Of all the things that are at stake in this year’s presidential election, one of the most important is the legacy of Barack Obama. Early in his presidency, seeking a phrase comparable to “the New Deal” or the “New Frontier” or “the Great Society,” Obama and his allies used “the new foundation.” The label was quickly dropped, but in his two terms Obama did in fact lay a new foundation for the Democratic Party. During Obama’s presidency the Democratic Party—a loose coalition of regional and local and ideological factions from the 1830s until the 2010s—became a homogeneous, centralized political machine, a version of the modernized Chicago machine with the help of which Obama rose to power.

The single term of Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, was more or less a third Obama term, and the presidency of Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice president, would be a fourth, if she is elected. In hindsight, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were transitional figures, between the New Deal Democratic Party of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, and the “new foundation” party of Obama, which, despite the legacy name “Democrats,” is a new national party that at the same time is the first national machine.

According to to Dick Simpson, who is both a political scientist and a veteran of Chicago politics:

A political machine, like the one that has dominated Chicago for most of the last 150 years, is a political party characterized by patronage jobs, favoritism, nepotism, precinct workers, and party loyalty. It seeks to control government by winning elections, but it inevitably has, as a byproduct, political corruption. Political machines are strongly hierarchical, usually centered on a political boss who controls the party and local government. Political machines historically have been involved in voter fraud as well. The dominant machine political party tends to control all units of government and suppress reforms.

Sometimes it is claimed that the old urban machines withered away as a result of suburbanization and other social and economic changes. Some of them did fade away, like Tammany Hall in New York City.

But others like the Chicago Democratic machine adapted and survived, making the transition from industrial-era political machines to information-age political machines. The Daley machine in Chicago, established by Richard J. Daley, who was mayor and Cook County political boss from 1955 until his death in 1976, was inherited by Richard M. Daley, who followed as mayor even longer than his father, from 1989 to 2011. According to Dick Simpson, the expert on Chicago politics, the younger Mayor Daley used “contributions from the global economy to hand out lucrative government contracts and other economic favors to corporations and big campaign contributors.”

The career and associates of Barack Obama illustrate the transition from the old urban Democratic political machine to the new-model machine, reliant more on foundation-funded nonprofits than on city patronage employees, depending in campaigns on mass media and online media rather than volunteers who knocked on doors, and funded by national and global corporate and banking interests and billionaire oligarchs.

One of the elder Daley’s sons, William M. Daley, who was U.S. secretary of commerce under Bill Clinton, became chief of staff for Barack Obama, whose previous chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, then succeeded William’s brother Richard as mayor of Chicago, keeping things in the extended Chicago Democratic family. Chicago native John Podesta ran Obama’s presidential transition. Valerie Jarrett became one of Obama’s three senior advisers in the White House. Obama’s top consultant in his 2004 race for the U.S. Senate from Illinois was David Axelrod, who became chief strategist for Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and a senior adviser to the president. Axelrod had been a campaign adviser for Chicago Mayors Harold Washington and Richard M. Daley. Chicago on the Potomac.

Obama rose to power at breathtaking speed and presided over the coalescence of what is in effect a new national political organization partly because of his own talents, but mainly because of his position at the intersection of both old and new power bases in urban Democratic politics in Chicago and big cities nationwide. In the new Democratic dispensation, groups that have often been at odds in municipal politics—urban machines historically dominated by “white ethnics” and challenged by African American politicians and reformers, unionized public employees, and foundation-subsidized activists—have come together in a new synthesis, symbolized by Obama himself—a protean figure with links to the Ivy League and liberal intelligentsia, the Black community, the foundation world, Hollywood and tech, and finance donors and companies.

Writing about Obama in 1996 in The Village Voice, the Black Marxist scholar Adolph Reed described the young Obama without naming him:

In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program—the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance.

