This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 5th, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The coalition that President Obama and other Democrats assembled for the 2008 election collapsed rather quickly.

Sean Trendy says he has an explanation.

He is the author of the new book The Lost Majority,

Why the Future of Government is Up for Grabs, and who will take it. He spoke at the Cato Institute

yesterday. The story is that Barack Obama redrew the map and had a broad new coalition

that would enable the Democrats to finally overcome the Republican

realignment that had occurred in 1968 or 1980. But as I looked at the data, something

jumped out at me and it struck me that Barack Obama did not have a new

map at all and that there was no new coalition that had responded to his message of

hope and change.

In fact, Barack Obama's map looked a whole lot like Bill Clinton's map in 1996.

And you can see in these maps, I've made it so that as a state goes more for Barack Obama it

becomes a little blue or as it goes more heavily for Clinton it becomes a little

redder and there are some differences but it is at its essences at its

essence the same map in 2008 as it was in 1996.

In fact, from 1996 to 2008, only three states moved more than five points towards the Democrats, Vermont,

Nevada, and Hawaii.

The biggest changes in the maps actually were losses for the Democrats.

Arizona, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Louisiana, and Arkansas all moved five points or more away for the Democrats.

In other words, Barack Obama did not build a new democratic coalition in 2008.

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