It’s been widely noted that the Democrats fared very poorly with Hispanic voters in the November election. But I believe that the scale of the Democrats’ crash among Hispanic voters has not yet been fully processed nor the extent to which this crash undermines Democrats’ plans for the future.

Let’s start by looking at some data on the scale of the Democratic Hispanic voter crash. Here are a dozen illustrative findings:

1. According to AP VoteCast data (the best data currently available), the national Democratic margin among Hispanics crashed by 16 points, from a 28-point advantage to just 12 points. This comes on top of another 16-point margin crash between 2016 to 2020, according to the gold standard Catalist data. Compare that to the overall national shift to the right across the entire time period, 2016-2024, which goes from Hillary Clinton’s 2-point advantage in 2016 to Trump’s point and a half margin in this election. That’s a total overall shift of just 3 and ½ points toward Trump, a shift that is simply dwarfed by the massive shift among Hispanics.

2. The Democratic margin among Hispanic working-class (non-college) voters declined by 18 points between 2020 and 2024. That is after a 19-point decline between 2016 and 2020, as measured by Catalist.

3. Hispanic men were a particular trouble spot for the Democrats this election. VoteCast data have the Democratic advantage dropping by 20 points in this election, down to a slender 1-point margin. But Hispanic women also shifted 14 points right in this election. And if you look back to the last election, the decline in Democratic margin between 2016 and 2020 among Hispanic women was actually twice as large (20 points) as it was among Hispanic men (10 points). So across the two elections, the decline in Democratic support among Hispanic men and women may have been quite similar.

4. The Hispanic shift to the right was concentrated among the younger generations of Hispanics who of course are the future of the Hispanic vote. Among Hispanics under 45, the Democratic margin dropped by a shocking 26 points. Trump actually carried working class Hispanic men in this age group by 7 points.

5. Turning to geographic patterns, here’s a New York Times chart illustrating the shift to the right in Hispanic-majority counties. Compared to Native American- and black-majority counties, the shift to the right in 2024 was larger in Hispanic-majority counties (13 points) and has been continuous since 2016 so these counties wind up way to right of where they were in that election.

6. Similar findings come from Jed Kolko, who analyzed counties using a typology developed by the American Communities Project, which groups counties using a variety of demographic, economic and other factors. The counties grouped into the “Hispanic Centers” category had the largest shift of any county group, shifting to the right by 14 points.

Share

7. Drilling down to specific geographic areas, there is no dearth of vivid examples of big Hispanic shifts. As Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis Research, a Democratic-oriented firm specializing in Hispanic voter research, observed somewhat ruefully:

[Hispanic] shifting was happening everywhere—so it’s happening in Lawrence, Mass., as much as it’s happening in the Rio Grande Valley, it’s happening in the Central Valley of California, it’s happening in Grand Rapids and Detroit…These places are so different that the only thing they have in common is that the kinds of people who are switching, they identify as Hispanic.

The New York Times, for example, mapped precinct level shifts in 11 cities—Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix and San Francisco. A continuing theme of their analysis was the strikingly large shifts toward Trump in Latino neighborhoods across this diverse basket of cities.

8. A vivid illustration of this dynamic comes from Philadelphia via a terrific Philadelphia Inquirer analysis of precinct results. Note the sharp rise in Hispanic support for Trump compared to other racial groups.

9. Staying in Pennsylvania—the tipping point state in this election—AP VoteCast indicates a 16-point pro-Trump margin shift across the state among Pennsylvania’s Hispanics. In a fascinating analysis by Charles McElwee, “Main Street of the Realignment” that follows the 2024 vote along historic route 309 in Pennsylvania, he finds some amazing trends in Latino-heavy areas:

Route 309 begins around the northeast’s Wyoming Valley, continues through Luzerne County then past the Blue Mountain ridge and onward to the Lehigh Valley, where it passes Pennsylvania Dutch communities and enters suburban Philadelphia’s Bucks County before terminating at the state’s biggest city… This highway long ran through reliable Democratic territory. This trend dates back to a day in October 1960, when John F. Kennedy’s campaign caravan traveled on Route 309 as it targeted working-class Catholic voters in small industrial cities and towns.

The Latino shift in Republicans’ favor was dramatically evident in Luzerne County’s Hazleton, a small city where Route 309 runs through the downtown and past the old Altamont Hotel, the site of a [John F.] Kennedy stump speech before 12,000 on that October 1960 day…Trump won every ward in Hazleton, where Trump’s overall vote share—62 percent—matched Latinos’ share of the city population. Even in 2016, when Luzerne’s voting margins fueled Trump’s narrow statewide victory, Hazleton still favored Hillary Clinton, though Joe Biden handily lost the city in 2020. This Election Day, the enthusiasm for Trump was hard to miss in Hazleton, where I spent the evening watching returns with friends. In the city’s Nanny Goat Hill section, an historically Italian neighborhood once reliably Democratic, residents displayed Trump regalia outside their homes. In that neighborhood alone, Trump carried nearly 65 percent of the vote….

Last week, Republicans overperformed in Lehigh County while flipping Northampton County. According to a Morning Call analysis, some of Trump’s biggest gains came in Allentown—Pennsylvania’s Latino-majority, third-largest city—where some wards saw a 25-point swing in the incoming president’s favor compared with 2020.

10. How about New York and New Jersey? In New Jersey, AP VoteCast reports a statewide Hispanic swing toward Trump of 26 points. And check out these massive swings in heavily Hispanic cities and towns in the state.

In New York, VoteCast estimates a 23-point statewide shift toward Trump among Hispanics. Notably big shifts took place in New York City, particularly in Queens. Matthew Thomas has analyzed the precinct data and here’s what he finds. In precincts that are 50-75 percent Hispanic the margin shift toward Trump is a whopping 36 points and in precincts that are more than 75 percent Hispanic the rightward shift since 2020 is an astonishing 48 points.

11. Massachusetts? Sure. VoteCast shows a 32-point (!) statewide shift toward Trump among Massachusetts Hispanics. As it happens, this is exactly the size of the shift that took place this election in the historic industrial town of Lawrence. Steve Kornacki explains the significance of the result:

This was a disastrous result for Democrats in Massachusetts’ most heavily Hispanic city. When Trump ran in 2016, he was crushed in Lawrence, an old mill city on the Merrimack River, by 66 points. Four years ago, he brought it down to 49 points. His 57%-40% defeat this time around is the first time a GOP presidential candidate has cracked 40% here since 1988, back when the city was still majority white. Dominicans are the largest Hispanic subgroup in Lawrence, demonstrating the breadth of Trump’s gains.

12. Florida and Texas, of course. In Florida, VoteCast shows a 21-point margin shift toward Trump, including a 31-point rightward shift among Puerto Ricans. The latter explains how Trump was able to flip heavily Puerto Rican Osceola county into his column.

In Texas, VoteCast records a 27-point rightward shift among the state’s Hispanics between 2020 and 2024. This comes of course on top of sharp rightward Hispanic shifts in the state between 2016 and 2020. Indeed, according to a Washington Post analysis, 13 of the 15 hardest right-swing counties in the country between 2016 and 2024 were majority-Hispanic counties in Texas. And the king of rightward-swinging is Texas’ Starr county, which is close to 100 percent Hispanic. In 2016, Clinton carried the county by 60 points; this election Trump carried it by 16 points. That’s an almost unbelievable swing of 76 points across the two elections!

These are big, big shifts. And Democrats seem at a loss on how to deal with this, outside of hoping for the ever-popular “thermostatic reaction” against Trump where Hispanic voters finally “come home” to the Democrats. That’s not much of a strategy. Paraphrasing Dylan, we might say: “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is….do you, Mr. Democrat.”

They’d better figure it out since these trends undermine what has been Democrats’ default plan for their political future. Consider that most Democrats like to believe that, since a relatively conservative white population is in sharp decline while a presumably liberal nonwhite population keeps growing, the course of social and demographic change should deliver an ever-growing Democratic coalition. It is simply a matter of getting this burgeoning nonwhite population to the polls.

But consider further that, as the Census documents, the biggest single driver of the increased nonwhite population is the growth of the Hispanic population. They are by far the largest group within the Census-designated nonwhite population (19 percent vs. 12 percent for blacks). While their representation among voters considerably lags their representation in the overall population, it is fair to say that voting trends among this group will decisively shape voting trends among nonwhites in the future since their share of voters will continue to increase while black voter share is expected to remain roughly constant.

It therefore follows that, if Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not cancelled out entirely, and this very influential Democratic theory of the case falls apart.

They’d better start planning for a very different future. And soon. To quote Dylan again: “Let us not talk falsely, the hour is getting late”.

Share

Subscribe now

The Democrats’ rush to put the 2024 election aside and move into the next phase of “resistance” is understandable. No party likes to dwell too much on how they blew an election. It’s easier to just stew in partisan anger and desire for retribution than to confront your own weaknesses with nearly every segment of voters.

But this approach is misguided and won’t work for Democrats. They are a different party than the Trump-dominated GOP. Democrats cannot mimic what Trump did after his loss in 2020 and expect to win the allegiance of more voters in the future.

Trump’s version of resistance last time around was to deny that he had in fact lost, try to change the results, and promise to get back at all those who “stole” his victory. It worked for him. Trump knew that his voters truly hated members of the other party and “the threat from within” more than they adhered to any specific governing principle or agenda—with promises to restrict immigration, erect tariffs, purge the bureaucracy, and “Make America Great Again” filling in the policy gaps. Trump could easily make his people smile and fight for his re-election by relentlessly ridiculing and attacking Democrats and cultural elites as the internal enemy with a supportive conservative media infrastructure to back him up. Resistance Democrats and “never-Trumpers” made the job easier with his base by pursuing excessive partisan legal maneuvers and over-the-top rhetorical accusations of “fascism.” No matter what charges Democrats hurled at Trump, his voters had his back and refused to accept any of them. In turn, Kamala Harris’s past leftism and Joe Biden’s lackluster presidency—particularly on the key issues of inflation and immigration—made the choice easier for those who weren’t regular Trump voters. Independent and less engaged working-class voters wanted their own “return to normalcy” that Biden and Harris promised but did not deliver after 2020.

So, the “anti-MAGA majority” strategy of Democrats failed and instead fueled a decisive “pro-MAGA” popular vote win and a GOP sweep of all the battlegrounds despite some close results.

Democrats now appear ready to pull their own version of Trump, sidestepping electoral reality (downplaying but not denying their loss) and hoping that negative partisanship and hatred of the other side will galvanize new Democratic majorities across the country. With the House of Representatives so narrowly divided, any “thermostatic” reaction to the next two years of a Trump administration could be enough for Democrats to regain control of at least one branch of the legislature. But the outlook in the Senate and in many states remains incredibly grim. Democrats will need much more than a technocratic repair job to fix their national brand, improve their candidate pipeline, and create plausible electoral paths for governing majorities nationally and in the states.

Looking ahead to 2028, the Democratic Party will need wholesale party rebuilding based on what successful Democrats throughout the party’s history have done best—defending basic American values of liberty and equality for all, fighting for the rights and opportunities of working people, and offering a hopeful vision for America built on economic growth and shared prosperity in all parts of the country.

The easy path of trying to hold the disparate Democratic coalition together through negative partisanship coupled with frontline and swing-state Democrats running away from the party brand and ideology is surely tempting. It doesn’t require any change in approach.

But the harder path of building a successful and sustained majoritarian party is worth the additional time and effort. This will require three major structural changes:

(1) The Democratic Party must create institutions fully committed to core American values. In the aftermath of Citizens United, Democratic politics is now like the “Wild West” of nuttiness with unlimited private money fueling radical politics, ineffective Super PACs, and a non-profit, “shadow party” infrastructure that is completely out of touch with the lives and values of working-class Americans. Think “anti-racist” racism, far-left gender ideology, “climate justice” extremism, police defunding and decriminalization, pro-Hamas activism, open asylum policies, and non-stop identity politics.

This infrastructure must be upended and replaced with groups and institutions dedicated to core American values.

Notably, the effort to rebuild the progressive movement and Democratic Party in response to the George W. Bush administration in the 2000s did not center on these extreme ideas but rather on developing big-tent organizing models and pragmatic policies like the Affordable Care Act and “all of the above” energy solutions to steadily improve the lives of Americans while respecting people’s cultural differences. It worked—and helped to produce two successful terms under Barack Obama who embodied these basic values.

Every effective movement in the Democratic Party’s history to advance civil rights and civil liberties, enact universal social programs, and increase workplace opportunities for working-class Americans has been grounded in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and FDR’s “Four Freedoms”—freedom of speech and worship; freedom from want and fear. In contrast, unsuccessful radical movements that attach themselves to the party have consistently rejected these basic American values and, consequently, ended up costing Democrats elections while fueling the rise of the right.

Democrats need more institutions dedicated to the former approach grounded in basic American values, and none from the latter approach grounded in ideological extremism.

(2) The Democratic Party elite needs to be replaced with normal Americans and more working-class leadership. You can’t build a majoritarian party in touch with working people if your current party is entirely run and represented by out-of-the-mainstream cultural elites and college-educated weirdos. The Democratic Party is controlled by rich people, lawyers, and “social justice” activists. They make the decisions, set the priorities, and devise the election strategies. Unlike in the glory days of the FDR coalition, their focus is not on working-class economic advancement but rather on promoting cultural ideas that are wildly unpopular with mainstream voters who are concerned about their finances and stability in life.

Instead of plowing more money into losing strategies devised by out-of-touch party elites, Democrats should take some of the billions of dollars spent every cycle on national elections to fund efforts to recruit, train, support, and publicize more candidates with good old American jobs and regular backgrounds. Rather than spending huge sums of party money on research and messaging projects that treat blue-collar and non-college voters like an endangered species, Democrats should make working-class Americans the central actors in party decision-making and policy development.

This approach certainly wouldn’t be any worse than what is on offer now from credentialed elites and would likely produce more of what working-class Americans actually want in life—increased economic security, safer and more enjoyable neighborhoods, better opportunities for their kids, and the freedom to live by their own values and beliefs.

