The Dems, the party of everybody but white males

Democrats Have an Identity-Politics Problem

Josh finds a way to say that without saying it.

The party, by pretty much ignoring labor and spending five decades on racial attacks, has lost too many white males and older whites of both sexes.

Unable to make an effort to win them back without alienating their basically anti-labor and merely sociolib billionaire puppeteers or their victim-group supporters, they can't win even the presidency without a special effort to draw more heavily on white women, on non-whites, and on young voters who normally don't march to the polls in battalions.

Hillary knows that.

She will run a war on white men campaign, hoping to lose less among white males than she wins among others.

[T]he main reason why Clinton is a near-lock for the nomination is that Democrats have become the party of identity. 

They're now dependent on a coalition that relies on exciting less-reliable voters with nontraditional candidates. 

President Obama proved he could turn out African-American, Hispanic, and young voters to his side in 2012 even as they faced particularly rough economic hardships during a weak recovery. 

As the first female major-party nominee for president, Clinton hopes to win decisive margins with women voters and is planning to run on that historic message—in sharp contrast to her campaign's argument playing down that uniqueness in 2008.

It's part of why freshman Sen. Elizabeth Warren inspires excitement from the party's grassroots, but former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, whose progressive record in office set liberal benchmarks, isn't even polling at 1 percent nationally. 

It's why Sherrod Brown, a populist white male senator from a must-win battleground state is an afterthought in the presidential sweepstakes. 

It's why Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, a runner-up to be Obama's running mate in 2008, quickly jumped on the Clinton bandwagon instead of pursuing any national ambitions. 

On Bernstein's list of 16 possible challengers, 15 are white and nine are white males. 

That makes many of them untenable standard-bearers in the modern Democratic Party.