Changing Party Coalitions to Clash in 2016 Election

I expect the electorate wants change, although Republicans can't discount the changing demographics.

Interestingly, Hillary Clinton is not the candidate to sustain the so-called Democrat rainbow coalition of the ascendant. She'll be freakin' 69 in January 2017. And she doesn't tip the counter help.

At the Los Angeles Times, "2016 election pits desire for change against a demographic shift":

The presidential campaign got fully underway this last week with a flurry of announcements, road trips and rallies that will roll across the country with increasing intensity for the next year and a half.

Most of what grabs headlines in the coming campaign will have little or no impact on who wins, past experience has shown. But underneath the hoopla, two clashing realities will shape what is likely to be a close and hard-fought battle.

Democrats will be trying to win a third consecutive presidential election, a difficult task made harder by the fact that by almost 2 to 1, Americans continue to believe the country is on the wrong track, polls show.

Republicans will be trying to win with a base of supporters that is roughly 90% white in an increasingly diverse country, having failed so far to develop a strategy to attract the growing minority populations who rejected them in 2008 and 2012.

Who wins will almost certainly depend on which proves more powerful — the hunger for change or the inexorable demographic wave.

Or to put it another way, the 2016 election will test whether the Obama coalition of minorities and white liberals can hold together, turn out and defeat the aging but still powerful coalition of social and economic conservatives and foreign policy hawks assembled by Ronald Reagan 35 years ago.

The best case for Republicans is that "the American public seldom has the stomach for a third term, and President Obama hasn't been the kind of leader who generates a third term," said political scientist Julia R. Azari of Marquette University in Wisconsin.

The two presidents in the modern era whose parties did win three or more elections, Reagan and Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, both transformed American politics by embodying — and helping bring about — a change in what people believed government should do.

Obama has not accomplished that. As a result, Azari said, for Hillary Rodham Clinton — or another Democratic nominee if she stumbles — it's hard to "talk about the Obama legacy" because it's not clearly defined.

Obama came into office with hopes of leading the country toward a new acceptance of activist government. Some Democrats hoped, for example, that successful implementation of the Affordable Care Act would cause Americans to warm toward the expanded government role in guaranteeing health coverage it represents.

Obamacare by now has helped more than 20 million Americans get insured, the biggest increase in coverage in half a century.

Contrary to dire warnings from the law's opponents, healthcare costs have not shot upward — the rate of healthcare inflation is the lowest in years — the job market has improved and the cost to the federal government is below forecasts.

Despite those successes, the country remains sharply divided on the law. American views of the Affordable Care Act have improved a bit in recent months — 43% disapproved and 41% approved in the most recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation in March — but mostly, opinions have been stuck about where they were when Congress first passed the bill in 2010.

Rather than changing the nation's close partisan divide, the healthcare law appears to have reinforced it.

Broader measurements also find continued widespread skepticism about government...

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