If AOC, Sanders and Warren took the reins of the party, they'd not only lose all support from billionaires, they'd go into vicious attack mode, funding whomever they thought could defeat them - both inside and outside the party.
I also wouldn't want to presuppose who the "other" might end up being. The far right might very well embrace Jews, Hispanics and Blacks while they turn on immigrants and muslims. But, there will be an "other" and their "otherness" will become a bigger and bigger deal over time.
I can’t find the article, but there was a story during the run-up to the 2012 election covering wealthy donors who switched to Romney in 2012. They interviewed one guy and his entire motivation for dropping support for Obama was, I kid you not, Obama telling him at a White House party in 2010 that he hadn’t gotten around to reading his self-published book yet. The donor thought it was really insulting that after all the money he gave Obama he hadn’t read his crappy book. This is especially absurd when you consider Obama was in the midst of battling the massive financial collapse and two foreign wars.
This is why I think bargaining with billionaires is dangerous. You’re never going to be good enough for them.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/08/super-rich-iro...
> Last July, before he had written the [harshly critical] letter [about Obama], Cooperman was invited to the White House for a reception to honor wealthy philanthropists who had signed Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least fifty per cent of their net worth to charity. At the event, Cooperman handed the President two copies of “Inspired: My Life (So Far) in Poems,” a self-published book written by Courtney Cooperman, his fourteen-year-old granddaughter. Cooperman was surprised that the President didn’t send him a thank-you note or that Malia and Sasha Obama, for whom the books were intended as a gift and to whom Courtney wrote a separate letter, didn’t write to Courtney. (After Cooperman grumbled to a few friends, including Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark, Michelle Obama did write. Booker, who was also a recipient of Courtney’s book, promptly wrote her “a very nice note,” Cooperman said.)
Here's a more recent retelling:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/leon-cooperman-eliza...
> For those unfamiliar with Cooperman’s history of bitching and moaning, this isn’t the first time he’s complained about being treated just sooo unfairly by a politician. During the Obama years, he claimed that the president’s description of Wall Street leaders as “fat cat bankers”—made in the immediate wake of the financial crisis before he would go on to be extremely business friendly—was encouraging “class warfare,” and that Obama’s “polarizing tone” was “cleaving a widening gulf…between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them,” i.e. the rich. Speaking of tones, Cooperman, like many of his brethren, chose to liken Obama to Adolf Hitler, and also got his knickers in a major twist over the fact that the president had the audacity not to write a thank-you note to Cooperman’s 14-year-old granddaughter for her unsolicited book of poems. So Liz Warren better shape up, and fast.
I'm particularly interested in watching African-American voting sentiments in the age of Trump. He seems to be bringing change.
For example, the Republican Party used to enjoy the majority of the black vote, but this shifted towards the Democrats during the latter half of the 20th century. Likewise, prior to 9/11, the Republican Party enjoyed the majority of Muslim voters, who shifted their support leftward in the following decade.
As for the Democrats, they used to have much stronger support from the white working class, but this once reliable voting bloc started eroding away from them since the 1970s.
The sustained economic prosperity of the post war years in the US mainstreamed market liberalism for Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, giving birth to “neoliberalism”, rejecting their parent’s depression-era “new deal Democrats” skepticism of unfettered market capitalism.
Political demographics aren’t set in stone. They will change with events of the nation.