Democrats are obsessed with diversity so perhaps they should apply these same principles to recruit more Americans who do the hard work of keeping the country running—more small business owners; more military members and veterans; and more Americans who grow the nation’s food, maintain the roads, run the offices, stock the stores, build the houses, develop key energy sources, deliver goods to people, care for our kids, and provide for the sick and elderly. No more rich people or lawyers.

(3) The Democratic Party needs to remake itself into a more democratic and participatory membership organization. “The Democracy” as a political entity is essentially outsourced to a few high-profile leaders, campaign committees, elite party organizations given national status, private consultants, and unaccountable outside infrastructure groups controlled by monied interests. It’s not particularly democratic. Regular party members vote in primaries and participate in general elections. They get hit up constantly for “small dollar” donations and other hysterical spam emails about impending doom if they don’t contribute. Various interest groups and coalition members get a seat at the table. But there is almost zero input from—or even outreach to—regular party members at the state and local level on everything that really matters for building a cohesive party: shared values, policy priorities, agenda setting, local and regional electoral strategies, candidate recruitment, volunteer duties, election spending, and voter communication.

With this time in opposition, Democrats should rethink their top-heavy approach controlled by wealthy interests and try something novel: become an actual membership party with dues, responsibilities, roles, and decision-making authority granted to all members at the local level within a federated structure. The Democratic Party has huge lists of all those who are currently registered officially with their states as party members along with anyone who has ever donated money to a party candidate or cause. Party officials know where they live and how to contact them. Invite these core supporters and others in all 50 states to “join the Democratic Party” with a dues-paying membership card to help fund collective efforts plus explicit directions to help organize local party membership groups with regular meetings and deliberations augmented by regional and national conferences to determine party strategy and agenda items. Let the people run the show.

Rather than continuing to maintain a patchwork quilt of various interests held together loosely for elections every two years, Democrats should become the party they imagine themselves to be—a party of regular working people with political agency joining together to build better lives for themselves and their families.

Democrats are surely down in the dumps by their electoral flop this year. But rather than ignoring the facts about why they lost and retreating into a defensive crouch of “anti-MAGA” hatred, lay party members and elected officials should take the time before the 2028 primaries to make their party worthy of future support and increased participation by new voters.

Democrats need to build a party grounded in core American values, dedicated to the rights and opportunities of all working people, and committed to an optimistic and hopeful vision for American economic growth and success.

They’ve done it before and—with genuine effort and commitment—can do it once again.

Share

Subscribe now

In the weeks since Donald Trump’s victory, Democrats have been busily working to understand the factors that drove their loss. Some have pointed to tactical errors; others believe the national headwinds were simply too much to overcome. We at TLP have highlighted more structural problems we see facing Democrats—the unpopularity of some of their cultural attitudes and the creeping erosion of support among working-class and non-white voters, for example—and how this put the party at risk heading into this election.

But there is another, more understated reason that likely contributed to their woes this year: they learned the wrong lessons from the previous two national elections.

Let’s start with the 2020 presidential election. At first glance, Democrats did very well. Joe Biden defeated Trump, achieving something rarely seen in American political history: the ouster of an incumbent president seeking re-election. And Biden’s Electoral College victory, 306–232, was fairly decisive. His party also retained control of the House and flipped the Senate, giving them a governing trifecta.

Democrats—especially Biden—interpreted these results as a mandate for sweeping change and subsequently pursued one of the most ambitious legislative agendas in recent history. However, far from an electoral rout in the vein of FDR in 1932 or LBJ in 1964, Biden’s win was actually very close, and it wasn’t at all clear that the American people were clamoring for the type of transformative change that Democrats were offering:

• Though Biden’s Electoral College margin was quite decisive, he really won by just 42,918 votes across the three closest states: Arizona (10,457), Georgia (11,779), and Wisconsin (20,682). Another way of thinking about this: if Trump had won even half (or 50.01 percent) of those additional Biden votes in each state, he would have been re-elected.

• Jon Ossoff’s win in the Georgia Senate runoff gave Democrats a 50–50 working majority in the upper chamber, with Vice President Harris casting tie-breaking votes. But his final margin was just 1.2 points (or 55,232 votes)

• In the House, Democrats actually experienced a net loss of seats and kept their majority by just 31,751 votes across five districts.

• Further down the ballot, the party’s successes were even more limited, as they failed to flip several key state house chambers on which they had spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

A reasonable read of those results might have been that voters were exhausted with Trump’s antics and simply wanted to return some stability to the government, but also that they did not trust the Democrats enough to give them convincing majorities. But instead of reflecting on this result, the party instead sought to be got ambitious. They passed several sweeping policies on party-line votes, sometimes with more care given to the size and price tag of various bills than the actual programs in them.

To be sure, some of these policies were popular. But the concerted push to secure these wins meant that they were spending less energy addressing two key issues that became voters’ biggest concerns over the past few years: inflation and immigration. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that Biden’s actions in office very likely exacerbated those concerns. Two of his signature achievements—the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act—were negatively associated with inflation. And his early moves to overturn Trump-era immigration policies likely precipitated subsequently record-high levels of border crossings.

Unlike past Democratic presidents who won power with a broad mandate—Roosevelt (1932), Johnson (1964), and Obama (2008)—Biden came into office with some of the thinnest margins possible for a governing majority. Yet, he took his win over an incumbent president as a sign that Americans were fully on board with his agenda, one that mirrored the size of what his Democratic predecessors had delivered on.

Then came the 2022 midterms, which took place on the heels of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. The issue of abortion was suddenly a top priority for Democrats everywhere. A Pew Research poll found that the share of Democratic voters saying abortion was “very important” to their midterm vote skyrocketed from 46 percent before Dobbs to 75 percent just before the election. Additionally, in the months leading up to Election Day, states all across the country—including some that were deeply Republican—had passed ballot measures to protect abortion access, a sign of widespread enthusiasm around the issue.

Consequently, Democrats came to believe that the Dobbs backlash and the presence of extreme Republican candidates in some key contests might be enough to forestall the expected drubbing that the president’s party almost always received in midterm years. And there was some validity to this theory. Democrats did ultimately have a good midterm by historical standards, limiting losses in the House, gaining a seat in the Senate, netting one new governorship, and flipping a handful of state-legislative chambers. They did this even as Biden’s personal approval rating was mired in the low-40s.

So, many in the party became convinced of a new theory: as long as abortion rights were threatened and Trump or MAGA candidates were on the ballot, an “anti-MAGA majority” would show up to defeat Republicans, regardless of how those voters felt about Biden or the Democrats. As one progressive strategist put it, “When elections are clearly about Trump and MAGA, MAGA will lose.”

However, this reading of the midterm results obfuscated the true political landscape:

• Despite Democrats’ success in a handful of swing races and the popularity of abortion rights, the national environment that year tilted in favor of Republicans, with the House popular vote leaning nearly three points to the right. In non-swing states, Republicans basically experienced a typical wave election, even in some places where voters also backed pro-choice measures.

• Nearly half (48 percent) of voters said the top issue facing the country was not abortion but the economy, and these voters broke Republican by a two-to-one margin (65–32). Abortion was a distant second at just 10 percent.

• There was also significant crossover support for abortion from voters who backed Republican candidates, a sign that the issue might not necessarily give Democrats a boost in every race.

• The midterm electorate was overwhelmingly sour on Biden: 57 percent disapproved of his job performance, including 44 percent who “strongly” disapproved.

As NBC’s Chuck Todd noted recently, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama experienced typical midterm drubbings during their first terms. In response, both men were forced to re-tool their messaging and change some things about how they governed. Biden, however, did not face the same outcome, likely precipitating to a cascade of ill-fated decisions.

Democrats thus marched into 2024 with a weak candidate, a flawed theory of why they had been winning, and a misreading of the issues that mattered most to people.

The results of the midterms had quashed any discussion of replacing Biden on the ticket and were likely a deciding factor behind his own decision to seek re-election, as he believed they validated the work of his first term. And, as the president and his inner circle liked to remind people, he was the only person who had proven he could defeat Trump.

This reading of the political landscape may have also influenced Biden’s decision to put “democracy protection” at the center of his re-election campaign, as well as Harris’s decision late in the race to pivot away from a positive message detailing her agenda for working- and middle-class Americans toward one centered on threats to abortion and Trump’s “fascist” tendencies.1

But in the end, none of it worked. A consensus is now forming that this year’s results were a referendum on Biden’s presidency. Rather than abortion, the top issues on voters’ minds were the ones that had festered during his term—inflation and immigration—and voters who prioritized them overwhelmingly broke for Trump. In several states, voters passed measures securing access to abortion while breaking for Trump by double digits. And, while some MAGA candidates running in swing states did lose, the ultimate MAGA candidate did not.

All this demonstrates the danger of creating narratives of convenience rather than being clear-eyed about the reasons for defeat. For Democrats, the path of least resistance heading into 2024 was sticking with an incumbent president who was decently popular among the party’s voters and running on abortion and democracy—strong issues for them. They pointed to the results of 2020 and 2022 as evidence to justify these decisions.

However, this led them to also ignore important warning signs, including that voters overall weren’t happy with Biden and cared most about inflation and the border. And their inability to recognize this may well have delivered the presidency to Trump again.

Share

Subscribe now

The clearest political thinking for Democrats often occurs in the moments after an election. Months or years from now, it will be easy to indulge in wishful thinking about what went right or wrong in 2024. Immediately after the election, the party is forced to face the most important and difficult facts about politics.

Here’s one of those inescapable realities. If you are running for president in a center-right country, or running for any office in a swing district, then you need to win a large number of votes from center-right Americans who normally wouldn’t vote for a Democrat.

These center-right voters back political parties and candidates who agree with them, not the other way around. They don’t ask themselves, “Do I agree with this candidate?” They ask, “Does this candidate agree with me?”

All the other door-knocking, advertising, and campaign rallies that make up an election are secondary. If Democrats like those in my center-right county in Washington State don’t first show voters that we agree with them, we lose.

Fortunately, this is really an easy fix and doesn’t cost anything.

It starts by understanding that America is a center-right country in traditional ideological terms. The swing districts that Democrats need to pick up each election cycle to either capture or hold legislative majorities are uniformly center-right. Next, Democrats must accept that they cannot win center-right districts (or win over a center-right nation) by running an exclusively liberal campaign. And they can’t govern if they don’t win legislative and executive power.

The good news? It’s quite possible for Democrats to do this. They’ve done it many times, including in some center-right swing districts this cycle. The harder truth is that there are only two proven ways for future Democratic candidates to win in center-right districts:

• Be a once-in-a-generation political talent like Barack Obama, who can run as a pragmatic progressive while also sounding notes of unity. “There's not a liberal America and a conservative America. There's the United States of America.” If you are an Obama-level candidate, you can pull it off. However, if you are merely a good person and a solid candidate, but not the Barack Obama of politics, you cannot win this way. If Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris couldn’t do it, neither can you. Don’t fool yourself into losing.

• Emphasize the issues where you agree with the center-right. Run as a person who agrees with a lot of what the center-right voters want economically and socially, and who also happens to be a Democrat. Remember, you need center-right voters to win, and these voters are asking themselves if you agree with them on issues ranging from jobs and inflation to taxes and crime. Show them you share these same values and positions.

This political realism should be carried out with integrity. For example, if you are running in a center-right swing district, 90 percent of your words should be some combination of the “Great Eight”:

1. “I want good jobs for working people and affordable lives for working families.”

2. “I want to keep your taxes low and keep government out of your way.”

3. “I stand for fiscal discipline and balanced budgets.”

4. “You don’t have to have a college degree to be smart, and leaders need to respect the people who do the hard work in this town.”

5. “Rural Americans need to be protected, respected, and empowered to maintain the character of their communities.”

6. “I support the police, I love our military, and we need law and order to have a civilized society.”

7. “We must have secure borders.”

8. “I care deeply about personal morals and values, and I try to live my life the best I can.”

Pick any or all of these that you truly believe—and say them authentically and often. Show center-right people you are aligned with them on plenty of things even though your party label is “Democrat.”

You can still be a progressive-leaning Democrat and vote for pragmatic progressive legislation. You can still support strong progressive political reforms. The voters in swing districts will know you’re a Democrat, and they will know you stand for Democratic policies. They expect you to be a Democrat. They just want you to be one of those Democrats who agrees with the center-right on a lot of things. Be that kind of Democrat, and you’ll win, and the party will have the majorities necessary to advance progressive reforms. In contrast, be an out-of-the-mainstream progressive in a swing district, and you’ll lose, and Democrats will have one less seat in the legislature.

What about all those Democrats running in deep blue districts? If you are running in a safe Democratic district that votes for Democratic presidents all the time, please go ahead and do whatever you want in your campaign. But if you want to be part of a Democratic majority that gets to make the laws, then you need to help those candidates in frontline districts win their elections by offering your support and, if necessary, by getting out of the way to let them make their case directly to more conservative voters with a national party that backs their efforts.

The Democratic Party is like an unruly orchestra, where candidates from across the country play different instruments that are not always in tune or synchronized. It is the job of both safe-Democrats and swing-district candidates to advance key party priorities for America that help all working people and stand up for basic civil liberties and civil rights. But a swing-district candidate has the extra burden of winning—time and again—in highly competitive environments, and this means really showing center-right voters that they are valued and understood.

Tim Probst is a former state legislator and chair of the Clark County Democrats. Clark County, WA, is a traditionally conservative county that has elected a Democratic congresswoman, flipped a state senate seat that was held by Republicans since the 1980’s, flipped the county council from conservative to progressive, and turned in the highest results for a Democratic governor in 20 years.

Share

Subscribe now

I never cease to be amazed at the touching faith of many Democrats in the wonder-working powers of economic populism. In the wake of Democrats’ stunning defeat by the hated Trump and his allegedly fascist party, this brand of magical thinking has risen again within the Democratic ranks. Sure, the argument goes, the party has lots of problems but there is nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by turning up the volume—way up—on an economic populist pitch. That will finally convince the lamentably unfaithful working class that their real interests lie with their old pals the Democrats.

