Although I disagree with some of his other observations in the column, I agree with Michael Barone’s main point—there will be no durable Obama coalition analogous to the FDR coalition of 80 year ago:

Why has the Democratic Party fared so poorly under Obama’s leadership? I can see two reasons: one ideological, one demographic.

Start with demographics. The Obama coalition, even more than Bill Clinton’s, is based on overwhelming support from constituencies with some conflicting interests. It’s a top-and-bottom coalition: he carried the very lowest and highest income and education groups, while his support sagged among those in the middle.

His strongest groups are blacks and gentry liberals — the same two groups he gathered together when he got to design his own state Senate district in 2002. Majorities of both groups still support him, but perhaps with diminished enthusiasm.

[…]

That gets us to ideology. Bill Clinton was credited with competence and acceptable ideology, which made his party competitive in the early 2000s and well-positioned to take advantage of George W. Bush’s perceived incompetence (Iraq, Katrina) in 2006 and 2008.

President Obama’s ideology — expanded government, Obamacare — has been less widely acceptable, and his reputation for competence is currently in tatters. He was able to eke out re-election with a reduced percentage by good organization. But he leaves his party in trouble.

I think that Mr. Barone leaves something basic out: the president has no stomach for cultivating friendships, crafting alliances, making deals, or forging compromises. Or building a coalition. Although getting more votes than the other guy is a necessary part of politics it’s not all there is to the craft. The president’s popularity is personal popularity or maybe even the popularity of his biography. That is not the stuff of a durable coalition.

This post was inspired by a comment left on another post. Raising taxes and hoping that an improving national economy will trickle down to Illinois is a poor strategy for Illinois. Illinois is not a destination state like California, Florida, New York, or even North Carolina. People don’t come here for the scenery or the benign climate or to savor the view from a highrise apartment overlooking Central Park.

What will happen in Illinois at the end of four years of raise taxes, raise the minimum wage, and hope? Illinois’s liabilities will have grown while its tax base has deteriorated which will put even more demands on a limited revenue stream.

Illinois needs to face its problems the two greatest of which are that its public employee pension funds don’t have enough money in them to pay what’s been promised and the state’s Medicaid tab is too high. Can incumbents be re-elected on the basis of dealing with those problems? I don’t think so. And that’s Illinois’s biggest problem.

The technical definition of a “wave election” is an election in which all or nearly all of the close contests break in favor of whichever party’s wave it is. I do not believe there will be such a clear pattern in today’s election. Consequently, there will be no wave.

Update

Charlie Cook describes what a wave would look like:

The first test of the existence of a political wave is whether the benefiting party avoids losing many of its own endangered seats. The second is whether it wins an overwhelming number of the purple, competitive or, in this case, light blue Democratic-tilting but still endangered seats. So, if Republicans limit their own losses to just one of their own competitive seats (for example, Roberts in Kansas) and win at least three of the four key purple states (the open seat in Iowa and the three seats held by Democratic incumbents—Kay Hagan in North Carolina, Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, and Mark Udall in Colorado), that starts qualifying as a wave. Just winning one or two out of the four neutral-site contests might well help the GOP secure the majority, but it hardly qualifies as a wave. These are seats where it is the political environment and President Obama, not the map itself, that are the cause of Democratic pain. Obama carried all four states in both 2008 and 2012; losses in these would mean voters who voted for him have officially reversed course.

The third test of a real wave is the ability of a party to pull off real upsets, knocking off incumbents who were not on the lists of first- or second-tier vulnerable seats. If, for example, someone like Mark Warner in Virginia, Al Franken in Minnesota, or Jeff Merkley in Oregon were to lose, that would be a wave in the sense of 1980, 1994, 2006, or 2008. These years saw wins that were way more than just a result of the map. There now appears to be little chance that any of these three will lose their races.

Is that really what appears to be in the making? I guess we’ll have a better idea after the polls close tonight.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal whine about Democrats’ wooing African American voters:

President Obama and fellow Democrats have been obsessed with the African-American electorate of late, mindful that the party needs high black voter turnout Tuesday to keep the Senate. The implication is that every black American who votes will automatically pull the Democratic lever, and perhaps they will. What is becoming harder to explain is why black Americans would feel any gratitude for the results of Obama Administration policies.

Of course Democrats want to get black voters to the polls. African Americans are their most reliable voting block. That’s what you do in a get out the vote campaign: you try to ensure that your most reliable voters vote.

Here’s a wild idea: put up more African Americans for statewide offices. It’s a proven way of getting out the African American vote. To the best of my knowledge the only African American running for the Senate this election is Corey Booker in New Jersey. That’s too few by far.

It isn’t often that we see a juxtaposition like this. On Sunday two young women, facing very similar crises, both made national news. Brittany Maynard has taken her own life:

Brittany Maynard, the terminally ill 29-year-old who spent her final days advocating for death-with-dignity laws, took lethal drugs prescribed by her physician on Saturday and died, a spokesman said, “as she intended — peacefully in her bedroom, in the arms of her loved ones.”

