The warrior and the priest: how Clinton and Obama divide their party

National Review, March 10, 2008 by Ramesh Ponnuru

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HILLARY CLINTON and Barack Obama fought to a draw on Super Tuesday. They won roughly the same number of delegates, and the popular-vote margin between them was 0.4 percent. But Yuval Levin pointed out something odd at NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE: In most of the 22 states with elections that day, the results were not at all close. Eleven states were blowouts for Obama: He won eight states by 24 points or more. Seven states gave Clinton lopsided victories.

If you divide the Democratic-primary vote by demographic group instead of state, you see the same pattern. Clinton and Obama have been roughly evenly matched overall, but that parity obscures the strong preferences of different subsets of the voting population. New Mexico was a close election. Two opposing landslides produced that tie: Exit polls showed that Obama took 60 percent of college graduates, while Clinton took 61 percent of voters without a college degree.

The candidates have two different coalitions--you might even say two different parties--within the party. The race has been tight nationally because those coalitions are roughly equal in size. But they are not equal in each state, which is why Clinton and Obama have each had large margins. If Obama pulls away, it will be because Clinton's coalition is surrendering control of the party to his. But even if the nomination does not go to Obama, his coalition probably represents the party's future.

Obama has, almost everywhere, been winning the votes of blacks. Affluent, highly educated voters have been in his corner. Young voters and irreligious voters have been on his side. White men in northern states have voted for him, and so have white women in states that don't have a lot of blacks. (A state with few blacks or a lot of blacks is a good state for Obama.) Independent voters have gone his way.

Clinton draws disproportionate support from white women. Her coalition includes more low-income voters, more union members, more Hispanics, and more white Catholics and Protestants. Older voters have favored her, and so have people who have a history of voting in Democratic primaries. Leave aside Illinois, Arkansas, and New York, which had strong ties to one or the other candidate, and these patterns have held almost everywhere.

Journalist Ron Brownstein wrote an article for the Los Angeles Times last spring on the tensions within the Democratic party: "Since the 1960s," he said, "Democratic nominating contests regularly have come down to a struggle between a candidate who draws support primarily from upscale, economically comfortable voters liberal on social and foreign policy issues, and a rival who relies mostly on downscale, financially strained voters drawn to populist economics and somewhat more conservative views on cultural and national security issues."

Democratic strategists, Brownstein noted, alluded to this division by referring to "wine track" and "beer track" candidates. One class of Democratic voters looks for a candidate who will be a "warrior" for their interests. Another class looks for a candidate who will serve as a kind of secular "priest" affirming their values.

Brownstein was right to locate the source of the party's division in the 1960s. Until that time party politics had been organized mostly on economic and sectional lines. In the late 1960s, however, a "new politics" (as it was then called) based on lifestyle and values issues started to come to the fore. Over time many well-off social liberals left the Republican party for this new Democratic party, and many working-class social conservatives traveled in the reverse direction. The old and new Democratic parties fought bitter battles in 1968 and 1972, battles that contributed to the end of the old Democratic lock on the presidency.

And the battles have continued in muted form ever since. You can trace a line from the old Democratic party of Hubert Humphrey to Walter Mondale to Al Gore and, now, to Clinton. Obama, meanwhile, is leading the party that descends from George McGovern through Gary Hart and Bill Bradley. The old party did not survive unchanged: The coalition Clinton leads is much more socially liberal than the party Humphrey led. But differences of emphasis remain.

The careful reader will note that most of the new party's candidates lost. Mondale beat Hart, and Gore beat Bradley. Obama is doing better than them in part because of his remarkable political skills. But that's not the only reason he may win the Democratic nomination. The new party has had an enduring weakness: its lack of appeal to black voters. They went heavily for Gore over Bradley, for example. This time, however, the new party's candidate is a black man. Obama's blackness expands the new party's coalition in two ways. It brings in his fellow black Americans. It also heightens his appeal to the party's natural constituents. Well-off liberal white voters are delighted to have the opportunity to vote for a nice black man. The primary contest, then, pits the McGovern-Hart coalition plus blacks against the Humphrey-Mondale coalition plus middle-aged white feminists.