Barack Obama is back on the campaign trail for a radically changed Democratic Party

The 44th president never fully bonded with his party’s establishment. But today’s Democratic Party is a different beast than it was in 2016 – never mind 2008

Barack Obama (EPA-EFE)

Late last week, it was announced that former president Barack Obama would be hitting the campaign trail for Democrats. His appearances will include one in Atlanta for Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock and would-be governor Stacey Abrams, one in in Detroit for Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and another in Milwaukee for Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers and his Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, who is running for Senate.

Mr Obama also appeared on Pod Save America, a show hosted by a squad of his former speechwriters and aides. In one clip that went viral, he offered some snippets of wisdom for Democrats not to get too “professorial” – as he, a former constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago, sometimes did during his presidency. He also warned Democrats not to be a “buzzkill”.

Unlike former president Donald Trump – and in truth, former president Bill Clinton and his former vice president Joe Biden – Mr Obama has served as a surrogate for other members of his party only sparingly. Part of the reason is that despite being perhaps the most popular Democratic president in recent memory, and unlike Mr Biden, Mr Clinton or even his onetime foe and 2016 Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton, Mr Obama has never really been much of a party man.

Back in 2008, his campaign decided that he would not appear with members of Congress, aware that many Americans disapprove of the legislative branch as a matter of course. Mr Obama never forged much of a relationship with Democrats in Congress, leaving that to his vice president, a Senator of 36 years who enjoyed back-slapping and gladhanding.

He infuriated many Democrats during his tenure by turning away from the Democratic National Committee and setting up a separate campaign apparatus known as Organizing for Action, and in 2014, he bitterly feuded with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid when he refused to send cash to fundraise for a Democratic outside group.

Yet for all the flak he took for not helping them more, many other Democrats ran away from Mr Obama in 2010, 2012 and 2014, when Obamacare remained unpopular and the president lost support in rural areas, leaving the purple-state Blue Dog Democrat subspecies virtually extinct. Tellingly, he lost North Carolina in 2012 after carrying it in 2008.

The upshot was that Republicans won governorships in swing states including Michigan and Wisconsin, two previously Democratic states that along with Pennsylvania handed Donald Trump his victory in 2016.

Altogether, Democrats lost 958 seats during the Obama presidency, and as a result, Mr Obama is returning to a party vastly different from the one he once led.

At the start of his presidency, Democrats and the independents who caucused with them controlled 60 Senate seats, including two each from Arkansas, Montana and North Dakota. Today, Mr Obama will be stumping in Georgia despite never having won the state, while eschewing Ohio, which since he won it twice has become a GOP stronghold, and where Representative Tim Ryan is touting his opposition to Mr Obama’s trade deals.

Nevertheless, Mr Obama remains incredibly popular among many Democrats, and his signature healthcare law gained approval after Republican attempts to repeal the law. More than a few current members of Congress, it must be remembered, got their start in politics working for him in one way or another..

And in Wisconsin, Mr Barnes, whose poll numbers have cratered since Republicans began carpet-bombing the airwaves with ads hitting him on crime and policing, tweeted that his inspiration to enter politics was Mr Obama’s legendary 2004 Democratic National Convention speech – the address that catapulted a once-obscure Illinois state legislator into the national spotlight.