Obama's third area of strength is his very impressive appeal to the Democrats' new upscale, highly-educated business and professional constituency, evident in his fundraising prowess.
Kotkin makes the case that the celebrated Obama coalition uniting well-educated, often upscale liberals, with such struggling, often disadvantaged constituencies as single women, racial and ethnic minorities, and the young is fragile at best: The class issue so cleverly exploited by the president in the election could prove the potential Achilles heel of today's gentry progressivism.
He cannot count on enthusiastic support from the GOP's traditional religious and economic constituencies, and his appeal to upscale independents is more than countered by Obama's.
The Democratic Party is continuing to extend its core support among minority constituencies — now 41percentt of the Democratic electorate — into upscale, often suburban, areas as college-educated white women abandon the Republican Party in droves and as education, more broadly, becomes a new partisan dividing line.
Ruy Teixeira, an analyst of demographic trends at the Century Foundation, said a lasting Republican majority was always unrealistic in light of the continuing growth in Democratic-leaning constituencies, including Hispanic and Asian immigrants, working women and upscale professionals.
Executives point to crosstown corporate neighbor the Gap as the prototype of how to manage different constituencies by creating separate brands discounter Old Navy, middle-market Gap and upscale Banana Republic.
When it comes to Trump, the Israeli leader can point to how much his constituency resembles his American ally's: Netanyahu lost the sophisticated, upscale voters around Tel Aviv to Gantz by more than 2 to 1, but he overwhelmed Gantz in more religious Jerusalem and also in towns that Sommer described as Israel's equivalent of Middle America.
An upscale private school?
An upscale grocery store.
Upscale retail is nearby.
