Go for the Bitter Bloc

...Then there is the small matter that the Republican coalition is shrinking...

...States with large Latino and Asian populations don’t always have large Latino and Asian electorates, thanks to disproportionately high numbers of children under 18 and foreign-born residents who haven’t yet acquired citizenship...

...Still, if McCain manages to pull off a victory, Republicans will owe a debt to the path blazed by the Hillary Clinton campaign in Pennsylvania—not that they would ever thank such an unlikely benefactor, and not that she would ever want to be thanked...

...What if, amid a deluge of ads, after spending the better part of six weeks crisscrossing Pennsylvania’s white ethnic inner suburbs and rural counties, he had managed to turn them into Obama country...

...And as the economy fl irts with recession, the social issues that supposedly drive America’s Bitter Bloc into Republican arms may be overshadowed...

...And as it turns out, the GOP may have a candidate who can do just that in John McCain...

...McCain’s balanced and measured plan to tackle the mortgage crisis, his call for doubling the tax exemption for dependents, and his proposal for delivering more affordable health care all represent a promising start...

...Instead of focusing on immigration as such, McCain needs to appeal to Latinos as members of a broad, pan-ethnic group of working class strivers...

...Only 41 percent feel better off...

...And gas prices are appreciably higher today than they were last fall...

...Meanwhile, the public mood is near toxic for the incumbent party...

...A reprise of 2006 in the form of Republican underperformance among white workingclass voters would doom McCain...

...He has a better chance than any other Republican...

...To the extent Latino voters can be pried loose from neo-McGovernism, the whole enterprise collapses...

...There’d be no denying that he had the political Midas touch...

...It is easy to see how a tough economic climate will shrink the winners’ circle...

...John McCain can’t match Clinton’s success in this regard, as the Latino political establishment is, with the exception of Florida’s Cuban Americans, very nearly monolithically Democratic...

...One has to assume Obama’s rapid-fi re responses to Clinton’s attacks on guns and security were a dry run for the general election...

...A number of analysts have attributed strong Latino support for Hillary Clinton to a deep-seated antagonism towards black Americans, an antagonism some Obama partisans have gone so far as to suggest has been stoked by the Clintons...

...An October 2007 survey, for example, found that 65 percent consider “Energy” (gas prices) very important to their vote, while only 22 percent felt the same way about same-sex marriage...

...But here’s the thing—the McGovern coalition included all minorities, as though minority status were defi ning and rigid...

...Obama would have shown that he can win white working-class votes in a big, diverse, populous state...

...In the 2006 midterms, by contrast, the fi rst group supported Republicans and Democrats equally, and the second backed Republicans by only 21 points...

...But it is by no means obvious that McCain can pry Latino voters lose, particularly in light of the tarnished state of the Republican brand...

...But he needs to weave together these and other proposals into a compelling narrative that goes beyond rewarding our guys and punishing yours...

...That was once the case, when memories of the Cold War motivated Korean American and Vietnamese American voters to back hawkish Republicans, and it could happen again as culturally conservative foreign-born Asian Americans acquire citizenship and younger churchgoing Asian Americans reach voting age...

...This leaves Latino voters...

...If he pulls it off, however, McCain will have a shot at winning states like Pennsylvania and Michigan...

...But what if Latino voters are simply mirroring the preferences of similarly situated Anglo voters...

...In a sense, Hillary Clinton’s coalition of white working class and Latino voters represents a better path for the Democratic party’s future than Barack Obama’s coalition of social liberals and black voters, which, as John Judis has noted, resembles nothing so much as George McGovern’s losing coalition of 1972...

...As for Latinos and Asian Americans, the so-called new minorities, the challenge is vexing because these groups are so diverse, and both are subject to what demographer William Frey calls “translation gaps...

...Right now, head-to-head match-ups between McCain and Obama look encouraging for the Republican...

...The party has performed decently with some Latino constituencies, some Asian ethnic groups, and with small but signifi cant minorities of culturally conservative black voters, as in Ohio in 2004...

...With Ross Douthat, he is the author of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (Doubleday), due out in June...

...This might sound a strange way to put it...

...And assimilation is fast turning Asian Americans into a less rather than a more distinctive constituency from whites with similar class and educational backgrounds...

...Democratic success in 2006 derived not from winning these voters but merely from cutting the Republican advantage...

...If Pennsylvania’s Northeast keeps trending Democratic, the state will become solidly blue...

...Pollsters fi nd the two are running neck-and-neck...

...In October 2004, the numbers were 54 percent and 32 percent respectively...

...Yet he didn’t win in Pennsylvania, even against Hillary Clinton’s near-penniless campaign, full of mutinous senior advisers eager to jump ship, even with a media cheering section to urge him on...

...Given that Latino voters by defi nition represent the most assimilated slice of the Latino population, it makes sense that, say, non-college-educated Latinos would parallel non-college-educated whites in preferring Clinton to Obama...

...For example, 60 percent of Asian Americans are foreign born...

...Way back after the Iowa caucuses, he playfully observed that everywhere he goes becomes Obama country...

...But in light of Obama’s popularity among black voters, it seems safe to say that McCain doesn’t have much of a shot with a constituency that has long been a Democratic stronghold...

...If the old coalition is shrinking, can McCain break out of the Republican demographic box by winning more nonwhite voters...

...According to a new Pew Research Center survey on the middle class, 31 percent of Americans believe they are worse off than they were fi ve years ago...