Maynard, who was diagnosed earlier this year with a stage 4 malignant brain tumor, said last month she planned to die Nov. 1 in her home in Portland, Ore., with help from her doctor. And Saturday, she said farewell, having succeeded at reviving interest — and debate — in a charged subject that had been out of the news for some years. (See “How Brittany Maynard may change the right-to-die debate.”

“Goodbye to all my dear friends and family that I love. Today is the day I have chosen to pass away with dignity in the face of my terminal illness, this terrible brain cancer that has taken so much from me … but would have taken so much more,” she wrote on Facebook, according to People. The magazine reported she took a fatal dose of barbiturates. “The world is a beautiful place, travel has been my greatest teacher, my close friends and folks are the greatest givers. I even have a ring of support around my bed as I type…. Goodbye world. Spread good energy. Pay it forward!”

Within hours of Ms. Maynard’s suicide, Lauren Hill made a basket in her first college basketball game:

Lauren Hill felt so good after fulfilling her dream that she felt inspired to play another game.

Makes sense, since the freshman forward for Division III Mount St. Joseph’s stirred a capacity crowd just by taking the court.

Much depends on Hill’s health and energy as she deals with an inoperable brain tumor that has left her with just months to live. In between making two layups that started and finished Sunday’s 66-55 victory over Hiram College and brought a crowd of 10,250 to its feet, she spent much of her inspiring game sitting on the bench wearing sunglasses and headphones.

Hill’s condition has made her extremely sensitive to sensations her teammates and opposing players take for granted, but she still enjoyed the bright gym and the cheering crowd. And she certainly savored her two baskets on a day she will never forget.

“This game was amazing,” Hill said. “It was awesome in every way. It’s a dream come true. To play on a college court, to put my foot down on the floor and hear the roar of the crowd — I just love it so much. I love basketball.

“Everything that happened today was amazing. I’m truly happy, it’s a really good day.”

I grieve the ordeal that life has brought these two young women. The world can be a very cruel place.

Larry Sabato makes his final pre-election prediction and it looks like things will go the Republicans’ way: 53-47 in the Senate, 243-192 in the House, but a net loss of three governorships. At the link there’s a race by race analysis and lots of pretty electoral maps and charts.

I think it’ll be closer than that but I think the final outcome will be close to that: the Republicans will control both houses of Congress and hold a majority of governorships. Here’s what Dr. Sabato says about the Illinois governor’s race:

We can’t quite believe it, but Gov. Pat Quinn (D) may actually survive. Despite ugly approval ratings, Quinn is running essentially even with businessman Bruce Rauner (R). Illinois is a blue state, and in what is pretty much a coin-flip, we’re taking Quinn. LEANS DEMOCRATIC

I believe that in Illinois everything depends on the turnout in Cook County. It will take a large enough turnout here to keep Gov. Quinn in office.

Every week members of the Watcher’s Council weigh on a single question. This week’s forum is here.

The question considered this week is whether there’s a case for impeaching the president.

IMO a new Republican Congress would be foolhardy to impeach President Obama. It would be a futile gesture but, then, the Republicans of the 113th Congress specialized in futile gestures.

If a hypothetical 114th Republican Congress is so vexed with President Obama that they must do something, they have plenty of other alternatives for doing so that could be done with a simple majority—a path for which the reckless Pelosi-Reid Congress set the pattern.

If they need to get it out of their systems, they could reduce the president’s travel and/or staff budget to zero. They could also get some administration officials thrown in the clink for perjury. I’d start with the director of the CIA.

If the editors of the Wall Street Journal think that the Illinois governor’s race is about taxes, they’ve got a hold of the wrong end of the stick. Not that Illinois hasn’t raised taxes over the last dozen years. We have. We’ve transmogrified from a moderate tax state to a high tax one and most of those taxes are regressive. We have a high sales tax, since our property taxes are reassessed every three years, they tend to rise quickly, and, since we have so many distinct taxing entities in the state, sales taxes and property taxes tend to rise with the expenses of these entities rather than with the state’s income.

I think Illinoisans would bear the taxes if they believed the state were moving in the right direction but they don’t. Nearly every indicator from income to population to number of businesses to our unemployment rate has worsened or, at least, gotten no better.

Mae West is quoted as saying that when it comes to a choice between two evils she always picked the one she hadn’t tried. I think that’s what this election is about in Illinois.

The question I couldn’t get away from in reading this article about the trials and tribulations of the New York Times was how in the world can you cut the number of people on the payroll in half and end up with the same size payroll you had when you started? I guess the second question is whether there’s a niche for a national journal of opinion that targets people who live on the Upper West Side or wish they did?

I think there probably is but it won’t be able to pay big salaries to its top management and its name columnists. Which may be the point of the whole enterprise at this point. It also won’t be able to service a lot of debt, something I’ve mentioned as a problem for the newspaper industry more broadly.

The Times had better watch out. Carlos Slim is a man who’s been known to cut his losses pretty suddenly.