From his base in the progressive technocratic foundation world, the young Obama ingratiated himself with the existing Daley electoral machine. It is often claimed that Barack Obama, an outsider in Chicago with a white American mother and a Kenyan father who was raised by his grandmother in Hawaii, was not part of the Daley machine. It is true that the machine did not support Obama early in his career, when he was backed by liberal “independents” in Hyde Park, part of his state Senate district and home to the University of Chicago. But Obama acquired mentors like Emil Jones, the president of the Illinois state Senate and a major power broker.

And he was careful not to offend the mayor. In 2005, an hour after he told the Chicago Sun-Times that the federal criminal investigations into Daley machine corruption “give me huge pause,” Obama called the Sun-Times to amend his remarks, saying that Chicago had “never looked better.” In the following year, Mayor Daley issued an unusual primary endorsement of Obama, and Bill Daley became a senior adviser to Obama’s campaign. In the 2006 Chicago mayoral election, Obama, then U.S. senator and presidential candidate, endorsed Daley, who had been in power for 18 years, for reelection against two African American candidates for mayor, Dorothy Brown and William Walls.

In 1991 Valerie Jarrett, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Daley, hired Obama’s then-fiancée Michelle Robinson, met Obama, and introduced the couple to well-connected and wealthy Chicago Democrats. Later she became one of three senior advisers to President Obama.

According to a 2008 report in Time, “Michelle Obama’s stint at the mayor’s office gave her, and her husband, access to Chicago’s political class. Combined with her own Southside roots—she went to high school with Santita Jackson, the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s daughter—Michelle’s job gave her husband entrée into the best political machine in Illinois, augmenting her ties to Jackson’s powerful civil rights group, Rainbow Push.” After only 18 months, Michelle moved from the mayor’s office to lead the Chicago branch of a progressive nonprofit, Public Allies, an AmeriCorps program. Michelle became associate dean of students at the University of Chicago and was appointed to the board of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and six corporate boards. By 2007, at the age of 43, her university and corporate board salaries added up to half a million dollars a year.

Educated at Harvard Law like Obama, whom she met when they both worked for the law firm Sidley Austin in Chicago, Michelle Obama herself was the daughter of a city employee, Fraser Robinson, a precinct captain for the Daley machine. According to Liza Mundy’s Michelle: A Biography: “As a precinct captain, you could expect, in return for this political policing a city job. In fact, doing ‘volunteer’ work was almost the only way you could get one … Daley kept a file cabinet with a list of jobs in it and was said to know the names of everybody who held them.”

A third power base, after the nonprofit sector and the Daley machine, was the Black community, which in Chicago as elsewhere had its own “organic” intellectuals and leaders in the form of Black Protestant pastors, not foundation-designated reformers leading “astroturf” NGOs or individuals appointed to be racial spokespersons by The Atlantic or The New York Times. Obama sought credibility with that Democratic constituency by joining the congregation of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. After modifying Wright’s phrase “audacity to hope” to become the title of his 2004 keynote address at the Democratic national convention and of his bestselling second book, Obama resigned from Wright’s church and denounced his former mentor after Wright’s inflammatory attacks on the U.S. became a liability for Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign.

After the nonprofit-industrial complex, Chicago pols, and the overwhelmingly Democratic Black electorate, Obama brought Silicon Valley and Wall Street into his campaign and his new party. Donors in tech, finance, and Hollywood showered Obama with so much money that, in 2008, he abandoned the public campaign finance system—the proud creation of earlier Democrats concerned about plutocracy in politics—in order to be able to raise campaign cash with no limits. Outraging old-fashioned populist and liberal Democrats, Obama staffed his administration with Wall Streeters like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and appointed Erskine Bowles, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and a private equity magnate, to co-chair the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The Simpson-Bowles Commission recommended cuts in Social Security benefits that both parties in Congress rejected.

