PHILADELPHIA — President Barack Obama has redefined the voters the Democratic Party attracts, the map that the Democratic Party competes in and the kinds of issues the Democratic Party talks about.

What he hasn’t built is a generation of elected officials to carry any of it on for him. Indeed, many Democrats waiting for him in Philadelphia express ambivalence over whether he’s had a significant political legacy at all.


Obama and his aides will make correcting that deficiency their main electoral project for the fall — starting with putting the full force of his coalition behind Hillary Clinton in a Democratic National Convention speech Wednesday that will be less about him and mostly about her.

Obama’s preparing a major run of endorsements and campaign stops for statehouse candidates, trying to foster an Obama generation on his way out the door. He’s throwing himself into fundraising, starting Monday with an event for Clinton in Atlanta and with more events being approved weekly. And he’s preparing to compensate for a September that will be mostly consumed by a long trip to Asia and days in New York around the United Nations General Assembly by doing more email and video events than ever before.

The White House is beginning to plan an October filled with nearly nonstop political travel on behalf of both Clinton — whose campaign aides have in recent months expanded the list of places where they believe he could be helpful — and Senate candidates. Obama’s team is even considering doing some travel specifically on behalf of House candidates.

Clinton, after all, isn’t just running on Obama’s popularity and his agenda more than she ever expected to. She’s running on his map and on his blueprint for winning voters: shifting away from the chunk of voters they’d been fighting Republicans for over decades and instead reaching new ones never before pressed.

It happened eight years ago out of necessity, when there weren’t enough existing Democratic votes to beat Clinton in the primaries. But the lasting effect of activating more African-Americans, Latinos, young voters and first-time voters solidified a realignment of a Democratic Party that is defined by the Obama mind-set: cosmopolitan and oriented toward shedding the baggage of the past, trying to catch up to cultural shifts occurring outside the political mainstream.

“Barack Obama’s presidency has ushered in a new era of diversity, and conversations are taking place not just in government, but throughout business, throughout media and throughout both parties,” said Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) as the convention was gaveled in here.

There’s a reason many Republicans see the president as divisive, a leader who doesn’t care about appealing to conservative voters. And it’s because he doesn’t. He hasn’t made that appeal or needed to.

The effect extends well beyond Obama’s two campaigns, though. His decision to not chase Republican voters has created an opening for Clinton to unabashedly campaign on climate change and Tim Kaine to launch his vice presidential candidacy by trashing the NRA explicitly and repeatedly. Leaders in the Democratic Party no longer worry about losing voters over these positions.

"The president has reshaped the American electorate for Democrats at the national level and has provided a road map for Democrats on the state level,” said White House political director David Simas, as Obama’s convention speech entered the final stages of drafting. “Once you extend the electorate, not only are you extending the people, you are extending the issue set that you can talk about.”

Legacy talk is still mostly forbidden in the White House, and, anyway, according to his aides, Obama has never been much for sitting and reflecting in meetings about how he’s changed politics. And Clinton allies are sensitive to any suggestion that she’s got to run as a function of Obama. That was never her plan. But from the president on down, no one who works in the White House gets very far into a conversation these days without pointing out the constantly rising poll numbers, which have boxed her into running largely on his steam, and on his terms.

North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada and Colorado are "four states that — when you think about the Obama coalition in 2008 and 2012 — in '16, the path to the White House, and also in some ways to the Senate, relies on these states that are now battleground states because Barack Obama made them battleground states,” Simas said.

Notably, Clinton’s numbers so far are higher than Obama’s with African-Americans, Latinos and millennials. Much of that is a reaction to Donald Trump, and among African-Americans, it’s powered by a recoil on Obama’s behalf to the Republican nominee for being the one who promoted the birth certificate mania.

Despite all of that, though, the lingering resentment against Obama within the party is there. They blame him for letting the Democratic National Committee atrophy as he invested in his own alternate political structure, and for leaving Debbie Wasserman Schultz in place as chair until she had to be forced out Sunday in the messiest and most public way possible. They can still get worked into a rage at what they see as his complete lack of interest in down-ballot elections that they say cost them the House and Senate. And many of the Democrats left in the House and Senate in Washington are bitter at how little he’s reached out to them socially or for their input on policy, and the disdain they feel he’s exhibited whenever he has.

The numbers haven't been good for Democrats under Obama: a net loss of 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats, 11 governors and 30 state legislatures (with 913 seats lost overall).

With that record as a backdrop, Democrats walking the convention floor this week expressed ambivalence about Obama’s lasting imprint on the party. For all the realignment he might be able to claim, elected officials here say they don’t see him as the Democrats’ Ronald Reagan.

“I feel like the values I took into his presidency are the same values I have now,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the only senator to endorse Bernie Sanders’ campaign. “I don’t see a realignment of the party.”

“I’m not sure where we are on all that now,” said Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-Iowa).

Obama’s changed the conversation on many fundamental political issues, Loebsack said, but at least so far, he hasn’t changed as much substantively, with gun control as a prime example.

“It is true that there are now folks interested in more stuff, but it hasn’t translated yet as a matter of public policy,” Loebsack said.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who styles himself a Clinton Democrat and a progressive leader, dismissed the idea that Obama or any president could define the party as Reagan did for Republicans.

“The Democratic Party evolves over time. The Democratic Party is still evolving,” Cuomo said, shortly after announcing the New York delegation’s votes during the roll-call vote Tuesday afternoon. “Bill Clinton was the party for his era, Obama’s Democratic Party was his era, and Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party will be a different Democratic Party, because the country’s much different than it was.”