Morning Plum: The real reason Hillary is embracing liberal positions
By Greg Sargent
May 18 at 9:27 AM
So why is Hillary Clinton embracing liberal positions at odds with previous ones on a range of issues, such as immigration, gay marriage, and criminal justice reform? The Post’s Anne Gearan gets more detail from Clinton advisers on this question than I’ve seen anywhere else.
The crux of the thinking is twofold: Clinton is making a bet on the coalition that powered Obama’s wins in the last two national elections, and she’s also gambling that some of these supposedly “left wing” positions on these issues are actually shared by the middle of the country:
The moves are part of a strategic conclusion by Clinton’s emerging campaign: that it can harness the same kind of young and diverse coalition as Barack Obama did in 2008 and 2012, bolstered by even stronger appeal among women.
Her approach — outlined in interviews with aides and advisers — is a bet that social and demographic shifts mean that no left-leaning position Clinton takes now would be likely to hurt her in making her case to moderate and independent voters in the general election next year.
The strategy relies on calculations about the 2016 landscape, including that up to 31 percent of the electorate will be Americans of color — a projection that may be overly optimistic for her campaign. It factors in that a majority of independent voters already support same-sex marriage and the pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants that Clinton endorsed this month.
As I’ve noted before, her positions on these issues are about the changing nature of the Democratic Party as much as anything else. Dems are more unified on immigration and gay marriage than ever before; her positions on those issues are mainstreamDemocratic ones, and aren’t the province of the “left wing” of the party, as some mistakenly claim. This is part and parcel of the Democratic embrace of its new coalition of millennials, minorities, and socially liberal college educated whites.
Partly because of that broader story, it isn’t really that hard for Clinton to embrace these positions. Clinton might have a tougher time navigating Dem differences on economic issues, particularly the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Interestingly, Clinton advisers confide to Gearan that they recognize this is a problem, particularly given the stance on trade held by a previous president named Clinton, but “her advisers are gambling that the issue won’t leave an enduring rift within the party.”
The strategic hints from Clinton’s advisers raise another question. Recent political history, plus the Democratic embrace of cultural priorities important to the party’s emerging coalition, suggests that Dems are less and less reliant on culturally conservative blue collar whites to win national elections. One key unknown about 2016 is whether Clinton (or any other Democrat) can turn out the Obama coalition in the numbers that he did. If not, she might need to perform better among white voters (including blue collar whites) than Obama managed to do.
So one angle worth further exploration is: Do Clinton advisers agree that changing demographics mean that she won’t need to significantly outperform Obama among non-college whites? Or do they believe that liberal positions on some of these social and criminal justice issues have simply lost the cultural charge they once had, meaning they no longer seriously pose a risk of alienating blue collar whites, who can (hopefully) be won over with a strong economic message? Gearan’s reporting suggests the answer is the latter, but I’d love to know more on this. |
