The Hillary coalition: Why white women will play kingmaker in 2016

Hillary Clinton is in it to ... assure you that she'll work hard to deserve your vote, especially if you're an everyday American.

"Everyday American" is a short phrase that encapsulates the grand strategy of her campaign, a subtle way of throwing shade on the non-everyday Americans — the people that Elizabeth Warren decries, the 1 percent, the Wall Street bankers, and, generally, opponents of progress. Whether Clinton's campaign will be revolutionary or regular is a question that'll take at least a year or more to answer. Judging by the way the media dissected her campaign video, political reporters will try to imbue every tick of her eye with transcendent meaning. I would say to all of that: "It's very, very early."

Democrats have not won a majority of white women voters since 1996, when President Clinton earned his second term in office. Democrats have been able to raise turnout among young women, black women, and Hispanic women to compensate for the Republican candidate's general advantage among white women. (Mitt Romney's margin in 2012 was 14 percent; John McCain's in 2008 was 7 percent; George W. Bush's in 2004 was 11 percent.) To compensate, the party has focused on unmarried women, who generally find themselves more sensitive to economic duress and recoil from Republican social conservatism. In the past two elections, these women have made up about 21 to 23 percent of the electorate. Hillary Clinton is focused on reducing this gap. The message potential is there.

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As Thomas Edsall pointed out in The New York Times last year, "It has not escaped the notice of political analysts that 72 percent of whites without college degrees — a rough proxy for what we used to call the white working class — believe that 'the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy.' Or that on Nov. 4, these same men and women voted for Republican House candidates 64-34." Many red states voted to raise the minimum wage, and women ran up the margins of the yes vote.

But something has pulled these women away from the Democratic Party. It could be that Democratic populism feels divisive to them and doesn't respect the more orderly world they know, where small businesses are forces of progress, and where they blame the government for being unable to fix their economic problems and too quick to shift the burdens onto taxpayers. By saying that Obama's policies, like the Affordable Care Act, represented a significant redistribution of wealth away from the (white) middle class, Republicans won the message war, turning what could have been an economic stimulus into a radical and destabilizing force.

Democrats can win without white women, but they will win much easier with them, particularly if they swing just a few percent of the vote among college-educated white women in states like Wisconsin, Indiana, and North Carolina.

How? If the election hinges on foreign policy, Clinton can pick off women who want a stable world and a strong leader who can make sense of the chaos. If there's a turn towards the economy, the substance of her proposals will matter. But her general appeal has surprising strengths, too.

In 2014, 58 percent of white women said they'd vote for Clinton a matchup with named Republicans. And among voters without college degrees, the split between men and women was profound, which, as The Washington Post noted, is striking because non-college whites of both genders tend to oppose Democrats. Being female — or being Hillary — confers a real advantage.

These numbers will fluctuate. And they will drop, inevitably. But Clinton's ceiling is surprisingly high among a particular group of voters who haven't chosen a Democratic presidential candidate in recent memory. White women are why Clinton is in such strong shape now. They will be the key to her eventual success or defeat.