...In doing so, he could remove places like Nevada, Florida, and New Mexico from the swing state column and improve his standing in increasingly blue-trending Colorado...

...That is, McCain needs to win a bigger share of a shrinking slice of the electorate...

...In Building Red America, Thomas B. Edsall described the Republican party as a coalition of winners...

...When Republicans win elections, they tend to do so on the strength of super majorities of white working class voters...

...Among non-college-educated whites in households making $50,000 to $75,000, Bush won by 70 percent to 29 percent, and congressional Republicans by 32 points...

...with the moderates who have until recently seen him as one of their own...

...Hasn’t it always been true that Obama is beatable...

...In a survey released this month, Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz chronicle the long-term decline of the white working class, a decline driven in large part by education and income gains but also by sharp growth in the Latino population...

...This picture couldn’t be more misleading, as the McCain camp has been reminding anyone who’ll listen...

...That won’t be easy, particularly since domestic issues aren’t his strong suit, as his disappointing performance in the Michigan primary showed...

...Compare this with 25 percent in 1979, shortly before Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter with a campaign promise of hope and change...

...Because Asian Americans tend to live in married households and have relatively high incomes, this ought to be a strong Republican constituency...

...But if a Republican candidate can hold the line or make some modest gains with the region’s white working class voters, the picture looks very different...

...It’s a tall order...

...When Pew conducted its most recent comprehensive report on trends in political values in 2007, it found that the gap between Democratic and Republican partisan identifi cation was a mammoth 15 percentage points, a sharp shift from parity in 2002...

...Well, consider an alternate reality in which Obama had won Pennsylvania...

...But the ideological landscape is far less favorable to Republicans today...

...Latino distinctiveness will likely endure on certain issues, particularly on immigration...

...Yet that distinctiveness will fade...

...Hillary Clinton would have dropped out...

...Among non-college-educated whites in households making $30,000 to $50,000 a year, Bush won 62 percent to John Kerry’s 38 percent...

...Granted, there are far more college-educated liberals now than there were a generation ago...

...Given that President Bush now has the highest disapproval ratings in the history of presidential approval ratings, and that much of McCain’s strength derives from independent voters who now believe he’ll take the country in a different direction, those matchup numbers could get ugly fast...

...McCain broke with conservative Republicans to embrace a comprehensive immigration reform, but he’s been forced to soft-pedal the issue...

...Latinos and native-born blacks have clashed in urban politics, particularly in California where Latino political power has arguably surpassed that of black voters...

...As Hillary Clinton’s campaign slow-marches to its unhappy end, she is offering lessons not only for how McCain can defeat Obama—she is pointing towards a possible bright future for the Republican brand...

...Writer and hip-hop historian Jeff Chang has suggested that Latino voters in California backed Clinton because they place a great deal of weight on community leaders who were courted aggressively by the Clinton machine...

...He needs to keep his edge with these voters well in double digits to blunt the growing strength of Republican-unfriendly constituencies like less affl uent college-educated whites, unmarried women, and nonwhite voters...

...This is particularly true in the hard-hit Great Lakes region, where McCain has a chance to perform well against Obama...

...The same group went for Republicans in 2004 congressional voting by 22 points...

...You might say Asian Americans are assimilating into the Democratic-leaning tendencies of their college-educated white neighbors...

...His people certainly thought long and deeply about this alternate reality—why else spend a staggering $12 million on one state’s primary...

...Not only did Obama not expand beyond his core constituencies— as always, he was crushed among Catholics, an atypically big slice of Pennsylvania’s Democratic electorate, and white working-class voters—he lost ground with affl uent professionals, the group that has powered his historic fundraising success, with weekly churchgoers, and Reihan Salam is an editor at the Atlantic and a fellow at the New America Foundation...

...Once the Democratic nomination is settled, there is every reason to believe McCain will fall behind...

...She’s probably not thrilled about that...

...The Obama campaign, a far shrewder, more effective, more creative operation than any we’ve seen in Democratic politics in years, didn’t spend that extraordinary sum for laughs...

...In a new Brookings study of Pennsylvania’s political demographics, William Frey and Ruy Teixeira identify this region, centered on Allentown, as key to the state’s political future...

...Asian-American voters have nonetheless been trending Democratic, in no small part because they are clustered in heavily Democratic metropolitan areas...

...He lost Greater Pittsburgh and the Philadelphia suburbs by wide margins, and he also lost the northeastern part of the state by a whopping 66 to 34 percent...

...Among self-identifi ed middle class voters, 79 percent are convinced it is tougher now than fi ve years ago for middle class families to maintain their standard of living...

...But before we get ahead of ourselves, it’s worth considering the scale of the obstacles Republicans face...

...And if that’s true, it suggests that the demographic decline of the white working class is an illusion—it will be remade as an Anglo-Latino white working class, just as conceptions of whiteness grew to include previous waves of immigrants...

...It’s true that these numbers were fairly grim, even before President Bush’s reelection: For example, only about 20 percent in 2003 rated the economy as excellent...

...There is no doubt some truth to this notion...

...Moreover, he will never win Latino voters in an immigration liberalization bidding war with Democrats...

...The vast majority of Clinton Democrats will rally round the fl ag, Obama will be able to train his fi re on McCain, and a massive independent expenditure campaign designed to tie McCain to the Bush White House will get under way...

...Bluecollar Republicans tended to be non-college-educated women and men in intact families, who had successfully adapted to economic change and were inclined to believe that the market economy worked for them...