For its part, Silicon Valley provided not only donations but also expertise, with Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and Google CEO Eric Schmidt volunteering to work on Obama’s campaigns. According to the Tech Transparency Project, “Schmidt was intimately involved in building Obama’s voter-targeting operation in 2012, recruiting digital talent, choosing technology and coaching campaign manager Jim Messina on campaign infrastructure. The system was credited with helping Obama achieve his unexpectedly large margin of victory.” Schmidt was appointed to Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and visited the White House frequently in the Obama years.

Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, who died in office in 1945, Obama as ex-president has continued to be one of the major power brokers in the new Democratic national machine that came together during his two terms in the White House. Obama is widely credited with being one of the powerful Democrats who exerted pressure to end the presidential campaigns of Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg in 2020, in order to “clear a lane” for his more electable former vice president, Joe Biden, to thwart the bid of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination. And according to reports Obama also favored an end to Joe Biden’s apparently doomed bid for reelection in the summer of 2024 and his replacement by Kamala Harris.

Roosevelt’s unwieldy coalition of agrarian populists, working-class immigrants, urban political machines, small-town capitalists and boosters, and Southern segregationists collapsed in 1948, splitting into three parties—the rump Democrats with his former vice president, Harry Truman, as the victorious chief, the Progressive Party, headed by Henry Wallace, FDR’s previous, unceremoniously dumped vice president, and the Dixiecrat States Rights Party. The New Deal coalition was cobbled back together again to win victories in 1960 and 1964, only to collapse beyond repair as a result of George Wallace’s right-wing populist bid for the presidency in 1968.

In contrast, the coalition assembled under Obama has remained intact, through Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 and Biden’s victory in 2020. There have been gradual changes in the electoral base, to be sure. In the last few national elections, more Hispanics and Blacks have voted Republican and the Democratic deficit with white working-class voters has continued to grow. But the Obama Democrats have sought to counter these losses under Biden by importing around 10 million quasi-legal immigrants, at a time when all immigrant groups prefer Democrats to Republicans. And Biden and Harris have both reached out to country-club Republicans who are appalled at the takeover of their party by Trump and his vulgar supporters, with Harris doing what once would have been unthinkable for a Democrat—praising Dick Cheney as a model American statesman.

Urban political machines were only one of several components of the New Deal Democrats. In today’s much more urbanized America, populous Democratic cities are far more important. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won every state in which a single metro area accounted for half of the state’s population, with the exceptions of Georgia and Arizona. In 2020 Biden won those two states as well, making a sweep of every one-metro-dominant state.

Merely by growing the urban share of the national vote, while minimizing defections, the post-Obama Democrats can grow their way to political hegemony. In 2024, 76% of Americans in the 100 most populous cities lived in cities with Democratic mayors, while only 16% had Republican mayors. Among the biggest 20 cities, 17 had Democratic mayors, two Republican mayors, and one independent. At the beginning of 2023, before Mayor Eric Johnson of Dallas switched to the Republicans, nine of the 10 cities with the largest populations had Democratic mayors, and the tenth, San Antonio, had an independent mayor, Ronald Nirenberg, who was indistinguishable from a progressive Democrat in his views. In 2000, four of the same 10 cities had Republican mayors.

When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, the Democrats had lost three presidential elections in a row, allowing “New Democrats” like Clinton to break with party orthodoxy and try to win over some Republican voters. In contrast, a Harris victory, even if accompanied with a Republican Congress, might lead the post-Obama Democrats to double down on their mix of cultural leftism and economic neoliberalism, convinced that they enjoy a new and sustainable Democratic presidential majority and the power to achieve goals by executive order if they cannot be achieved by congressional legislation. And nothing short of a landslide loss of the popular vote this year will convince the Obama Democrats to rethink their strategy or reach out to alienated voters, as opposed to tweaking their rhetoric and targeting a few groups in swing states in 2028. There is no reason to believe that the new foundation of the Democratic machine that was laid by Barack Obama is going to crack or crumble any time soon.