It certainly makes sense that in our current populist era, Democrats need to be responsive to that populist mood. But it makes much less sense that an aggressive economic populism by itself is a sort of get-out-of-jail free card for a party whose brand among working-class voters has been profoundly damaged. In fact, it’s completely ridiculous, a comforting myth for Democrats who don’t want to make hard choices. Here are four reasons why Democrats should discard this magical thinking as quickly as possible and devote their energies to strategies that might actually work.

1. Economic populism cannot solve the cultural leftism problem. In a post-election YouGov survey of working-class (non-college) voters for the Progressive Policy Institute, 68 percent of these voters said Democrats have moved too far left, compared to just 47 percent who thought Republicans have moved too far right. It’s a fair surmise that working-class sentiment about the Democrats’ leftism is heavily driven by the party’s embrace of cultural leftist positions across a wide range of issues (immigration, crime, race, gender, etc.) given how unpopular these positions are among those voters.

And in a widely-noted finding from a post-election survey by the Blueprint strategy group, the third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”. And among swing voters, this concern about cultural focus was the most powerful reason.

In the same poll, overwhelming majorities (67 to 77 percent) of swing voters who chose Trump thought the following characterizations of Democrats were extremely or very accurate: not tough enough on the border crisis; support immigrants more than American citizens; want to take money from hard-working Americans and give it to immigrants; want to promote transgender ideology; don’t care about securing the border; have extreme ideas about immigration; aren’t doing enough to address crime; and are too focused on identity politics.

It’s magical thinking that simply changing the subject to economics will evaporate the Democrats’ many cultural liabilities. Culture matters—a lot—and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.

Instead, for many working-class voters to seriously consider their economic pitch, Democrats need to convince them that they are not looked down on, that their concerns are taken seriously and that their views on culturally freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. That’s the threshold test for many of the working-class voters Democrats need to reach and Democrats have flunked it over and over.

That’s why changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook they detest. Convincing voters of the latter is much harder and more uncomfortable for Democrats. But it has to be done.

Share

2. Economic populism will not produce a big turnout dividend. Many Democrats have looked at the 2024 election results, noticed that Harris, relative to Biden, lost more votes than Trump gained across the two elections and concluded the Democrats’ loss was really about poor turnout. Comforting solution: more economic populism please! That will, it is alleged, galvanize the higher turnout among Democratic-leaning voters needed in future elections.

But was turnout really the problem? As Nate Cohn points out, even under generous assumptions, lower relative Democratic turnout likely explains no more than a third of lower Democratic support. And critically, nonvoting attrition among 2020 Biden voters is inextricable from vote-switching to Trump. Both reflected dissatisfaction with Harris, the Democrats, and the record of Biden administration.

[L]ow turnout among traditionally Democratic-leaning groups—especially nonwhite voters—was a reflection of lower support for Ms. Harris: Millions of Democrats soured on their party and stayed home, reluctantly came back to Ms. Harris or even made the leap to Mr. Trump. And if those who stayed home had voted, it wouldn’t have been an enormous help to Ms. Harris, based on Times/Siena polling linked to validated records of who did or didn’t vote.

Clearly, the turnout problem, such as it was, was an indicator of broad dissatisfaction with Harris and her party. As noted above, that broad dissatisfaction cannot and will not be solved by sprinkling the magic elixir of economic populism onto the currently existing Democratic Party and its tarnished brand. There will be no turnout dividend separate from fixing that brand.

3. Economic populism will do nothing to fix Democrats’ governance problems. Pretty much by definition, economic populism in whatever form has little to do with making Democratic governance of states and, especially, cities any better. Democratic governance is not, to say the least, synonymous with public order, low crime, and effective and efficient administration of public services. Quite the contrary. Progressive domination of deep blue cities instead has become synonymous with poor governance across the board. Josh Barro:

I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them…Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system…even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it…The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets…[S]chools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything—and it’s really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels. And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population—we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy.

Ouch. No wonder Democratic-governed large metros, including and especially New York City, swung so heavily to the right in the last election. Fixing this has nothing at all to do with economic populism and everything to do with getting better at governing. That will not be easy with the array of Democratic-oriented interest groups who benefit from the current system (I’m looking at you non-profit industrial complex!) and of course the innumerable regulations that undermine efficient public services and prevent the building of needed housing and infrastructure.

Speaking of regulations, economic populism has nothing to say about the radical reform we need in the country’s regulatory and permitting structure so that, well, stuff could actually get done. As Ezra Klein points out:

The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later—four years—the first 28 stations opened.

Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.

Appalling. There are innumerable other examples. How about the $42 billion allocated in the 2021 infrastructure act to provide broadband access to underserved, primarily, rural areas? Three years later, almost nothing’s been done. Or how about the $7.5 billion allocated by the IRA to build half a million EV charging stations? So far, a grand total of seven! This should be completely unacceptable.

As should the failure of the bipartisan Energy Permitting Reform Bill of 2024. The bill would have facilitated the building of renewable energy infrastructure, particularly long-distance transmission lines, as well as new fossil fuel infrastructure. But the environmental groups blocked it so we’re still stuck with the same old glacially slow and inefficient permitting regime for energy infrastructure, ensuring that the goals of the IRA, of questionable feasibility to begin with, will certainly not be met. In the immortal words of Bob Dole: “Where’s the outrage?”

This is a problem that most assuredly will not be fixed by a generous dose of economic populism. Not even close.

4. Economic populism is inadequate as populism. We are certainly in a populist era and it makes sense to respond to that mood. But it does not necessarily follow that Democrats can effectively speak to that mood simply by bashing the rich (“the billionaire class”), insisting they pay their fair share, and advocating for programs aimed at middle- and working-class voters, rather than corporate priorities. Many voters, including swing voters, are certainly sympathetic to such a pitch. But what this approach leaves out is that the populist sentiments of voters go much deeper than that.

To put it bluntly, voters, particularly working-class voters, harbor deep resentment toward elites who they feel are telling them how to live their lives, even what to think and say, and incidentally are living a great deal more comfortably than they are. This is not the rich as conventionally defined by economic populism but rather the professional-dominated educated upper middle class who occupy positions of administrative and cultural power. By and large, these are Democrats in Democratic-dominated institutions. Looked at in this context, truly populist Democrats might want to say, with Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is a bitter pill for most Democrats to swallow. In today’s America, they are the Establishment even if in their imaginations they are sticking it to the Man and fighting nobly for social justice. The failure to understand that they themselves are central targets of populist anger leads Democratic elites and activists to overestimate the efficacy of economic populism and interpret populism on the right as driven solely by racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc. That’s more comfortable than realizing millions of populist voters hate you. But they do.

Coming to terms with this reality—while unpleasant—will help Democrats overcome their current tendency toward magical thinking. Assuming they want to. Magical thinking may not lead to effective politics but it can be mighty comforting.

Share

Subscribe now

As is often the case after a bad loss, Democratic post-mortems have been rife with Monday morning quarterbacks. Biden dead-enders suddenly declaring they saw it coming all along. Pundits proclaiming they knew inflation would doom Harris from the get go. And on and on.

It is, of course, a good thing that Democrats are seriously wrestling with how they lost to Donald Trump. But ultimately this sort of hindsight analysis is easy. As they move forward, the party should look towards the elected Democrats who sounded the alarm before November 5th.

Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-03) and Jared Golden (ME-02), co-chairs of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, not only saw it coming—they backed up their talk with huge performances on Election Day.

Since first winning a Trump district in 2022, Gluesenkamp Perez has hammered her party for dismissing working-class voters. Golden, meanwhile, wrote an op-ed way back in July arguing that Trump would win the election. In an interview the same week, he said: “[T]he preferred campaign message of not just Joe Biden, but a lot of Democrats, that this election is about saving democracy happens to be a complete, abject failure.” This argument looks awfully prescient today.

Well before Election Day, both recognized that winning working-class voters means occasionally bucking the party line on important issues. Each spoke out against Biden’s student loan forgiveness and supported GOP measures to strengthen border enforcement. Gluesenkamp Perez’s signature push in Congress has been a “Fair Repair Act”—a bill that would let farmers and consumers fix their own equipment—while Golden has consistently sided with Republicans on gun control bills.

This moderation proved remarkably popular. Gluesenkamp Perez won her Trump +3 district by 4 points and Golden won his Trump +9 district by a point. And they aren’t alone. Across the country, moderate Democrats in swing districts dramatically out-performed Harris.

The chart above compares Harris to House Democrats in closely contested seats where district-level data is available. Some toss-up races—like those in California—are excluded as precinct results are not yet finalized.

Across the districts where we do have data, the pattern is clear. Most moderate candidates outran Harris by sizable margins, even if they did not all win their elections: Mary Peltola by 10.7 percent, Matt Cartwright by 6.9 percent, Pat Ryan by 11.2 percent. Some dismiss these strong showings as nothing more than incumbency advantage. But even setting aside the fact that incumbency is not much of a leg up anymore, the “incumbent” tag obscures why these candidates have done well. They’re incumbents because they aren’t afraid to appeal across the aisle and win over Trump voters. Pat Ryan was one of the first Democrats to ask Biden to use executive action at the border. Matt Cartwright consistently touted securing funding for local law enforcement. Mary Peltola backed oil development on federal land that was opposed by climate change groups.

If Golden or Gluesenkamp Perez or any of the Trump-district Democrats lined up 100 percent behind Biden and Harris, they would have lost—incumbent or not.

Moreover, incumbents are not guaranteed to overperform. Ilhan Omar, for example, was one of the worst-performing House Democratic candidates, running 12 points behind Harris. In the Senate, Elizabeth Warren ran 5.6 points behind Harris in Massachusetts. Democrats can afford such underperformances in safe seats. But these differing margins offer an important lesson for the sort of policy positions that successfully translate to a contested national campaign.

In a post-election interview with The New York Times, Gluesenkamp Perez was asked whether the Democratic Party will be forced to change after a crushing election cycle. “It’s a lot easier to look outward, to blame and demonize other people, instead of looking in the mirror and seeing what we can do,” she responded. Yet again, she’s right.

Self-reflection and accountability are no fun—but they sure beat more losing.

Share

Subscribe now

Continuing TLP’s examination of 2024 data, the erosion of working-class support for Democrats across multiple issue and image fronts is impossible to ignore.

For example, in a comprehensive post-election survey of 4800 working-class voters conducted by PPI and YouGov (including oversamples in the battleground states of AZ, GA, MI, WI, and PA), Republicans outperformed Democrats across every indicator of party leadership and values. As seen in the charts below, pluralities or majorities of working-class voters overall viewed Democrats as “incompetent,” “out of touch,” “not on my side,” “weak,” and “untrustworthy.” In contrast, 50 to 63 percent of working-class Americans viewed Republicans in this election as “competent,” “in touch,” “on my side,” “patriotic,” “strong,” and “trustworthy.”

Compounding difficulties for Democrats, the PPI/YouGov survey found that nearly seven in ten working-class voters believe Democrats have “moved too far to the left” compared to less than half of these voters believing Republicans have “moved too far to the right.” Notably, this includes double digit advantages for the GOP on perceived party extremism across all five battleground states “despite these states having plenty of moderate leadership,” as the report authors write.

If Democrats want to be honest with themselves, they will admit that their party is no longer the historic voice for blue-collar, working-class Americans. The Democrats’ national party brand is sadly a pathetic shell of its former self.

Additional findings from the survey highlight just how far Democrats have fallen with this critical voting bloc. As seen in the table below, working-class Americans favored Republicans over Democrats on every contested issue in the 2024 campaign. The GOP margin over Democrats in terms of party trust on the issues ranged from +2 on healthcare to +28 on immigration. Working-class independents trusted the GOP by even greater margins than working-class voters overall across all the issues with advantages ranging from +14 to +38.

On the brighter side, although working-class Hispanics trusted the GOP more on the key issue of immigration (R +8), Democrats did score better with Hispanic working-class voters along some important economic populist dimensions including fighting for working people (D +17), promoting the interests of ordinary people (D +20), housing affordability (D +9), and healthcare (D +24).

Similarly, a majority of working-class voters overall, 55 percent, expressed some worry about Trump in this survey compared to 45 percent who don’t worry at all about him. Concerns that Trump “will prioritize the interests of the wealthy over ordinary Americans” emerged at the top the list of potential worries. Given Trump’s stated priority of enacting massive tax cuts for corporations and high income earners as part of his new agenda, the favoring of the wealthy over others could emerge as a potential weakness for Trump with his new working-class coalition.

However, as mentioned last week, traditional populist bashing of the rich won’t be enough for Democrats to gain back the support of working-class voters. Democrats will need to do far more in opposition to develop an updated and affirmative economic agenda that addresses the needs of workers and their families if they want any hope of winning them back.

Looking at some of the possible components of a Democratic working-class agenda, the PPI/YouGov survey found a whopping 80 percent of working-class voters backing the Biden administration’s new rules to support worker strikes and union ratification along with 70 percent who support the administration’s national investments in domestic energy production. Eight in ten working-class Americans also like Democratic proposals for more alternatives to college and affordable ways to increase workplace skills. On the cautionary side, working-class voters overall do not want a blowout of new government spending that fuels more inflation while large shares of working-class voters—including 83 percent of white, 75 percent of black, and 64 percent of Hispanic working-class voters—also desire federal deficit reduction.

Should Democrats successfully update their brand, policy agenda, and leaders to better reflect the modern sensibilities of working-class Americans—meaning they transform themselves into a party that is actually “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America” rather than one that is elitist and culturally left—they have a fighting chance to claw back some ground with workers across racial lines in a still sharply divided American political landscape.

But this will take some honest reckoning with the depths of working-class alienation from Democrats, and a willingness to try new policy and political approaches to help re-establish the party as a true representative of working-class values and economic interests.

