Stirred by fears that Democrats might fail to patch together the broad coalition necessary to defeat Donald Trump next year, the late stages of the Democratic primary have taken an abrupt turn.
Suddenly, a contest that has been largely defined by ideology is being re-framed around questions of race and identity.
The campaign’s transition to a more overt confrontation of race is no accident. It is purposeful and unfolding, according to aides in a handful of campaigns, as a still large field of contenders grows increasingly desperate to shake up the top tier — and also to carve out lanes that will take them through the early-state gauntlet.
The shift crystallized during last week’s debate as Democrats descended on the majority-black city of Atlanta and fanned out afterward in campaign appearances designed to connect with African-American audiences.
Aides and allies of Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker — as well as Julián Castro — have increasingly sounded alarms about whether any other candidate can beat Trump. And Harris, Booker and Castro have been telegraphing for weeks that they would take their campaigns in a more race-conscious direction.
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“What we need to talk about right now in this primary is which candidate can actually assemble the coalition we need to win, and that’s a big concern right now with who is leading the polls,” a Harris official said.
The new orientation is animated by doubts surrounding the durability of Joe Biden — a candidate with a broad-based coalition, anchored by his commanding lead with black voters — and a desire to blunt the momentum of a younger, white male candidate, Pete Buttigieg. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has failed to demonstrate any ability to win over voters of color, most starkly in a recent Quinnipiac University poll that pegged his support among African-American Democrats in South Carolina at 0 percent.
Castro, the only Latino in the race, attacked Buttigieg’s low polling figures with black voters last week.
“If there’s a candidate that has a bad track record with the biggest base of our party,” Castro said, “then why in the world would we put that person at the top of the ticket and risk handing the election over to Donald Trump when we need places like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia to help us win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?”
Source: To defeat Trump, Dems rethink the Obama coalition formula
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