The New Democrats

Ron Brownstein's cover piece in the latest National Journal looks at what the primary season tells us about the shape of the Democratic coalition, and what he finds seems to dovetail with my last post about the shape of the Obama vote. "The party is growing younger," he writes, "more affluent, more liberal, and more heavily tilted toward women, Latinos, and African-Americans." These trends have obviously been at work for a long time now, but they've been amplified by the Obama and Clinton campaigns: He's brought more affluent voters to the polls, and more young voters; she's brought out more women, and more Hispanics. Meanwhile ...

Seniors' share of the votes cast has declined this year in all 18 states except Wisconsin (where it remained even) and New Hampshire (where it grew slightly). Likewise, white men have cast a smaller share of the Democratic vote in every comparable state except New York.

White voters with no college education, the foundation of the party's coalition from the time of Franklin Roosevelt through Lyndon Johnson, have also cast a smaller share of the vote this year in three-fourths of the states with data that can be compared with 2004 ... just before the Wisconsin primary in mid-February, ABC News polling director Gary Langer calculated that a cumulative majority of white Democratic primary voters in all of this year's contests had college or postgraduate degrees -- a remarkable tipping point for a party that since its 19th-century inception has viewed itself as the tribune of the working class.

Read the whole thing.