Barack Obama’s re-election confirms the emergence of a new Democratic majority, writes Anthony Painter

‘America goes into the darkness,’ was Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips’ reaction to the re-election of Barack Obama. Just in case the reader missed the none-too-subtle racial undertone of the headline, she went on to inform us that Obama was a ‘narcissist’ with close links to ‘thuggish, far-left, black power, Jew-bashing, west-hating politics’.

Far from stepping into the darkness, the United States took a step away in 2008 and a further step in this year’s presidential election. Slowly but surely, America is leaving behind the politics of mainstream racial hatred disguised as patriotism and traditional values. This election was a confirmation and reaffirmation rather than a declaration – that came in 2008. The forces that have changed American society are embedded. They are cultural, demographic and structural. They also create new problems, as the losers realise they cannot win, and that could create a backlash.

One of the more interesting findings from the exit polls came on the question of geography. Obama decimated Mitt Romney in the cities – 62 per cent to 36 per cent. They were pretty even in the suburbs. The Republican candidate had an enormous advantage in small town and rural America. The problem? That is now only 21 per cent of the US population. City-dwellers are 32 per cent of the total. Small town and rural America is politically weak.

Alongside this sits the racial shifts in the US. Every election cycle sees the white electorate shrink by a few more percentage points. Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress forecast that the white element of the electorate would shrink to 72 per cent in 2012 from 76 per cent in 2008. It was 85 per cent in 1988. Teixeira was right – another data guy vindicated just as Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight blog was, despite Republican attacks on his forecasting methods. What is more, the fastest-growing in terms of numbers in the non-white demographics is Hispanics. They voted 71 per cent to 27 per cent for Obama compared with 67 per cent to 31 per cent when the president defeated John McCain. Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado increasingly default to the Democrats. As one pundit put it on Sky News, ‘Romney ran out of white voters to vote for him.’

There are so many subplots to this story. But the big one is that the coalition that won the Republicans seven out of 10 presidential elections in 40 years is no longer functioning. The new Democratic majority has emerged. Teixeira and John B Judis published The Emerging  Democratic Majority in 2002 in a deliberate echo of Kevin Phillips’ 1969 classic The Emerging Republican Majority. Actually, their achievement is far greater than Silver’s, despite the salivating Twittersphere.

So Melanie Phillips-esque fantasies of a ‘strong’ America where a white majority puts troublesome minorities in their place and launches wars of aggression every other year become less and less likely to be realised. The heady brew of social, evangelical and neoconservatism mixed with neoliberalism is decreasingly likely to prevail.

The fate of the Tea party this time around is instructive in this regard. As Cas Mudde has recently pointed out on the Extremis Project website, the Tea party is actually a coalition of two factions: the ‘astroturfers’ and the ‘grassroots’. Freedom Works, Fox News, and other plutocratic organs drive the former. In the latter we see a toxic brew of social conservatism and racial anxiety. The former is deploying movement-esque techniques to try and generate popular support for traditional conservatism. The latter are values-driven but the problem is that their values are not those of the mainstream majority: exit polls found 65 per cent of voters believing that illegal immigrants should be given the chance to apply for legal status, 59 per cent believing that abortion should be legal in most or all cases, and a slight plurality backing the legalisation of same-sex marriage.

Tea party politics is out of step with mainstream America. The upshot? The spectacular defeat of candidates advocating the Tea party view. Senate candidates Todd Akin of ‘legitimate rape’ fame and Richard Mourdock lost seats the Republicans should have won, while House incumbents Allen West and Joe Welsh were among the vanquished. And then there was Romney himself. To win the Republican primary contest he had to compromise with the Tea party. He lost America in the process. Seventy-seven per cent of voters considered the economy to be ‘not so good’ or ‘poor’. What is more, 55 per cent thought economic conditions were ‘poor and staying the same’ or ‘getting worse’. If this were an election decided on purely economic factors then Romney could well now be US president. The battle of values was crucial and the former Massachusetts governor managed to place himself outside the mainstream.

The Obama campaign strategy – tactical, defensive and negative despite an awesome ‘ground game’ – gave the Republicans a further opening. This election was really there for the taking. While the auto-bailout and Romney’s opposition to it placed him at a disadvantage in key midwest battleground states, the opportunity was there. There is a strong sense of this election being one that the Republicans and Romney lost rather than one that the president won.

So does this mean that the Republicans can never win again? Of course not. Even when the Republican coalition was in its heyday the Democrats were able to win. But it does mean that a more centrist strategy and candidate will be necessary – former Florida governor Jeb Bush; senator Marco Rubio (despite his Tea party association); and Indiana governor Mitch Daniels seem like obvious names but others will emerge. But if the Tea party grassroots prevent such a candidate winning the nomination, the outcome for the Republicans is likely to be the same. That source of rightwing energy is a negative energy when it comes to seizing the White House.

And what of small town, white, conservative, declining America? Increasingly they could struggle to be heard as the Republicans turn away from them in the journey to electability. The anti-racism campaigning group the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that the number of anti-government ‘patriot’ groups has grown from 149 in 2008 to 1,274 today. Fox News presenters such as Bill O’Reilly bemoaned the re-election of Obama in terms of victimhood: ‘the white establishment is now the minority.’ Putting aside the illogicality of an ‘establishment’ ever being a majority, it is clear there are many who are prepared to aggravate and provoke discontent. Politically things should get better but security could become an increasing concern – as the violent attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin back in August highlights.

In all this there could be portents for the UK. We are becoming a more ethnically diverse society. The non-British white population is expanding. Younger generations are far more comfortable with that. A recent Extremis Project/YouGov poll shows that those aged 18-39 are far more accepting of immigration than older generations. It remains to be seen whether there is a generational shift or whether age breeds anxiety. Nonetheless, some of the attitudinal shifts we see in the UK echo, in a less striking way, some of what we see in the US. This could well play out over the next decade or two. The geography of change will matter too.

The US has shown it is ready to step away from the darkness. The clash of civilisations is not between ‘Islam’ and ‘the west’. There is no melodramatic ‘clash of civilisations’ but there is a shift between increasingly pluralistic societies and the rejection of that change – despite the noise from the right. Obama’s win is one aspect of the change. And so is Melanie Phillips’ anguish.

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