Share

Subscribe now

A burning question coming out of this year’s presidential election was why Kamala Harris’s efforts to fashion herself as a moderate candidate didn’t seem to land with much of the public. As we wrote shortly after the election, these struggles likely stemmed from her inability—or unwillingness—to forcefully rebuke and distance herself from her past unpopular positions on hot-button issues, such as favoring decriminalizing border crossings, abolishing private health insurance, and defunding the police.

Two new surveys now offer even more context to this question, and they point to a similar conclusion: voters perceived Harris and the Democrats as too liberal, and this probably hurt them politically.

In its post-election survey, the think tank Third Way asked voters to place themselves, Harris, and Donald Trump on an ideological scale ranging from 1 (most liberal) to 10 (most conservative) to discern which of the candidates the voters were more aligned with. On average, respondents gave Harris a score of 2.5 and Trump a score of 7.8. As for themselves, the average voter had a score of 5.6, placing them 2.2 points apart from Trump and 3.1 points from Harris—nearly a full point difference.1

The survey also asked voters to give a word or two to describe Harris and Trump as candidates. Though many of them ascribed positive attributes to Harris, including that she was strong, intelligent, and qualified, the term they most associated with her was “liberal.” Others also included “liar” and “fake,” both of which touch on a related problem for her: to the extent she tried to outrun her past positions, it wasn’t seen as credible or sincere.

Another study, however, shows that Democrats’ ideology problem may have been rooted in more than just Harris’s own past actions and statements. The group More In Common, which examines trends around polarization and misperceptions in politics, found that voters perceive the average Democratic voter to be more left-wing than they often are. One way to demonstrate this is by examining issue priorities. Nearly half (49 percent) of all voters identified inflation as their top issue, followed by the economy (32 percent) and immigration (27 percent). When asked how they perceived the priorities of the two parties, voters associated all three of those issues with the Republicans. By contrast, they didn’t believe any of the issues were among Democrats’ top priorities, even though 40 percent of Democrats—a plurality—were foremost concerned about inflation. Instead, the perception was that the party cared most about social issues like abortion, LGBT issues, and climate change.

Why the disconnect between what many Democrats actually cared about and what the public perceived? There are a couple of seemingly obvious reasons. Democratic voters did cite abortion, specifically, as a top issue, though it was tied with healthcare for a distant second (29 percent) behind inflation. Additionally, Harris herself talked throughout the campaign—and especially in the homestretch—about abortion as much as any other issue, hoping to press her advantage over Trump.

But the study also found that many voters believed the views of the Democrats’ most liberal wing—a faction More In Common refers to as “Progressive Activists”—reflected those of the average Democrat as well. Indeed, a plurality (39 percent) of Progressive Activists cited climate change and abortion as the two most important issues in the election. Meanwhile, they appeared to deem immigration and the economy, voters’ top issues, less important.

Additionally, over a third (34 percent) of voters—including a whopping 56 percent of Republicans—believed that LGBT issues were the Democrats’ second-highest priority behind only abortion. In reality, only nine percent of Democrats ranked these issues as a top priority, placing them among their bottom three issues overall. However, more than one in five Progressive Activists (or 21 percent) prioritized them.

Past research from More In Common has shown that Progressive Activists hold much more left-wing views than the public at large on several issues as well. For example, nearly everyone in this faction says they have “no doubts” about the prevalence of white privilege and sexism in America. Compared to the average American, they are also three times more likely to say that people’s outcomes result from “luck and circumstance” (75 percent vs. 25 percent), almost three times more likely to be “ashamed to be an American” (69 percent vs. 24 percent), and far more likely to say they are proud of their political ideology (64 percent vs. 43 percent).

Progressive Activists are also among the most politically engaged groups in American society, meaning their views are more present (and often louder) in public life than those of other groups. In a highly polarized country like ours, voters may necessarily attribute this faction’s policy preferences and moral attitudes to the party closest to them on the ideological spectrum.

All this presents a conundrum for the Democrats moving forward. As the party’s base comprises a greater share of college-educated whites who are often more liberal than the country as a whole, especially on social issues, its center of gravity is shifting further leftward—and away from the median voter. Gallup polling shows that although the share of liberals in the U.S. is growing, they are still a far smaller group (26 percent) than moderates (35 percent) and conservatives (36 percent). Third Way found something similar in its survey of the 2024 electorate:

The American electorate has long leaned more conservative than liberal, with a plurality of voters describing themselves as moderate. This ideological asymmetry means that Democratic presidential campaigns can only win if they woo a supermajority of moderate voters…Harris did win moderates [in our survey], but only by a 10-point margin—52 percent to 42 percent. That simply wasn’t enough to win an election as a Democrat in this center-right country.

Regardless of whether voter perceptions about the Democratic Party in this election were influenced by the left flank, Harris’s past statements and unconvincing pivots along these lines appear to have weighed the party down.

Of course, liberals deserve representation too, and it’s completely fair to be concerned about issues like abortion, climate change, and minority rights. But winning in politics requires meeting voters where they are and catering to the issues they care most about. Harris and her team may protest that they tried to make the economy a central focus of her campaign, downplay hot-button topics, and employ tough rhetoric about the southern border, but none of it resonated with the voters they needed most. As the party moves forward, it must grapple with this reality and learn from it if they are to repair their image and chart a new path.

Share

Subscribe now

On November 5th, former president and Republican nominee Donald Trump prevailed over his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. In a historic comeback, Trump will return to the White House as one of only two Republicans to win the popular vote since 1992. Propelling his victory was an otherwise unlikely group of voters—Hispanic and Latino Americans. According to exit polls, Trump garnered around 46 percent of the Latino vote including an outright majority of Latino men.

For Democratic pundits, the development represents an incomprehensible turnaround for a man who began his political career by railing against illegal immigration from Mexico. In the same vein, Trump’s overperformance with Latinos belies the GOP narrative of Democrats “importing voters in order to win elections.” The fundamental flaw of each of these readings is the supposition that Latinos—or any other individuals from various demographic groups—lack agency in their political decisions.

In reality, Latinos are disproportionately working-class voters. According to Pew, around 79 percent of Hispanics lack college degrees. Unsurprisingly, it’s a group that has seen itself drawn both to the populist Donald Trump and his left-wing counterpart Bernie Sanders. At heart, Latinos are an eminently populist constituency for an eminently populist moment. Unfortunately for Democrats, the party mostly relegated the material concerns of Latino voters and instead elevated mostly unpopular priorities from both its centrist and progressive wings.

Like other working-class voters, Latinos generally favor stricter policies against crime and are more likely to cite public safety as an electoral concern. This is, in part, because a greater share of Hispanics live in urban areas and are thus more exposed to crime and the broader maladies of progressive governance. In a stunning rebuke of the failed experiment of California’s Prop 47—which reclassified crimes such as shoplifting as misdemeanors—around 70 percent of California Latinos supported reinstating felony charges for purportedly “non-violent” crimes. It was, in fact, then Attorney General Kamala Harris who authored Proposition 47 in 2014—and later declined to back 2024’s Proposition 36 which stiffened penalties for drug and other crimes. Tellingly, Democrats’ advantage among California Latinos in this election declined by a very substantial 18 points relative to Biden’s performance in 2020.

By far the most resounding issue where Democrats facilitated their own demise with Latinos—and the broader public—was on immigration. In 2020, the share of voters that favored increased immigration rose to a 50-year high of 34 percent—in large part as a backlash to Trump’s immigration policies. In a severe overcorrection, the Biden administration more or less decriminalized border crossings in 2021 through an overly generous asylum regime. The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that more than 10 million foreign nationals without legal permanent status entered the United States during Biden’s term. Consequently, the number of Americans that now favor decreased immigration has risen to a record high of 55 percent.

Here, it’s important to note that opposition towards illegal immigration has been comparatively stable—and even more resounding—including among Latinos. One poll found that 65 percent of Latinos backed stopping illegal immigration entirely. Mired with the sheer unpopularity of his policies, Biden issued an executive order in June barring migrants from soliciting asylum after daily border encounters exceed 2500. In practical terms, the move was a resounding success with monthly crossings falling by around 80 percent since December 2023 in conjunction with increased enforcement by Mexican authorities.

The sad reality for Democrats, however, is that the move came too little too late. Given years of chaos at the border—and its associated costs in areas like housing and wages—previously loyal Latinos defected to Trump over immigration. This was further compounded by the fact that the party could not campaign on taking decisive action on the border for fear of alienating its college-educated base. For perspective, the pro-immigration Financial Times found that over 80 percent of white progressives agreed that “immigration to the US should be made easier” compared to just 30 percent of Latinos. 

The final nail in the Democratic coffin came from the party’s resolute inability to champion progressive causes that garner actual votes. At a time when the federal minimum wage has lost close to half of its value due to inflation, the party ceded to its corporate wing—which favors curtailing inflation through lower wages. According to Pew, 79 percent of Latinos favor increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour—a logical finding considering that large shares of Hispanics earn at or close to the minimum wage.

Even in high minimum wage California—where an amendment to further increase the minimum wage appears to have narrowly failed—the class divide within the Democratic coalition continues to be stark. Around 53 percent of Latino and 56 percent of voters earning less than $40,000 a year backed the minimum wage amendment compared to 42 percent of whites and 40 percent of those earning over $100,000. In states with historically low minimum wages such as Florida and Missouri, Latinos have been decisive in their support for similar amendments. 

This isn’t to say that the entirety of the Biden agenda—most notably with regard to unions, industrial, and antitrust policy—will not redound to the benefit of workers, Latinos included. But at best, these are mostly long-term, technocratic gains at a time when housing and grocery prices have skyrocketed. Instead of actually cracking down on corporate price gouging, banning private equity from home sales, or augmenting the Affordable Care Act with a public insurance option, Democrats funneled billions of dollars into questionable energy policies, student debt forgiveness, and prolonged military support for wars in Europe and the Middle East. Many Hispanic voters took notice of these priorities and looked for an alternative.

On energy, much like immigration, neither Biden nor Harris chose to tout record oil production—mostly from licenses granted under Trump—for fear of alienating affluent progressives. On repeated occasions, Biden ceded to the demands of climate hawks such as nixing the Keystone XL Pipeline despite a global energy crisis. Had the administration instead pursued an agenda of energy abundance, it’s certain that much more of the pain from post pandemic supply shocks would have been mitigated.   

It is, after all, the progressive pretext of imminent climate apocalypse that has led to exorbitant energy costs in blue states—the very same that hurt working-class voters the most. When I spoke with the Venezuelan-American Raul after having moved to Florida from San Francisco, he explained that the cost of traveling to and from work as well as taking his kids to school “nearly bankrupted” his family.

Confronted with the most unpopular aspects of Democratic centrism and progressivism, it’s not hard to understand why so many Latinos turned to Trump over both pocketbook and cultural issues. Lacking a clear agenda and promising policies that most voters likely regarded as outright lies, the core promises of the Trump campaign were comparatively coherent to many voters: reduce immigration and lower prices.

Indeed, in my reporting, the most common answer I heard from Latino voters was that Trump would do a better job of reducing inflation than Kamala Harris. One 20-something Biden voter of Costa Rican origin explained to me how he disliked Trump but felt that the economy was better during his presidency. He also appreciated Trump’s willingness to sit down with podcasters such as Joe Rogan and described Kamala Harris as elitist for not doing the same. Still another Mexican-American voter I spoke with resented the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to hold competitive primaries and likened the media narrative on Trump’s authoritarianism with that of Mexico's Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).

At minimum, Trump’s overperformance in relation to other Republicans speaks to his strengths as a populist—a quality he shares with many of his peers in the Americas such as the friendly AMLO.

It’s worth considering whether the politician that most resembles a Latin American leader has a unique appeal among Latinos. In the same way that populism is the defining characteristic of Latin American politics, the core of Trump’s appeal is his populism. This is also to say that the political reality of the U.S. increasingly resembles that of Latin America.

In recent decades, the egalitarianism of New Deal America has decayed into the atomized, elitist, and unequal society of the present. In this environment, the essence of populism is one that challenges the sensibilities of a genteel and credentialed—if not always economic—elite.

In some cases, this improves the quality of democracies by incorporating previously ignored voter concerns. In other cases it empowers questionable demagogues and/or fringe extremists. In yet another subset of cases, ostensibly respectable elites resort to questionable tactics such as lawfare or censorship in order to oppose populist opponents. To varying degrees, Trump and Trumpism have prompted a combination of these scenarios.

Seen through a hemispheric lens, the president-elect is a seminal populist and the perfect archetype of a Latin American conservative. Since 2000, 15 of the region’s 26 right-wing presidents have been wealthy tycoons like Donald Trump. Unsurprisingly, many of the president-elect’s Latino voters—like many of his Latin American admirers—credit his business acumen as a factor for his economic management.

And yet, Trump’s brand of right-wing populism is unique relative to his conservative peers in the Americas. In several important ways, his views often align more closely with left populists. This is most evident with regards to trade where Trump is the region’s solitary protectionist on the right. By comparison, the “Argentine Trump” Javier Milei, considers tariffs to be dangerous distortions of market freedom—in stark contrast to the “Tariff King” Trump.

In an October interview with Bloomberg News, editor-in-chief John Micklethwait scolded the former president for his controversial tariff plans. In typical fashion, Trump noted the benefits of protecting American industry and countered: “It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs and have someone explain to you that you’re wrong”. For all the talk of Brazil’s “Trump of the Tropics” or Argentina’s “Trump of the Pampas,” both Bolsonaro and Milei remain closer to Micklethwait on trade than the real Donald Trump.

The irony is that the Biden administration has been, if anything, more protectionist than its Trumpian predecessor. In 2022, Biden issued sweeping restrictions on the sale of semiconductors to China prompting the resignation of dozens of industry CEOs. Then in May, the president slapped 100 percent tariffs on Chinese EVs. The political genius here of Trump’s maximalism on tariffs—such as imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports—is that it distracted Democrats from proposing an alternative or championing their own record protecting domestic workers. Unsurprisingly, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 56 percent of voters favored Trump's tariff plan, although other polls report more mixed sentiments toward his plans.

