The New York Times published something of a deep dive this week about Donald Trump eating into Democrats’ base en route to a convincing and impressive electoral sweep. In a piece entitled, “How Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message,” the reporters detail how “Donald Trump’s populist pitch bumped Democrats off their traditional place in American politics.” Its bottom line conclusion: “After three Trump elections, almost every traditional Democratic constituency has swung to the right. In fact, Mr. Trump has made larger gains among Black, Hispanic, Asian American and young voters in his three campaigns since 2016 than he has among white voters without a college degree, according to New York Times estimates. In each case, Mr. Trump fared better than any Republican in decades.” As powerful as those words are, this accompanying illustration is simply astonishing. A seismic event, likely inconceivable to nearly anyone when Trump arrived on the political scene in 2015:
Trump swung the electorate rightward among every single racial minority group, by double digits. He moved the youngest voting bloc that way too, especially among men (per CNN’s exits, he outright won Gen Z and Millennial men). The article continues:
…There probably wasn’t a realistic case of young and nonwhite voters supporting Ms. Harris at a level the Democrats would have taken for granted just a few years ago. And while the election was still close, this erosion of strength among the party’s core groups has been happening for a long time…The overarching pattern is clear. In election after election, Democrats underperformed among traditional Democratic constituencies during the Trump era. Sometimes, it was merely a failure to capitalize on his unpopularity. Other times, it was a staggering decline in support. Together, it has shattered Democratic dreams of building a new majority with the rise of a new generation of young and nonwhite voters.
The report does note that Trump did lose a bit of ground among seniors, and white educated voters have moved leftward. But those gains were overwhelmed by Democratic erosion elsewhere. On election night, during our Fox coverage, I started to get a strong sense that Trump would win relatively early in the evening, when two things happened. First, Florida’s polls closed at 8pm and the numbers clearly showed that both Trump and Sen. Rick Scott had not only won handily, but they’d each won by double digits. Comparing what turned out to be roughly 13-point wins to the RCP presidential and Senate averages in Florida, that was the first major confirmed polling “miss” of the night, in the same direction that we’d seen previous Trump-beneficial polling errors. Then again, Florida was an outlier in 2022, so I needed more data. Given the raft of polling showing Trump overperforming — and Harris underperforming — among multiple traditionally Democrat-leaning demograpics (black voters, Hispanics, Arab Americans, union households, young people, etc.), I’d reasoned that Harris would have to really run up the score in white, wealthier, more educated suburbs in order to offset her problems elsewhere. Then this result dropped, fairly early on election night:
Any path for Kamala would have required a place like Loudoun to move further in her direction, compared to Biden’s margin there four years prior. That…didn’t happen. There would be no math for her. In short, the staggering graphic above, plus Loudoun (as a microcosm) was the story of the election. It’s how Trump swept all the battlegrounds and even won the popular vote. Democrats are trying to recalibrate moving forward, and at least for now, it sounds like ‘Total Resistance’ will be abandoned:
[Some Democrats] are settling on a new approach: Take his populist, working-class proposals at his word — or at least pretend to. If he succeeds, they can take some credit for bringing him to the table. If he doesn’t, they can bash him for it. It’s a change in strategy, emerging in private conversations among some liberal elected officials and operatives, that comes after years of resisting Trump ended with him returning to the White House. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said in an interview that she would likely work with Trump if he pursues antitrust promises he made on the campaign trail. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said he sees himself partnering with Trump to tackle “large corporate consolidations,” while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) posted on X that he “looked forward” to Trump “fulfilling his promise” to cap credit card interest rates.An aide to a progressive member of Congress, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal strategy, stated the obvious: Liberal Democrats will continue to oppose most of what Trump does “tooth and nail.” However, the person said, “For the few policy proposals that we think will help the working class, capping credit card interest rates being one of them, we’ll say, ‘Put up or shut up.’ Because if he does, it’s a great win for millions of people across this country. And if he doesn’t, it exposes him as a fraud that he is.”
Finally, earlier in the week, we highlighted Americans’ general approval of Trump’s handling of his presidential transition. On that front, I’ll leave you with this:
