The Morning: Obama’s big lesson - frederick.lapides@gmail.com

November 26, 2024

Good morning. We’re covering an analysis of the 2024 election — as well as Jack Smith, Pakistan and mashed potatoes.

Barack Obama is smiling and shaking hands with someone as a small crowd looks on.

Barack Obama in 2007. Keith Bedford for The New York Times

‘I’m one of them’

It remains Barack Obama’s most underrated political skill: his appeal to working-class voters, including those who are white.

Obama won most voters without a four-year college degree in his two presidential campaigns. Those majorities helped him win Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in both campaigns. He even won Indiana and North Carolina once.

He did so by both speaking to the economic frustration that resulted from years of slow-growing wages and signaling that he, like most Americans, was moderate on social issues. He made clear that he understood people’s anxiety about the speed of cultural change.

He talked about “an awesome God” in the 2004 speech that made him a national figure. He rejected sweeping new policies like single-payer health care. He traveled to the University of Notre Dame as president and said he wanted to reduce the number of abortions. He supported civil unions rather than same-sex marriage when most voters felt similarly.

He went on MTV and complained about people who wore their pants too low. (“Some people might not want to see your underwear — I’m one of them,” Obama said.) He took a middle ground on immigration, criticizing both family separations and companies that undercut “American wages by hiring illegal workers.”

As time has passed, I think some people have forgotten how conservative Obama could sound. This approach sometimes angered progressives. They called him a sellout, a neoliberal and “the deporter in chief.” But Obama was genuinely moderate in some ways. He also hated treating political disagreements as existential and opponents as the enemy.

“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff — you should get over that quickly,” Obama told young activists after leaving office. “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.”

Perhaps above all, Obama liked winning. He understood that a Democratic Party that treated the country’s working-class majority as backward or hateful would probably lose those voters. He recognized that sounding like an economic populist, as Obama often did, was not enough. Many people — rich, middle-class and poor — vote on social issues and values at least as much as on taxes and spending.

Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, yesterday published an analysis of how voting patterns have shifted since Obama’s 2012 re-election. And those numbers demonstrate just how badly the Democratic Party’s post-Obama strategy has fared.

What Obama and Trump share

After Obama, the party moved left on one big issue after another — Medicare, gender, border security, policing and more. It’s true that Kamala Harris tried to move back to the center this year, but her moderation never had the self-assurance that Obama’s did. It could seem tactical and reluctant. She refused to explain why she had changed her mind about fracking, border security and “Medicare for all.” When asked whether she supported any abortion restrictions, she avoided the question.

The Democrats’ post-Obama leftward turn was based on a specific theory of the electorate: that the country’s growing number of voters of color would cover the loss of working-class whites. Under this race-centric theory, Donald Trump looked like a gift to Democrats. He made racist and sexist comments. He resembled a caricature of the backward voters Democrats were happy to leave behind.

But the Democrats’ theory was wrong. As they moved away from Obama’s approach and toward the purer progressivism that’s popular among college professors, pundits and activists, the party didn’t win over more voters of color. Instead, Democrats have lost ground with every major racial group except white voters, as Nate’s analysis shows:

A chart with red and blue arrows shows the Democratic margin in the 2012 and 2024 presidential elections among voters of different races and ethnicities.

A key reason is that Trump’s anti-establishment populism appealed to working-class voters across racial groups. Trump also helped himself by adopting a mirror image of Obamaism and seeming to reject Republican orthodoxy on subjects like Social Security, Medicare, abortion and foreign wars.

Different though they are, both Obama and Trump approach politics as if class matters more than race. Sure enough, Trump’s biggest gains have come among the nonwhite working-class voters who were Obama’s strongest supporters:

A chart with red and blue arrows shows the Democratic margin in the 2012 and 2024 presidential elections among voters with different racial and education backgrounds.

Not simple moderation

As the Democratic Party tries to figure out a way forward, it can’t merely mimic Obama. The country has changed, partly because of Trump. Nor can the party assume that the answer is simply to moderate its position on everything. The Democrats who won tough races this year were more heterodox. They sometimes sounded like Bernie Sanders when talking about foreign trade or corporate America and Joe Manchin when talking about government regulation or social issues. They also sounded authentic.

Still, Obama’s success remains relevant. It highlights the importance of treating working-class voters’ opinions respectfully rather than talking down to those voters. And it’s a reminder that no Democrat since Obama has come up with an approach that works as well as his did.

Related: Democrats in Georgia and North Carolina are dissecting their 2024 losses in a hurry. Both states will have competitive Senate races in 2026, and Georgia will elect a governor.

THE LATEST NEWS

Special Counsel Investigation

Jack Smith wearing a blue suit and carrying a portfolio in his left hand.

Jack Smith Doug Mills/The New York Times

Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to investigate Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and his handling of classified documents, moved to dismiss both cases. Hours later, the judge overseeing the Jan. 6 case dismissed it.
Smith said he ended the cases not because of their merits but because Justice Department policy forbids prosecuting sitting presidents.
Smith asked to leave open the option of refiling the charges after Trump leaves office. But the statute of limitations — five years for most federal offenses — could prevent that.
Trump, who had vowed to fire Smith if he won, plans to fire the entire team that worked for him, The Washington Post reports.
Smith plans to pursue charges against Mar-a-Lago workers accused of obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve the documents. Trump could pardon them.
Trump will re-enter the White House with legal questions — about presidential immunity and the power of special counsels — still unanswered by courts.

Trump Appointments

Trump’s legal team found that an adviser had asked potential appointees to pay for help securing roles in the administration. The adviser denied doing so.
Billionaires are set to lead Trump’s economic team. Investors are excited. Democrats say it’s proof that he will mostly help the rich.
Stocks and bonds rose yesterday morning after Trump picked a financier, Scott Bessent, for Treasury secretary.
Steven Witkoff, Trump’s choice as a Middle East envoy, has potential conflicts of interest: He would be negotiating with leaders who have stakes in his real-estate projects.
Matt Gaetz, Trump’s failed pick for attorney general, is now on Cameo, where users can pay him $500 to record personalized videos.

MORNING READS

Eli Durst, Brian Kaiser, Brandon Watson for The New York Times

Team spirit: The New York Times for Kids goes inside the sweaty and heartfelt world of high school mascots.

World-class looks: Competitive tablescapers can teach us something about setting the perfect table.

Ask A&L: “Should I sit through the movie’s closing credits?”

Lives Lived: Barbara Taylor Bradford’s best-selling novels captivated readers with chronicles of buried secrets, raging ambitions and strong women of humble origins rising to wealth and power. She died at 91.

SPORTS

N.F.L.: The Baltimore Ravens, coached by John Harbaugh, beat the Los Angeles Chargers — coached by his brother, Jim Harbaugh — 30-23.

N.H.L.: Several men attacked Paul Bissonnette, a popular hockey personality and former player, at a restaurant in Arizona.

Soccer: The goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher announced her retirement from the U.S. women’s national team.

ARTS AND IDEAS

A hand grasps a few handwritten envelopes, with other papers scattered on a desk near a keyboard.

Submissions from singles. Alec Jacobson for The New York Times

Feeling fatigued by dating apps? In Vermont, they are using an old method to look for love. For decades, singles in the state have placed earnest and sometimes quirky personal ads in Seven Days, a small weekly newspaper. (In a recent entry, a man in his 70s boasts about his several hundred maple sugar taps.)