In Latin America, protectionist policies are similarly popular in large part because of the overwhelming elitism of free trade opponents. Tune in to financial coverage of Gustavo Petro’s Colombia or Lula’s Brazil, and you’ll encounter pundits using identical Democratic Party talking points on the harms of tariffs. Like Trump, AMLO and Petro campaigned on renegotiating unfair trade deals such as NAFTA and the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement; Trump and AMLO later renegotiated NAFTA into the more worker-friendly USMCA—a development which allegedly kindled an enduring friendship.

Unlike Biden or Harris moreover, “radical leftists” like Lula actively champion their defense of workers from foreign competition. Here it’s worth noting that neither Bolsonaro nor Milei would even consider comparable rhetoric—let alone actionable policy—on the subject. The same can be said of central bankers’ job-killing propensity for high interest rates that have elicited ire from both Lula and Trump.   

Impressive as the president-elect’s gains may be, Republicans should exercise prudence when evaluating an enduring “multiracial working class” realignment. Just as the Democratic Party has hobbled itself with unpopular immigration, energy, and social policies, the Republican Party remains firmly wedded to comparably unpopular positions on labor, big business, and abortion.

The optimistic scenario for the coming years is that a more ideologically flexible Republican Party retains or further expands its working-class support. This could be done by adopting a coherent pro-labor agenda through the promotion of collective bargaining and related reforms such as restricting just-in-time scheduling—a major impediment to parents’ ability to care for their children.

Similarly, a reformed Democratic Party might view GOP gains with Latinos as an incentive to resuscitate the party’s historical pro-labor position against mass, unskilled immigration. It could also embrace popular pro-labor reforms such as the PRO Act while simultaneously repudiating progressive maximalism towards criminal justice and the energy transition.

Sadly, a more realistic scenario is that neither party enacts meaningful reforms to their platforms and thus continue to prevail by default. Democrats have offered scant self-criticism while Republicans seem all too likely to provoke a comparable backlash on issues such as immigration and tax cuts for top earners. Faced with the prospect of lower turnout and an energized opposition, it’s quite likely that even the most identity-driven variant of the Democratic Party will succeed in retaking the House of Representatives in 2026.

Relative to other Republicans, Trump’s heterodoxy has translated into unique strengths among specific voters—namely Latinos, non-college, and union households. But this appeal by no means translates into resounding popular support—and speaks poorly of the rest of the GOP.

With virtually all ballots counted, Trump’s “landslide” win amounts to just under 50 percent of the vote compared to Kamala Harris’ 48.3 percent. While largely forgotten, in 2004, Republicans also won the popular vote and an almost identical share of Latinos under then president George W. Bush. Then as now, the sad reality is that most Americans—including Latinos—largely despise both political parties and their respective leaders.

In his notable campaign appearance in Pennsylvania as a McDonald’s worker, the president-elect dodged a question as to whether or not he would raise the minimum wage. On Election Day, I spoke with Karla, a low-wage worker of Ecuadorian descent and an enthusiastic Trump supporter. When I asked what she hoped for from a second Trump term, she responded in Spanish: “Espero que mi presidente suba el salario mínimo | I hope that my president raises the minimum wage.”

As in 2016, Donald Trump has been given yet another opportunity to upend American politics—ideally for the better. It will remain to be seen whether he listens to his newest working-class Latino voters to find the path forward.

Juan David Rojas is a South Florida-based columnist for Compact magazine, covering the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. He is also a contributor to American Affairs.

Share

Subscribe now

As Democrats continue to sift through the debris of their electoral thrashing on November 5, the primacy of economic populism has risen to the top of various explanations of what went wrong with working-class voters and what should be done to correct the situation. This is a necessary if insufficient component in rebuilding a multiracial working-class coalition in the Democratic Party.

The Liberal Patriot has long argued for a combination of economic populism and nationalism with cultural pluralism and conservatism to better align the party with existing working-class voters who have steadily migrated to the right or disengaged from politics altogether.

The cultural side of this equation is extremely easy and straightforward to deal with (even though party elites and activists refuse to do so): Stop telling working-class voters they have the wrong beliefs about immigration, climate, race, gender, democracy, and patriotism. Nothing turns away people faster than party ninnies and progressive talking heads hectoring them about their views on family, faith, and flag. Don’t hold a meeting on working-class solidarity and economic populism where half the new attendees get blocked at the door for transgressing some non-profit, activist group, or think tank litmus test on culture. If you’re not willing to welcome dissent and pluralism on cultural matters inside the Democratic Party, then find a line of work other than politics.

Turning to the economic populism side of the equation, the calculations are a bit trickier to process. For many long-standing factions within the Democratic camp, populism exclusively equals the pursuit of universal social insurance policies to help working people plus a political focus on money in politics, the negative effects of economic inequality, and the corrupt “one percent” of corporations and billionaires who run the country. Many elements of this economic populism remain potent in terms of attracting working-class support and in devising governmental policies that ensure greater fairness and equal opportunity for all people across all parts of the country. In its purest form, not polluted by cultural leftism, this was the driving ideological engine of the great populist and labor movements of the 20^th century, FDR’s New Deal, and later efforts such as the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign for president.

However, like all ideological movements, contemporary left populism needs some serious remodeling if proponents in the Democratic Party want to build a politics that can win back working-class voters who have drifted over to Trump.

Looking at attitudes over time, the migration of working-class voters to the GOP coincides with shifting perspectives about capitalism, the role of government, federal spending, and regulation.

For example, in an excellent post-election study conducted by PPI and YouGov, including more than 4500 interviews in 2024 battleground states, working-class voters express the most enthusiasm for a host of proposals that go well beyond traditional left-populist ideas. Three-quarters or more working-class voters support policies like making it easier for people to start a business, creating more alternatives to college, reducing the federal budget, building more housing and other infrastructure, tackling high medical costs, reinventing government, lowering taxes, and increasing military investments. Strong support ranges from 46 to 56 percent on each of these issues.

In comparison, only 44 to 54 percent of working-class voters overall express support for more traditional left-populist ideas like breaking up big tech, increasing taxes on corporations, increasing social spending and redistribution, and pursuing more taxpayer-funded healthcare insurance. The intensity of support is also much lower for these measures, ranging from 17 to 29 percent.

Although this is just one survey, these findings are consistent with other data over the past decade showing serious declines in working-class trust in government, diminished support for new social spending, and widespread concerns about government corruption, mismanagement, and overly burdensome regulatory regimes. Add in working-class disdain for much of the green agenda (particularly EV mandates), rising support for tech-libertarian ideas around free speech and cancel culture, and a desire for more restrictive immigration policies, one can easily see the contours of a right-populist majority emerging among the working class that is more in line with Trump’s approach rather than the left-leaning version on offer from Democrats.

Given the shifting views and political allegiances among working-class voters in recent elections, economic populists within the Democratic Party should use this upcoming time in opposition to update their own ideological framework and policy approach to better align with the existing views of these Americans.

Center-left populists first need to understand and accept how beliefs about business and government have changed among many working-class voters if they want to win more of their support over the next few election cycles.

Bashing corporations and the rich can only do so much, and may not work at all depending on the specific audience. Working-class voters today are much more interested in getting ahead in life with help, not hindrance, from both the private sector and the government—with no special treatment for favored demographic groups or select businesses.

Getting this policy balance right is difficult, yet critical if the party wants to find an agenda and leadership class that is attuned to the complexity of working-class sentiments in the Trump era.

Share

Subscribe now

Editor’s note: The Liberal Patriot will resume publishing on Monday, December 2. Enjoy the Thanksgiving break!

News coverage of the Democratic Party’s recent electoral struggles often focuses on their growing losses with working-class voters in Rust Belt states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. All three were once reliably blue—at least at the presidential level—but have become more competitive in recent years. These losses have produced even worse results for Democrats elsewhere in the region. For example, following Senator Sherrod Brown’s re-election loss this year, Republicans now control all statewide offices in Ohio, a state that voted for Barack Obama twice.

It’s tempting to look at this picture and conclude that many voters in this part of the country no longer want anything to do with the Democrats. But the recent history of another Midwestern state complicates that theory. In my home state of Missouri, a once-reliable presidential bellwether that has become deeply Republican, voters were very much open to supporting Democrats in the not-too-distant past. It’s easy to forget that the Show-Me State nearly went for Obama in 2008. And following the 2012 election, Democrats controlled six of Missouri’s eight statewide offices, buoyed by support from voters everywhere.

But just four years later, Donald Trump carried it by 20 points, as Democrats’ erstwhile support in rural areas plummeted. Today, most Democratic candidates only win the four municipalities comprising Missouri’s major population hubs—Jackson (Kansas City), St. Louis (the county and city), and Boone (Columbia).1 And collectively, these places have not been enough to keep the party competitive statewide.

And following the 2022 midterm election, Democrats here, like in Ohio, were locked out of all statewide offices—for the first time since 1870. Republicans have also held supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature since 2012.

However, even in the face of Democrats’ decline in Missouri, voters there still support many of the party’s policies, especially on the economic side of things. Missouri is one of a handful of states with a robust ballot measure tradition, and as Democrats have struggled to win contests for elected office and enact their changes in the legislature, they have sometimes taken their issues directly to the voters—and found immense success. Over just the past few cycles, Missourians have sided with Democrats on:

• “Right-to-work.” By a two-to-one margin, voters in 2018 rejected a Republican-backed effort to pass a “right-to-work” law in the state, which would have made it easier for companies to disrupt union organizing efforts. The measure, whose defeat marked a big win for organized labor, won majority support in just 15 of Missouri’s 115 counties.2

• Medicaid expansion. After the GOP-led state legislature repeatedly rejected attempts to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, voters took action themselves. In 2020, as Missouri voters backed Trump by 15 points, they also voted to extend health coverage to as many as 217,000 low-income residents. The success of this measure was driven by the state’s major metropolitan areas—the only ones to back it with majority support—but it received significantly higher support than most recent Democratic candidates in counties across the state.

• Marijuana legalization. Even as Democrats were losing their final statewide seat in 2022, voters passed a constitutional amendment making marijuana legal. The measure, which succeeded by a six-point margin, received majority support in 14 counties. As with Medicaid expansion, support for the measure outpaced Democratic candidates’ margins all over the state, including in rural areas.

• Abortion protections. In 2024, Trump again carried the state by double digits. At the same time, the electorate supported two measures that were backed by the Democratic Party. The banner headline was the success of a constitutional amendment enshrining into law the right to an abortion and repealing the state’s current ban. Though the measure only narrowly passed by three points—and the only counties where it received majority support were in and around the three major population centers—support for it outpaced support for Kamala Harris in every single county.

• Minimum wage, and paid leave. Also in 2024, voters approved an initiative that raised the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and guaranteed paid sick leave. This measure received majority support from counties all across the state and passed by an overwhelming 15-point margin.

These results show that Missouri voters are generally aligned with Democrats on key issues, and yet, many still have hostile views toward them. According to the 2024 AP VoteCast survey, fully 63 percent of Missouri voters had an unfavorable view of the party, including 51 percent who held a “very unfavorable” view of them. At the same time, voters viewed the Republicans—who were on the other side of every ballot measure listed above—favorably by a margin of 55–43 percent.

Moreover, the Democrats’ 2024 Senate nominee, Lucas Kunce, showed that simply campaigning on issues that are popular with the electorate may not be enough to regain lost ground in places like Missouri. Kunce ran a campaign rooted in themes of reproductive rights and economic populism, including touting his support for antitrust measures, tariffs, and unions. Ultimately, though, he only did about 1.8 points better than Harris, a sign that the “D” next to his name still outweighed his support for policies favored by most voters.

All this is indicative of a broader conundrum for Democrats: leaning into popular issues may be insufficient if voters feel increasingly estranged from the party across social and cultural lines. As my colleague Ruy Teixeira has written, “The idea that Democrats can just turn up the volume on economic issues and ignore sociocultural issues when they are viewed as out of the mainstream is absurd. Culture matters, and the issues to which they are connected matter.”

Allow me to offer a personal example of how I’ve witnessed this cultural shift. In 2012, I had the chance to stop by a gathering of Missouri Democrats in the town of Hannibal—the birthplace of Mark Twain—called “Demo Days.” One of the first things I noticed when I walked into the main hall was a table for a group called Second Amendment Democrats. That the party had included gun owners at the event signaled that they understood the importance of building a broad coalition to win in a state that leaned to the right. My rural college also received visits that cycle from Governor Jay Nixon and Attorney General Chris Koster, both Democrats who held some more conservative views including support for gun rights and the death penalty and opposition to same-sex marriage and the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate.

Looking back on that election, I wonder: is there a place in the party’s coalition today for voters and politicians who care about gun rights? What about ones who are anti-abortion, pro-death penalty, or unsure whether they agree with the Democratic base on issues related to race, gender, and immigration? Would the Democrats even think of holding major party events in Hannibal or similar areas today?3

These questions strike at a deeper reason why Democrats have struggled to regain support from voters who backed them barely over a decade ago: many simply no longer see themselves in the party. As the Democrats increasingly represent a college-educated, urban-dwelling, affluent, secular and culturally progressive professional class, it becomes harder to sell themselves as the party of ordinary people—even as they’re often on the side of public opinion on important issues.

It remains to be seen how Democrats will grapple with this disconnect and address their deficiencies moving forward, but they would be well served by heeding what may be a new axiom of American politics: “It’s the culture, stupid.”

Share

Subscribe now

November 5th was almost much, much worse for Democrats. Amidst news of a GOP trifecta and the nominations of Gabbard, Kennedy, and Co., a worse scenario for Democrats is hard to imagine. But if not for strong performances from battleground Senate candidates, Democrats would be staring down the barrel of a nearly filibuster-proof Republican majority in the Senate. 

Four Democrats—Elissa Slotkin, Tammy Baldwin, Jacky Rosen, and Ruben Gallego—won in states that Trump flipped from blue to red. Such a feat defies recent political history. When a presidential candidate flips a state, their party almost always wins the concurrent Senate race. For example, Democrats won all Senate races in states that Biden flipped blue in 2020. Republicans did the same in 2016. In fact, between 2004 and 2020 such split outcomes have happened just twice—Democrat Joe Donnelly’s 2012 win in Indiana and Republican Judd Gregg’s 2004 victory in New Hampshire.  

