lead over Trump among the college-educated is 20 points. This takes the college-educated/working class margin gap from +2 under Obama to +35 today—that is, from doing barely better among college voters in 2012 to a massive class gap today. That’s because Democratic support in the two groups has gone in completely different directions. You miss this and you can’t possibly understand the Obama coalition and why it is so different from the Democratic coalition we see today.

Similarly, consider the class trajectories within the white vote. In 2012, Obama lost the white working-class vote by 20 points, a bounce back performance after the Democrats’ catastrophic performance with this demographic in the 2010 election. Gaining back some of Democrats’ lost white working-class support was a widely-ignored key to his re-election, particularly his success in Midwest/Rustbelt states. But famously Clinton in 2016 did much less well, losing these voters by 27 points (and the election in the process because of these voters’ defection in three key Rustbelt states). Then in 2020, Biden lost this demographic nationally by a slightly lower 26 points, which included slight improvements in those key Rustbelt states—an underrated factor in his victory. But today in the Times poll, Harris is losing these voters by a whopping 38 points.

The trajectory of the white college vote has gone in the completely opposite direction. Obama lost these voters by 8 points. Then Clinton moved this demographic to the break-even point, followed by Biden’s solid 9-point lead among these voters in 2020. Now Harris has a 15-point lead over Trump among white college graduates. That’s quite a trend. And it’s taken the class gap among white voters from 12 points in the Obama coalition to 53 points (!) today.

The trajectory of the nonwhite working class also highlights another key difference between the Harris coalition and the Obama coalition. Recall Obama’s massive 67-point margin with these voters in 2012. That margin dropped to 60 points for Clinton in 2016 and further to 48 points for Biden in 2020. Now Harris, despite her progress relative to this year’s fading Biden campaign has only a 29-point margin among these very same voters. Moreover, this reverses the class gap among nonwhites that had existed under Obama—he did 11 points better among the nonwhite working class than among the nonwhite college-educated. Now Harris is doing 11 points worse among the nonwhite working class than among nonwhite college voters.

Finally, when looking at the nonwhite voting pool as a whole, we see the following trend in Democratic margin: Obama 2012, +64 points; Clinton 2016, +58; Biden 2020, +48; Harris today, +34.

It is difficult to look at these data and not see profound differences between the Obama coalition and the emerging Harris coalition. These differences reflect how much the party has evolved in 12 short years.

Of course, none of this means Harris can’t win. But no one should kid themselves that, even if successful, Harris’ coalition will represent the second coming of the Obama coalition. Instead it is likely to be a more class-polarized version of the post-Obama Democratic coalition with even more reliance on the college-educated vote, particularly the white college-educated vote.

This seems consistent with how the nascent Harris campaign has been unfolding. Layering on top of Biden’s themes before he dropped out—"saving democracy” and abortion rights (particularly the latter)—we have seen a great deal of emphasis on social media and the production of memes that capture the “vibes” of the Kamala! campaign. The latter has certainly garnered a lot of attention but, as Freddie DeBoer acerbically remarks, Harris is not running for President of Online America but rather America as a whole. He detects, not without reason, a whiff of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their misplaced faith in online success.

Related to this, we have seen a rather strange online manifestation of the identitarian politics that still dominates the Democratic Party and is certainly alive and well in the Harris campaign. This is the raft of sex- and race-segregated zoom fundraisers for Harris. This has included the “White Women for Kamala Harris” fundraiser and the just plain embarrassing “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” extravaganza.

On the white women call, the following wisdom was imparted by social media influencer Arielle Fodor:

As white women we need to use our privilege to make positive changes…If you find yourself talking over or speaking for BIPOC individuals, or God forbid, correcting them, just take a beat, and instead we can take our listening ears on…So, do learn from and amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized and use the privilege you have in order to push for systemic change. As white people we have a lot to learn and unlearn, so do check your blind spots.

Shades of 2020! It is hard to see a persuadable white working-class woman—a type of voter where Harris desperately needs help—responding positively to talk of her “privilege” etc. Really, the call should more properly have been labelled “White Liberal College-Educated Women for Kamala Harris.”

The same could be said of the “White Dudes for Kamala Harris” call. The call’s organizer averred that when white men organize “it’s usually with pointed hats on” and that the call and supporting Harris was a way for the trope (?) of masculinity to be properly channeled. This is how to be one of the good white men. I can’t imagine white working-class men of practically any flavor responding positively to this sort of appeal. Again, the call should really have been billed as “White Liberal College-Educated Men for Kamala Harris.”

And there were many other and more finely-grained identity group fundraising calls for Harris. This aggregation of identity and interest groups approach to organizing and coalition-building is exactly what Obama wanted to get away from. As Obama memorably put it 20 years ago:

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. There is not a black America, a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America. There’s the United States of America.

We need to get back there….and fast. And that includes the Harris campaign. Right now, they’re on a narrow, polarized path to November and their reckoning with Donald Trump. They can do better, starting with remembering what the Obama coalition really was—and really was about.