Some Democrats I know have been really enjoying the presidential race this year.
Not the one in their own party – especially not the Democrats in Portland, who waited outside their caucus in the cold for up to four hours Sunday.
The one they’ve been getting a kick out of is the race on the other side, where what was supposed to be a deep field of Republican governors with real-world experience were ground into a paste by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz – two flawed candidates whose appeal runs deep, but not wide.
Could Republicans really nominate one of these guys, Democrats ask. Or even better, could the party elders engineer a brokered convention that nominates someone else, maybe a candidate who has already been rejected by voters, or one who had never even entered the race?
Trump voters are angry now. Just imagine how angry they would be after they’ve been told that their party finds them and their candidate distasteful. Forget about Bernie Sanders – that could be a revolution.
It’s fair to wonder how, after a race like this, the party could ever put together the pieces of a coalition that could do at least as well as Mitt Romney in 2012. And a coalition shattered like Humpty Dumpty could affect races for the House, Senate and state legislatures.
But Democrats should not party too early. They have a Humpty Dumpty problem of their own.
They have won the last two presidential elections with a coalition that includes young people turning up in huge numbers and voting overwhelmingly Democratic. The party is banking on them to show up again this year.
The party is also getting ready to nominate Hillary Clinton, and to many of the young voters turning out for Bernie Sanders, she is not just their second-favorite contender: She is also the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the world.
In their telling, she voted for the war in Iraq, she lobbied for the 1994 crime bill that many people blame for mass incarceration of African-Americans, and she has supported free-trade agreements that have made jobs disappear.
But worst of all, she and her husband have been good friends to Wall Street, deregulating the financial sector and voting for bailouts of the investment banks during the financial collapse. Their service has been rewarded with donations to her campaign, to his charitable foundation and to her personally, in the form of $250,000 speaking fees, which she collected from Wall Street firms 14 times in 2013.
Fair or not, that’s how she’s viewed in some corners of social media, message boards and progressive journalism, and it doesn’t get better as she succeeds at the polls. There is no talk of a brokered Democratic convention, but if the race were to get close, the party’s pressure valve might be even worse than what the Republicans are considering. If Bernie Sanders won enough delegates to deny Clinton a victory on the first ballot, he would be crushed by superdelegates – officeholders and state party officials – who will be at the convention and who overwhelmingly back Clinton.
That is not going to sit well with the young people who have rallied around Sanders and whose enthusiasm Clinton will need in November.
This race exposes a structural problem for Democrats, one that may not be as obvious as the Republicans’ but is just as deep.
The Democrats act like the future belongs to them because minorities and young people – their core constituencies – are growing as a share of the electorate, while the Republicans’ older and whiter base is not. But the Democrats don’t seem to be able to put forward a candidate with a message that resonates with all the groups that they need to win.
Coalitions are living things, and just because you know what all the parts are doesn’t mean you can reassemble them when they shatter.
Both parties have a Humpty Dumpty problem. It will be interesting to see which one does a better job of putting the pieces back together.
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