Had the GOP conformed with precedent this year—an entirely reasonable outcome given Trump’s strong performance—they’d start the next Congress with 57 Senate seats. Not to mention the handful of very winnable seats that Republicans missed two years ago! Imagine stronger candidates in place of Blake Masters, Dr. Oz, and Herschel Walker—all of a sudden Democrats are down to 40 seats. 

So, to Democrats desperate for a piece of good news: Entering the 2026 cycle with 47 Senate seats is a small miracle. 

How did Democrats eke out Senate wins in states that Trump flipped? Each certainly benefited from ticket-splitting. But Democratic success may also owe to the traditional “undervote”—voters who selected Trump and left the rest of their ballot blank. Others, meanwhile, voted for a minor third-party Senate candidate, effectively the same as an undervote. 

In the table above, the Michigan and Nevada races immediately stand out. Slotkin and Rosen both won despite receiving fewer votes than Harris—who lost both states. This phenomenon—the winning Senate candidate receiving fewer votes than the losing presidential candidate—had happened just twice this century (Minnesota ‘08 and Nevada ‘12). The 2024 elections doubled that tally. 

Overall, as Kyle Kondik notes, the national undervote was actually inline with past elections. But with so many close Senate races in presidential battlegrounds, every undervote mattered more. If Nevada’s Sam Brown and Michigan’s Mike Rogers had come just a bit closer to Trump’s vote total (or even Harris’s!), they would be in DC for Senate orientation. Let’s take a closer look at both of those races. 

In Michigan, Mike Rogers’ vote total of 2.69 million was 95.6 percent of Trump’s, while Slotkin’s 2.71 million was 99.1 percent of Harris’s. Unsurprisingly, then, Rogers received more votes than Trump in only one spot: Leelanau County—a left-trending area in Northwest Michigan that still votes GOP down ballot. 

More interesting are the counties where Rogers’ vote total lagged further behind Trump—the darker counties on the map above. Aside from a strange underperformance in Bay and Arenac counties, Rogers’ total ran behind Trump the most in Genesee and Wayne counties, home to Flint and Detroit, respectively. 

As Trump gained ground with Michigan’s non-white voters, both counties swung substantially to the right at the presidential level. But Rogers’ lower total suggests these converts are not yet voting for Republicans besides Trump. Many voted for Slotkin and House Democrats—or simply didn’t vote for anyone else at all. 

A Trump undervote is even more recognizable in Nevada. Though Rosen outran Harris in every county, her improved margins were most notable in the rural areas beyond Vegas and Reno—where she managed to lose by less than Harris did. The table below breaks down four of these sparsely populated counties. 

Though Rosen beat Harris’s margin by between 6 and 11 points, her vote share really isn’t all that much higher. Rosen’s rural strength hinged on Sam Brown dramatically underperforming Trump’s vote share, often by 7+ points. 

In the Nevada presidential race, third parties and the “none of these candidates” option did not exceed 2.7 percent anywhere. In the Senate race, meanwhile, the share exceeded 5.5 percent in every single county—and was often closer to 10 percent. This sizable “other” vote almost certainly cost Brown thousands of votes. 

Many Nevadans headed to the polls, cast a ballot for Trump, and then selected a third-party or “none of these candidates.” Interestingly, this type of vote appears disproportionately concentrated in the ruby-red rural areas. This suggests the “Trump alone” segment of the electorate extends to rural, white voters as well—not just the non-white populations we saw in Michigan. 

One possible explanation in Nevada? The Rosen campaign’s heavy spending advantage allowed Democrats to negatively define Brown before he was on air. As a result, voters who might have gone straight-ticket GOP ditched Brown, but couldn’t quite bring themselves to vote for a Democrat—so they selected a third option or left the Senate race blank. 

The undervote, of course, is difficult to disentangle from persuasion effects. It’s easy to rattle off other factors that contributed to Democrats’ Senate success. But this was still a historically remarkable performance. And, at the margins, a Trump undervote might have made all the difference. 

This will be a crucial factor as we turn towards 2026: What share of Trump-only voters will show up in the midterms? Can the GOP retain their first-time non-white voters? Realignment—or not—hangs in the balance. 

Share

Subscribe now

Democrats have lost two of the last three presidential elections to Donald J. Trump. Donald Trump! And they now face a governing trifecta of House, Senate, and presidential control by their (semi-fascist?) opponents.

Clearly, something has gone dreadfully wrong. A clue can be found in the shocking decline of nonwhite working-class (non-college) support for Democrats in this election. Harris carried nonwhite working-class voters by a mere 32 points, a 16-point decline from Biden’s 48-point margin in 2020. (Obama carried them by 67 points in 2012!) This latest decline swept across both black and Latino working-class voters.

What on earth is going on? Whatever happened to Democrats’ identity as the party of the working class? After all, it has been Democrats’ seemingly unchallenged hold over the nonwhite working class that has made that identity even semi-plausible, as white working-class voters have slipped farther and farther away from the party. But now that’s gone too.

Trump dominated the working-class vote in 2024. And look what’s happened to the Democrats’ image over time:

As another indicator, look at this one:

Yup, the party of the working class no longer. So why might working-class voters, especially nonwhite working-class voters, be finding it ever more difficult to see the party as their tribune? A key reason is the overriding sense that Democrats’ priorities have changed over time and that the welfare of the working class is no longer front and center in their calculations. This chart illustrates the shift:

Democrats of course argue that while their cultural views may have shifted left over time and some of these views may be unpopular (actually, most are), they are nevertheless just as focused on the welfare of the working class as they’ve ever been. This ignores the basic reality of opportunity costs. The time, energy and resources spent on the Democrats’ cultural left agenda is time, energy, and resources taken away from promoting the economic welfare of the working class. Working-class voters are well aware of this tradeoff, even if progressive activists and “the Groups” are not. As a result, working-class voters tend to connect their economic criticisms of the Democrats to the party’s apparent preoccupation with cultural issues pushed by their liberal college-educated supporters—issues working class voters either don’t care about or are actively hostile to. This connection is clearly dragging the Democrats down with these voters.

The salience of this connection is demonstrated by post-election data from the Blueprint strategy group. The third most potent reason—after too much inflation and too much illegal immigration—for voters to choose Trump over Harris in a pairwise comparison test was “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class”. And among swing voters, this concern about focus was the most powerful reason.

And look at what swing voters who chose Trump thought were extremely or very accurate criticisms of the Democratic Party:

A recent article by Jennifer Medina in the New York Times illustrates how these views are expressed by nonwhite working-class voters:

“Democrats flipped,” said Daniel Trujillo, who owns a barbershop in East Las Vegas and watched many of his customers shift from supporting Barack Obama to favoring Mr. Trump. “They went from being for the working class to, if you’re not college-educated and have money, you’re not worthy.” He said he had watched with delight as his customers increasingly warmed toward Mr. Trump.

“The right turned blue-collar and went full border-control, strong-economy and law-and-order,” Mr. Trujillo added. “Who doesn’t want that?”

Who indeed? Later in the article, Medina notes:

Even as they held onto their faith in the American dream, many nonwhite working-class voters said they had come to see the Democratic Party as condescending, overly focused on issues irrelevant to their day-to-day lives. They bristled over social issues like the concerns of transgender children or the party’s focus on abortion rights. They felt scolded by liberals on Covid precautions—and crushed by the pandemic’s economic fallout.

Some sounded every bit as aggrieved as the white working-class voters who first fueled Mr. Trump’s MAGA movement, voicing similar complaints about migrants being given easier access to housing and food than homeless veterans living on the streets.

These views and their antagonistic relationship to Democratic orthodoxy are further illustrated in an excellent article by Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “The End of Denial: How Trump’s rising popularity in New York (and everywhere else) exposed the Democratic Party’s break with reality,” that focused on the red shift this year in the Queens borough of New York City. He observes:

Through the resistance years and into the COVID era, liberal institutions from universities to media organizations to nonprofits cathartically swung left, which bred further denial about what voters cared about and were experiencing. A partial catalogue of progressive denialism, listed in no particular order: that alienating left-wing positions or rhetoric were confined to college campuses; that the externalities of pandemic shutdowns, such as grade-school learning loss, were overblown; that the rapid adoption of new gender orthodoxies, especially in settings involving children, was not a popular concern; that the “defund the police” movement would be embraced by communities of color; that inflation was overstated; that the pandemic crime wave was exaggerated; that concerns over urban disorder represented a moral panic; that Latinos would welcome loosened border restrictions.

Van Zuylen-Woods’ reporting indicates how absurd this denialism is when matched against the lives—the “lived experience”, as it were—of ordinary residents of Corona, Queens:

Carlos Bermejo owns an Italian Latin restaurant called La Pequeña Taste of Italy. Bermejo, who emigrated from Ecuador, says the street vendors undercut his sales and the streetwalkers deter customers and attract crime. “In the summer, in the window, maybe like ten ladies,” he said. Inflation was another concern: Facing rising costs of his own, he says he had to hike the price of his standard aluminum-container takeout from $10 to $12. When I asked whom he voted for, he looked at me like I was kidding: “Donald Trump. You gotta do that. Everybody knows that.”

Several blocks away, the manager of a grocery store complained of a spike in thefts—he didn’t want me to use his name to avoid risking further incidents—as well as of street vendors pouring their grease directly into the sewer, which he said attracted rats that wound up in his store basement. He says he voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump this time around. Carmen Enriquez, a substitute teacher from Ecuador who lives nearby in what is technically Elmhurst, says she’s a registered Democrat who voted Republican this year for the first time. She complained that migrants had received free shelter and benefits while existing residents struggled. She directed her ire at not only the Biden administration but also Ocasio-Cortez, who appeared at a local rally last year to support migrant vendors, and State Senator Jessica Ramos, who co-sponsored a bill several years ago to decriminalize sex work...

One of the most interesting people I spoke with was 57-year-old Mauricio Zamora, who lives just off vendor-packed Corona Plaza on 103rd Street. Zamora runs a Facebook page and an active WhatsApp group for an organization he founded called Neighbors of the American Triangle, named after a minuscule nearby park he started maintaining during the pandemic when it became a magnet for drinkers…

He says that thanks to the chaos on Roosevelt, he has been getting fined for random garbage in front of his home, which he owns. He feels some of his local representatives, meanwhile, have prioritized tolerance over law and order. Using our translator now, he claimed they showed up only for “LGBT mobilization or when the lady prostitutes do a rally.”

In short, Democrats have lost the plot in the view of more and more nonwhite, especially nonwhite working-class, voters. How can they find it again? The obvious answer would be to sever the party’s connection to unpopular and unworkable social policies and re-establish a focus on the material welfare of working-class voters.

The simplest way to do this, in turn, would be to forcefully denounce said policies and unambiguously break from the forces in the party that are pushing these policies—“the Groups” and their allies that insist being a Democrat is inseparable from being a progressive as they define it. But this is hard because it entails conflict and conflict with the Groups is something Democrats have been determined to avoid.

This is foolish, not least because the theory upon which this deference was based—that the Groups actually represented groups of voters—was incorrect. As Ezra Klein, generally a loyal liberal Democrat, has been compelled to admit:

[I]t’s very important to look at the power of this nonprofit complex in the Democratic Party. Because part of what that power has been based on…is a sense that the way to understand what …collections of voters want…is by listening to what the groups purporting to represent them want…

“[I]n the case of nonwhite voters, it proved really, really deceptive. So the groups that were, in a sense, representing Hispanic voters within the Democratic coalition — they were part of what was leading Democrats, many of them in 2020, to say they were going to decriminalize border crossing, unauthorized border crossing. But that wasn’t what Hispanic voters wanted.

It was many of the groups representing Black Americans that pushed the Democratic Party toward “Defund the Police” rhetoric…But that was never popular, and certainly is not now popular, among Black Americans.

And so there’s been this dynamic where you have these groups that are claiming to speak for very, very wide swaths of the electorate and persuading Democrats of things that those parts of the electorate simply don’t believe. In the room where the Democrats are sort of making these decisions, you have staffers from these groups, and they’re often maybe the only Black person in the room or maybe the only Hispanic person in the room, so they’re granted a degree of deference.

But it has proved to be a misleading form of politics. Because these aren’t mass-membership groups. And this is a place where I think the Democratic theory, political theory, has just actually and truly failed. The Democratic Party moved into a position of thinking it was doing more than it ever had before to win over the allegiance of this multicultural electorate.

And it has lost huge amounts of support among that very same multicultural electorate. Because the people it was listening to as its guide to how to win them over were nonrepresentative.

In short, it was a catastrophic error which should now be rectified. And that will inevitably entail conflict. Adam Jentleson put the issue squarely in a recent New York Times op-ed:

Democrats cannot [achieve electoral dominance] as long as they remain crippled by a fetish for putting coalition management over a real desire for power…Democrats remain stuck trying to please all of their interest groups while watching voters of all races desert them over the very stances that these groups impose on the party.

Achieving a supermajority means declaring independence from liberal and progressive interest groups that prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win. Collectively, these groups impose the rigid mores and vocabulary of college-educated elites, placing a hard ceiling on Democrats’ appeal and fatally wounding them in the places they need to win not just to take back the White House, but to have a prayer in the Senate…

[W]hen Kamala Harris was running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, the A.C.L.U. pushed her to articulate a position on surgeries for transgender prisoners, needlessly elevating an obscure issue into the public debate as a purity test…

The same year, a coalition of groups including the Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party demanded that all Democrats running for president embrace decriminalizing border crossings. When candidates were asked at a debate if they would do so, every candidate on the stage that night raised a hand (except Michael Bennet). Groups like Justice Democrats pushed Democrats to defund the police and abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Positions taken a few years ago are fair game in campaigns, and by feeding into Republican attacks these efforts helped Mr. Trump and left the people and causes they claim to fight for under threat.

