All of the naval gazing over whether or not Hillary can win back Appalachia is really a more reasoned reaction to the Democratic Party break-up that's happening right along side the Republican one.
The only difference is that the media is taking some satisfaction in watching the Republicans implode, while hoping fervently that Hillary can hold it together just long enough to allow them to author their think-pieces on the first woman President.
In case you thought this Hillary rapture was about Progressives supporting progressives forget it. A reporter craves nothing more than their moment in history, imagining that they are going to pen the central opus of a historical moment.
Except their not. Because the historical moment is going to be Tweeted, and broadcast on Vine, posted to Instagram and shared on SnapChat. It's a new-age of media consumption after all. And that's the first coalition that has fallen, the coalition of the media.
The second, and most public, is the demise of the long-abandoned Reagan coalition that has loosely held together as the modern GOP. I've said before that it was comprised of seven primary 'factions' and that your view of the so-called "establishment" varied in accordance with which group you found yourself in.
Trump has successfully courted and eighth faction, the blue collar workers, and they have banded together with the remnants of the Tea Party movement to form a fairly powerful voting bloc based, primarily, on anger and economic illiteracy in order to Make America Bronze Again....or something.
What's not really being reported all that often is that this wave of Trump supporters has to be coming from somewhere. As the linked article at the top of this post accurately surmises it's coming from the old Democratic coalition, from the labor movement that was a reliable voting bloc for a long, long time.
This is the former union vote that allowed the Democrats to build powerful, urban political machines. It led to Tammany Hall and the Chicago Way, it provided the backbone for Democratic dominance of cities in the MidWest. Ultimately, it might be the thing that undoes Democratic control of a large portion of urban areas.
It's important to note that I'm not referring to the union leadership here. They have too much political, and financial, capital invested in the Democrats to cleanly break-away. Their abandonment of the party is going to be messy and public as the rank-and-file voters find themselves increasingly detached from their leaders.
The problem is that the Democrats ran out of things to give them. And what the voters wanted ran the risk of hurting another Democrat group, one of increasing electoral importance, the Hispanic voter.
That problem is not limited, for the Democrats, to just the blue collar workers. How long, for example, do you think it will be before the GLBTQ advocacy groups tire of Democratic pandering to Muslims? (who, in other countries, have a troubling habit of continuously trying to teach gay people to fly by throwing them off buildings) How long before the simmering black resentment over what they perceive as abandonment by Democrats starts becoming directed at the aforementioned Hispanics? And can the largely Catholic Hispanic voter really ever reconcile with Planned Parenthood and their Fetal tissue factories?
Another Democratic problem is that all of these groups are being loosely held together by a group of very well-off, Caucasian members of the New England yacht set. A group that has absolutely nothing in common with any of them.
The above is why I think "demographics is destiny" is a flawed model for Democrats and it's why I see a path to renewal for whatever follows the GOP.
Of course, the GOP voter is going to have to change a little bit, more on that later.
