ABSTRACT
Barack Obama assembled a diverse coalition on his way to winning thepresidential election in 2008 the likes of which the Democratic Party had never seen. Obama was able to tap into the energy and pulse of a new generation of voters who were disenchanted with politicians of the past and were looking for someone who shared their energy and enthusiasm. Obama’s emerging coalition of American voters included young people, Hispanics and other minorities, and white upper-middle-class professionals. That “coalition of the ascendant” (a phrase coined by political analyst Ronald Brownstein), added to a huge majority of the African American vote, gave Obama a resounding victory over Republican John McCain for the presidency.2
According to Simon Rosenberg, president of DND, a Democratic group that studies electoral trends and tactics, “Democrats [are] . . . surging with all the ascending and growing parts of the electorate. He [Obama] is building a coalition that Democrats could ride for 30 or 40 years, the way they rode the FDR [Franklin D. Roosevelt] coalition of the 1930s.”3 Whether this actually
happens remains to be seen, but the rise of this new coalition does tend to parallel some of the major demographic trends in the country. This nation is becoming increasingly multiracial. According to political scientist Scott Page, “Given the growth of the Asian and, particularly, the Hispanic share of the population, most demographers predict that whites will no longer comprise a majority by 2050.”4 Obama’s victory was the most decisive for either party since Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 and the largest for any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964. Obama’s gains came behind parallel coalitions centered on minorities and better-educated whites who are often the most comfortable with the country’s increasingly diverse and racialethnic mix.