In other words, if anyone was being thrown under the bus, it was the very voter groups the Groups purported to represent! It’s high time for Democrats to turn the tables and throw the Groups under the bus. It’s the road back to the working class if the Democrats care to take it. Otherwise, they’ll be stuck being America’s educated, affluent party relying on their redoubts in blue metropolitan areas for political support. That would be a sad fate indeed for America’s historic party of the working class.

Subscribe now

Share

In the weeks since Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, Democrats and their allies have begun the long process of trying to determine why they lost. Some of these conversations have been productive, identifying factors that we at TLP have been writing about for some time: the party’s governing woes, misperceptions about the electorate, ideological shift away from the median voter, embrace of identity politics, and reluctance to pick fights with the left wing of the party, including interest groups and donors. All of this likely played some role in fracturing their coalition this year and giving Trump an opening for a comeback.

Some prominent writers and pundits on the left, however, are offering a different theory: they believe Harris took deliberate steps to appeal to the middle of the electorate and avoid discussions about identity, and it’s therefore silly to claim that she lost because voters thought she was too liberal or too focused on identity politics.

This view was perhaps best summarized in a recent monologue by John Oliver:

If what you want is a centrist campaign that’s quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, that candidate existed—and she just lost. […] I’m not sure how you reach out to moderate Republicans more than appearing with Liz Cheney multiple times.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but suffice it to say, this critique misses some key dynamics in this election. To be sure, Harris did sound like a moderate for much of the campaign. She touted the popular accomplishments of the Biden administration like caps on insulin prices, promoted policies to help lower housing costs, played up her career as a prosecutor, vowed to be tough on crime and the border, and mostly eschewed hot-button culture-war topics like race, gender identity, and the war in Gaza.

However, this was a hard pivot from the not-too-distant past. A mere five years ago, Harris adopted—or at least sympathized with—a host of objectively radical and unpopular positions, including decriminalizing border crossings, defunding the police, abolishing ICE, banning fracking, confiscating guns, allowing convicted felons to vote from prison, and requiring all new car sales by 2040 to be electric (to name just a few). As the party’s 2024 nominee, she never really disavow any of these past positions or fully accounted for reversing some of her positions, saying only, “My values haven’t changed.”

Many voters were thus unsure of her true beliefs, leaving a vacuum for Republicans to hit her repeatedly over those past views, claiming that her attempt to cast herself as a moderate was a charade. One memorable Trump campaign ad highlighted comments Harris had previously made in support of using taxpayer funding for sex-reassignment surgeries in prisons, including for detained migrants. The spot concluded: “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

Many Democrats decried the ad for picking on transgender Americans, but it was clearly making a broader point that seemed to resonate with some voters: that Harris wasn’t the moderate she purported to be, and that she cared more about being on the right side of progressive interest groups than advocating for the vast majority of the country. The ad it turned out to be extraordinarily effective. Pre-election focus group tests by the pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward found that the ad shifted the race 2.7 points toward Trump after viewers watched it, as it “cut to the core of the Trump argument: that Ms. Harris was ‘dangerously liberal.’”

Post-election surveys from the Democratic group Blueprint told a similar story. They tested several reasons why voters may have chosen not to support Harris, including the claim that she was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class.” This was the third-most-cited reason among all voters for not supporting her—and the top reason cited by swing voters who broke for Trump. (Meanwhile, among the least compelling claims in the survey? “Kamala Harris is too conservative.”)

A subsequent Blueprint survey confirmed Harris’s core problem was that many voters simply thought she hadn’t genuinely changed her past positions.1 According to their findings, swing voters who chose Trump believed that Harris still supported:

• Using taxpayer dollars for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83 percent)

• Requiring all cars to be electric by 2035 (82 percent)

• Decriminalizing border crossings (77 percent)

• Banning fracking (74 percent)

• Defunding the police (72 percent)

Oliver also highlighted the fact that Harris made several public appearances with Liz Cheney, a Republican stalwart whose father was a Democratic bogeyman just two decades ago, as evidence that she ran a moderate campaign. In the past, earning crossover support like that might signal a candidate is expanding their appeal to some nontraditional voters.

But importantly, Harris didn’t do anything meaningful to earn Cheney’s support, like make policy concessions, because Cheney’s dislike of Trump was strong enough that Harris didn’t need to. And Americans who shared Cheney’s anti-Trump animus likely didn’t need any convincing to support Harris either. So, if Cheney wasn’t forcing Harris’s hand on certain policies in exchange for her endorsement or bringing a new type of voter into Harris’s tent, how much did her support really boost Harris’s “moderate” appeal?

Finally, Harris’s refusal to distance herself from President Biden surely complicated her efforts to fashion herself as a moderate. Though Biden ran to the center of the 2020 Democratic primary field, he began making explicit appeals to the left ahead of the general election and continued doing so after taking office. He demonstrated this early on by hiring staffers who had worked for Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in an effort to ingratiate himself with the party’s progressive faction. Meanwhile, he shunned moderates like Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers, veterans of the Obama White House.

This was also evident in how he governed. Biden made a concerted effort to push policy ideas that thrilled the progressive wing of the party, such as the COVID stimulus package early in his administration, which has been linked to the subsequently higher rate of inflation. He also acquiesced to their demands on a liberalized asylum policy and student debt forgiveness, neither of which went over well with the public. And he took controversial actions related to race and social justice. One of his first acts as president was signing several executive orders related to advancing “equity,” one of which called for “an ­ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

Perhaps all this is why in the early part of summer, just before Biden dropped out, polls showed that more voters saw him as “ideologically extreme” than said the same about Trump—and why Harris’s insistence on embracing him during the campaign may have hurt her. Indeed, Blueprint’s polling found that among the other reasons voters chose not to support her was that they viewed her as too closely tied to Biden.

Many figures on the left are clearly reluctant to acknowledge some hard truths about the state of the Democratic Party and why it has struggled to build a sustainable, electorally dominant coalition. The reality is that although Americans are open to many of the economically populist ideas the party supports, they are also on average more culturally moderate or conservative than the Democratic base. And the evidence is quickly becoming clear that unless the party adjusts to this—in both words and actions—it may continue to cost them votes.

Subscribe now

Share

The movement away from two-party identification has intensified in recent years, with independents now making up around one-third of the electorate, and an even larger percentage of Americans overall. It’s important to recognize that independents are not a uniform group, and so their motivations and voting behavior differ from year to year. The group remains roughly comprised of a large pool of ideological moderates, two kinds of populist voters, and those who are politically disengaged.

Understanding the diversity of thought among independents, we can still examine recent trends with these voters and see how their past behavior might compare to 2024 when all the data is finalized.

For example, looking at Pew’s validated voter studies over the past few cycles, Donald Trump narrowly won independents on the whole (including party “leaners”) by a 43 to 42 percent margin in 2016 only to lose the group by 9 points to Joe Biden in 2020, 52 to 43 percent. Democrats also won independents by an even wider 15-point margin in the 2018 midterms when they regained control of the House of Representatives.

Although we won’t have comparable data for 2024 from Pew for a few months, the national exit poll for this year shows Harris winning all independents (including leaners as does Pew) by a 49 to 46 percent margin after Biden carried the group 54 to 41 percent in the 2020 exits. Despite Trump losing independents overall again in 2024, his 10-point improvement in the margin from 2020 (even if smaller in the validated data next year) clearly helped him to win a decisive if narrow popular vote and Electoral College victory this time around.

Regardless of the finality of the data at this stage, the trends are basically the same across all sources: Trump with a narrow independent win in 2016; Biden with the big advantage in 2020; and Harris likely with a narrow lead among independents in 2024.

What does the recent movement among independents tell us?

In pre-election surveys, independents favored Trump over both Biden and Harris on the two most important issues this cycle—the economy/inflation and immigration—while also trending more conservative on hot-button cultural issues. In contrast, independents generally favored Biden and Harris slightly more than Trump on a host of personal character issues and abortion.

Independents are a skeptical bunch—unimpressed with partisan rhetoric and propaganda and more “show me, don’t tell me.” If Trump and his party can continue to improve with these voters, particularly by delivering positive results on the two big issues of the economy and immigration, Republicans could conceivably maintain their grip on power and perhaps expand these gains in upcoming elections in 2026 and 2028.

However, Trump and the GOP shouldn’t count on independent support going forward.

We know that independents react strongly to economic conditions and do not particularly like the ideological agendas of either party when it comes to policies on economic growth, jobs, inflation, taxes, and spending. Trump’s proposals for across-the-board tariffs, extensive deregulation, and big new corporate tax cuts could turn out well in the eyes of these voters—or not. Likewise, Trump’s leadership style remains a wild card. Some aspects of his “bull in a china shop” demeanor might go over well with independents, while several more years of chaos, incompetence, and corruption like his first term will not.

It remains to be seen how Trump handles his new mandate and if he does things differently than last time.

Given the inherent distrust and lack of interest in politics among many independents, it is best to exercise some caution in anticipating their reactions to future events and when examining possible vote intentions.

Independents are growing both in size and electoral power almost organically. No party actually represents independents or has the allegiance of these voters, despite some leanings given the forced two-party system. They remain a diverse group in terms of their economic, social, and cultural views. They do not like politics to begin with and do not trust either conservative or progressive partisan media outlets to tell the truth and present unbiased information. Third-party and other emerging membership groups capture some aspects of their opinions, but not fully.

If Democrats want to regain their advantage with independent voters, they will need to present a party brand, leadership, and agenda that is more “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America” and less ineffective big-government spending and cultural extremism. If Republicans want to gain more support from independents, they will need to show them that they can govern the country respectably as a majority party committed to widely-shared economic growth and common-sense social policies—not excessively online, right-wing culture wars.

Given the internal dynamics and incentive structures of both Democrats and Republicans—and their relationship to ideological outliers within their respective coalitions—it seems unlikely that either party will figure out how to better represent independent voters permanently.

But whichever party manages to get closer to the median independent voter sooner will likely reap the rewards in upcoming midterm and presidential elections.

Share

Subscribe now

As we continue to sort through the wreckage of the 2024 election, one thing has become very clear: Donald Trump gained ground relative to 2020 in almost every state and with almost every demographic group. Even the most reliably Democratic constituencies, including racial minorities, shifted in his direction, an ominous sign that the party’s coalition may not be as solid as they once thought. Indeed, these results shone a spotlight on long-festering problems in the Democrats’ coalition, which have left them a shell of their former selves—as the party not of the multiracial working class but increasingly of society’s elites.

Though it may be hard to believe this fate has befallen the party of FDR, these changes didn’t happen overnight. Democrats were long considered by many Americans to be the party of the common man and woman. Mark Brewer, of the University of Maine, has found that in every presidential election between 1952 and 2004, the trait voters said they most liked about the Democrats was that they were “the party of the working class.” By contrast, the biggest mark against the Republicans was that they were viewed as the party of big business and the upper class.

These perceptions created a clear divide between the parties’ coalitions during that period: Democrats were likelier to win lower-educated and lower-income voters while Republicans were the favored party of many college-educated and affluent Americans.

At the same time, the parties had also begun to polarize along racial lines. Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act under President Lyndon Johnson, black Americans almost uniformly threw their weight behind Democrats while white voters—especially working-class, white southerners—began a slow but inexorable slide toward Republicans. For a time, this realignment came at the expense of the Democrats: from 1968 through 1988, they won the presidency just once, in 1976.

However, by the 1990s, the country was growing more diverse and better educated. Bill Clinton was a beneficiary of this new reality, as he made sweeping gains with women, young people, voters of color (especially Hispanics), and college-educated voters. Importantly, he also retained significant support from white Americans and lower-educated voters, who made up the vast majority of the electorate. As Clinton rode this coalition to victory twice—marking the first time since FDR that a Democrat had won two full terms as president—some political observers, including my colleague, Ruy Teixeira, saw the emergence of a new majority, one that could consistently win elections using the formula Clinton had used.

In 2008, Barack Obama built on the Clinton coalition, bringing in even higher levels of support from almost every major party constituency, including blacks, Hispanics, Asians, young people, and women.1 He also notably became the first Democratic nominee since at least 1988 to decisively win voters who held a bachelor’s degree and fared far better with high-income earners than past Democrats had. These were the first signs of a growing professional class whose cultural values had aligned many of them with Team Blue—a departure from the past.

Obama’s two wins confirmed for many Democrats and Republicans the validity of the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis. Gone were the days when Democrats needed to win a majority of white voters, a feat they had found nearly impossible to achieve since the 1960s. Now, the party that represented America’s demographic future stood to lead it as well.2

But no sooner had that consensus come into focus than Donald Trump arrived on the scene. Trump disrupted the Democrats’ plans for building a dominant coalition and, in the process, helped precipitate a dramatic realignment between the two parties—one rooted in economic and social class. This change has tipped the demographic advantage in favor of Republicans and left Democrats at very real risk of losing many of the voters who not long ago were expected to deliver them an enduring majority.

In 2016, non-college-educated voters, a group that had backed Obama by four points in 2012, swung to Trump, who won them by six. This was a core driver of Trump’s win, as these voters made up a whopping 63 percent of the electorate that year. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton gained substantial ground with college graduates, who went from also backing Obama by four points to supporting her by 15—an early sign that Democrats would struggle to win at the national level without a critical mass of working-class voters behind them.

Four years later, as Joe Biden defeated Trump, the education gap grew even wider. Biden improved on Clinton’s advantage with college-educated voters by three more points, while Trump’s margin with non-college voters remained virtually unchanged—likely the difference in the outcome. Even in Biden’s victory, though, there were signs that the traditional Democratic coalition wasn’t holding. The clearest example was the rightward swing of Hispanic voters, who had backed Clinton by 38 points but supported Biden by only 26. There were also more modest signs of eroding support among black and Asian voters. In fact, a key driver of Biden’s win was improvements with white Americans: he lost them to Trump by only 13 points compared to Clinton’s 17-point deficit.

It seems plausible that because Democrats found success in 2020 and unexpectedly did so again in the 2022 midterms, they overlooked real problems under the hood of their coalition. Now, these problems finally caught up with them.

Initial data from the 2024 AP VoteCast survey shows that Kamala Harris matched Biden’s margin with white voters, but Trump made historic gains with non-white voters. He earned the highest share of Asian support since 2004, the highest share of black support since 1976, and the second-highest share of Hispanic support ever (he even nearly won Hispanic men outright). All this points to an American electorate that is becoming less polarized along racial and ethnic lines. While that may be a welcome development for society, it comes at the obvious expense of the Democrats, who had hoped these voting blocs would help them build a demographically dominant coalition for years to come.

Meanwhile, the transformation of the parties along class lines appears to be moving full steam ahead. Harris retained higher levels of support among college-educated voters, winning them by 14 points. But perhaps just as telling: she carried high-income earners (those earning at least $100,000) by seven points—by far the largest margin for a Democratic nominee in the modern era. On the other side, Trump became the first Republican nominee on record to win low-income voters, narrowly carrying them by three points. He also continued growing his advantage with non-college voters, winning them by 13 points—the largest margin for the GOP since at least 1988. And his 44 percent support from union households marked the greatest share for a Republican since Ronald Reagan.

Looking at this picture, it’s hard not to see that the Democrats are becoming the very thing they have long fought against: the party of the elites. This stands in sharp contrast to their longtime image as the champions of the working class, which is further and further in the rearview mirror. According to political scientist Matt Grossmann, college-educated white voters this year became a plurality of the Democratic coalition for the first time ever, surpassing both non-college whites as well as voters of color.

On a more practical note, this new coalition also risks putting the Democrats on electorally unsound footing. Although college graduates are more reliable voters than their non-college peers, they also constitute a much smaller portion of the population. Without a meaningful share of working-class voters in the mix, the party will struggle to be competitive.

Strategists and pundits will argue in the months ahead about the best path forward for the Democrats, but suffice it to say: from both an electoral and moral standpoint, the party’s aim should be to figure out a path to reclaiming its roots as the party of the people.

Editor’s note: A version of this piece first appeared in Persuasion.

Share

Subscribe now

The Liberal Patriot is pleased to co-sponsor a great post-election panel with our friends at the Niskanen Center examining the early data on important demographic and ideological trends in the 2024 presidential race.

Please sign up here to join us on Friday, November 15th, at 3 pm for a virtual debrief on the class, race, and gender dynamics of the 2024 election.

Did the election cement a class realignment of American politics? Did Republicans peel off minority voters based on changing perceptions of the GOP as a working-class party? And how did these dynamics interact with the growing gender divide in voting?

We will review the initial evidence with:

• Tom Edsall, Columnist, New York Times

• Amanda Iovino, Principal, WPA Intelligence

• Patrick Ruffini, Founding Partner, Echelon Insights

• Ruy Teixeira, Co-founder and Politics Editor, The Liberal Patriot

• The panel will be moderated by Niskanen Senior Fellow Matt Grossmann.

For additional context, David Dagan of the Niskanen Center posted an essay prior to November 5 examining the subject matter of the panel on his Hypertext newsletter (below).

The election, the elite, and the roots of our dysfunction

Highly educated Americans are arguing over abstractions, shaping the culture—and alienating non-graduates. Two major new books explain.

The closer we get to Election Day, the more helpful it is to step away from horse-race coverage and last-minute political gambits and ask: How did we get to this point?

The most compelling answer contains a deep irony. We live in an era in which the elite that wields the bulk of power in our society has become broader and more diverse than ever before. And yet, that elite has seldom been more unpopular.

“Elite” is obviously a contested term, but in this issue of Hypertext we feature two critically important new books that use it roughly in the same way, to describe the nearly two-fifths of Americans 25 and older who hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Along with that education, most of them have acquired an enormous economic advantage—and a distinctive worldview.

All of this means that the much-discussed “diploma divide” defining elections in the U.S. (and other wealthy democracies) runs far deeper than the polling place. David Hopkins and Niskanen Senior Fellow Matt Grossmann explain the stakes in their new book Polarized by Degrees:

Culturally progressive technocracy, the governance of society by socially liberal and well-educated experts, is winning a long-term battle, reshaping the governmental, business, and nonprofit sectors—but not without stimulating a major backlash that has redefined conservative politics. 

With Harris and Trump at an apparent dead heat, pundits across the political spectrum are puzzling at why neither party seems capable of seizing the obviously available middle ground in American politics (see recent pieces by Yasha Mounk, David Brooks, and Liam Kerr—all citing the work of our friends Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin). Both parties certainly have room to moderate and, as we recently highlighted, to reassert themselves as vital organizations: A functioning, well-staffed, enduring party is the precondition for connecting with voters—and for desanctifying the commentariat “priesthoods” that, Brooks argues, now dominate the GOP and the Democrats.

But it may also be true that overcoming the educational break among Americans is harder than moderating, managing, and messaging. The diploma divide has become a gulf.

Meanwhile, a broader elite itself is awfully difficult to unify, particularly when its ranks are filled with people who make their living manipulating abstractions and who believe that words and symbols are the most vital political goods, as Musa al-Gharbi explains in a terrific new critique, We Have Never Been Woke. 

These “symbolic capitalists” virtually all hold college degrees and as such have far better prospects than less educated Americans, al-Gharbi explains. They nonetheless will include many frustrated aspirants who cannot land the best jobs for which they are qualified. That frustration leads to a status competition among the elite’s relative winners and losers—a competition that takes the shape of claiming that one’s rivals are not living up to their professional obligation to advocate for the less fortunate. The irony, of course, is that the less fortunate generally could care less about these disputes—and more often than not, al-Gharbi notes, symbolic capitalists wage these fights while exploiting those people’s labor.

The “elite” in these stories is broad indeed, lumping adjunct professors who are barely scratching out a living with billionaires who are pouring money into political influence. Even Peter Turchin, the theorist of “elite overproduction” who predicted our age of instability, focuses his attention on people with a realistic shot at the highest positions of economic and political influence in society.

But Grossmann and Hopkins and al-Gharbi provide a compelling case for taking this wider angle. The resentments that billionaire political donors are able to exploit are not purely ginned up by a devious Republican Party. Nor is there a conspiracy of Ivy League intellectuals forcing “wokeness” down Americans’ throats.

Meanwhile, the differences between people who are highly educated and people who are not extend beyond cultural attitudes, into life expectancy, well-being, and critically, social status. Brink Lindsey provides a window into this deeper decline in social position in his essay, “The declining status and leverage of ordinary people.”

The upshot is that the transformations in our culture run deeper than politics—and so do our problems. As Lindsey has put it:

When people were telling pollsters that they no longer trusted government, what they had lost confidence in—what they were in the process of giving up on—were established institutions and governing elites. Rational-legal authority was gradually disintegrating, and people were reverting to charisma.

This collapse of legitimacy is the product of deep economic trends that have even deeper social ramifications, and with which we have not yet reckoned.

Read the excerpts and essays:

Grossmann and Hopkins: “The rise of the caps and gowns”

al-Gharbi: “How elite competition turns into culture war”

Lindsey: “The declining leverage and status of ordinary people”

Share

Subscribe now

At one point in the initial rollout of Harris’s campaign, there was much happy (joyful?) talk of getting the band back together—the return of the mighty Obama coalition. The “rising American electorate” would have its revenge on Trump, the Republicans, and their retrograde supporters from declining demographics.

That’s not exactly how it worked out. Instead, Trump won every swing state and the election, carried the national popular vote and made dramatic headway among key demographics that were supposed to buoy the rising American electorate. In short, the rising American electorate didn’t rise, it crashed.

As Democrats dig out from their debacle, it’s important for them to understand just how far away they now are from the salad days of the Obama coalition. In 12 short years, they have lost two of three elections to Donald Trump and huge chunks of support from key demographics, including most of their rising constituencies. They need to face the uncomfortable fact that not only did the Obama coalition not come back, it’s likely never coming back. It’s time for a new coalitional strategy—a strategy that starts with rebuilding their support among working-class Americans of all races and forcefully jettisoning all the political baggage that is preventing them from doing so.

Here are data that illustrate the scale of decline since Obama vanquished Mitt Romney in 2012. For this exercise, I use the Catalist data from 2012, the best retrospective data available, and compare it to the demographic group estimates from AP VoteCast, the best 2024 election data currently available. (It would be preferable to use 2024 Catalist data for this comparison but their data are not yet available.)

Nonwhite voters overall. Obama carried these voters by 64 points; Harris carried them by 34 points. Democratic decline: 30 points.

Black voters. Obama carried black voters in 2012 by an amazing 93 points. Harris managed only a 67-point margin. Democratic decline: 26 points.

Latino voters. Obama carried Latinos by 39 points, Harris by just 12 points. Democratic decline: 27 points. It is interesting that the overall decline since 2012 is quite similar between blacks and Latinos; however, essentially all of the decline for Latinos was post-2016 while the black decline has been more or less continuous.

Working-class (non-college) voters overall. Obama was the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the working class as a whole (3-point margin). But Harris lost them solidly by 13 points. Democratic decline: 16 points.

White working-class voters. The traditional trouble spot for Democrats; Obama lost them by 20 points, which goes up to 30 points in this election. Democratic decline: 10 points—which is a substantial and very consequential decline among a huge voter group. However, that decline pales in magnitude when compared to the decline among nonwhite working class voters.

Nonwhite working class voters. Obama cleaned up among nonwhite working-class voters, carrying them by 67 points in 2012. This election the margin was down to 32 points, cutting the Democratic advantage by more than half. Democratic decline: 35 points.

Black working-class voters. Black working-class voters gave Obama a 94-point margin in 2012, actually higher than among their college-educated counterparts. But in 2024, the Democratic margin among the black working class—64 points—was lower than among the college-educated, reversing the class polarity of the black vote. Democratic decline: 30 points.

Latino working class voters. These voters gave Obama a 43-point advantage, much higher than among the Latino college-educated. In 2024 this crashed to a mere 8-point advantage for Harris. Democratic decline: 35 points, two and a half times the decline among the Hispanic college-educated.

Young voters. Obama carried voters under 30 by 23 points; this election Harris managed only a 4-point advantage among this age group to the shock of most, particularly Democratic, observers. Democratic decline: 19 points.

Of course, this is comparing an age group that had a different generational composition in the two elections. But this should provide little comfort to Democrats. The 18-29 year old age group in this election was composed almost entirely of Gen Z voters, supposedly the leading edge of a generational shift that would make the voting pool ever more Democratic. In 2012, the 18-29 year olds who provided Obama’s 23 point margin were all members of the Millennial generation. In 2024, those voters are now entirely contained in the 30-44 year old age group, where Harris eked out only a 3-point advantage. So much for the generational theory of political dominance.

Young black voters. Black voters under 30 gave Obama a 92-point margin in 2012. Harris carried them by only 50 points. Democratic decline: 42 points(!) The decline was almost as large among black voters 30-44.

Young Latino voters. In 2012, Obama dominated Hispanic voters under 30 by 54 points. Harris’s margin among these voters was just 17 points. Democratic decline: 37 points.

Male black voters. While black female voters have also shifted right over time, the shift among black men has been far larger—almost three times the size. In 2012, Obama carried black men by 91 points; Harris’ margin crashed to 49 points in 2024. Democratic decline: 42 points.

Male Latino voters. Latino men have also shifted harder right than their female counterparts. Obama enjoyed a 32-point advantage among Hispanic men in 2012. In this election, Harris was essentially tied among these voters, carrying them by only single percentage point. Democratic decline: 31 points.

So it’s time for Democrats to bid farewell to the rising American electorate. The Obama coalition is gone and in all likelihood it can’t be brought back. It would be a fool’s errand to even try.

It’s time—past time—for a new coalitional strategy for a new populist era. The Trump administration is likely to give them plenty of opportunity for a comeback. They should be ready with a new playbook.

Share

Subscribe now

As Democrats begin to take stock of how they spent two years attacking Donald Trump as a threat to democracy only to see him emerge stronger than ever with unified control of Congress, the usual progressive versus moderate battles have begun.

The problem with these fights is that neither side truly has an answer about how to win back working-class voters.

Why? Because many working-class voters (and others) do not fall into the traditional progressive-moderate ideological templates. They are cross-pressured voters, desiring a mix of economic populism and nationalism along with socially conservative values that neither faction in the current Democratic Party fully represents.

On one side of the party divide, progressives want to ramp up the economic populism without confronting and purging their extreme cultural leftism and unworkable climate plans. For an example of this strategic drift, look no further than Bernie Sanders who ran a sharply focused class-based campaign in 2016 against the Democratic establishment and Trump only to turn around in 2020 to run on an intersectional cornucopia of “economic, racial, social, and environmental justice for all.” Likewise, the progressive movement went from pragmatic Obama-era policies on clean energy jobs and infrastructure to a wild-eyed Green New Deal proposal and increasingly over-the-top activism with apocalyptic rhetoric and themes like “climate reparations.” Same on civil rights and civil liberties. Progressive institutions moved from mainstream liberal positions guaranteeing equal rights and free speech for everyone regardless of race, sex, ethnicity, or religion to “structural racism and equity” models that actively pushed discrimination in the name of social justice. Open borders, drug decriminalization, de-policing—the list of bad ideas from the progressive movement that working-class voters dislike goes on and on.

To now say “turn up the populism” without first acknowledging and jettisoning these out-of-the mainstream views doesn’t fly and won’t bring back the black, Hispanic, and white working-class voters who have fled the Democrats in droves. Unfortunately, many solid left-liberal economic ideas never get a hearing with working-class voters because they too often come from cultural elites with strange beliefs.

On the other side of the party divide, moderate groups prudently want “common-sense” solutions and approaches grounded in reasonable rhetoric, pragmatic policies, and pluralistic values. All good electorally—and far better than progressive extremism. However, longstanding moderate groups should admit to themselves that they also acquiesced too much to the fashionable cultural leftism and climate priorities that took over the party brand in the past decade, along with pro-immigration policies that were unpopular with voters and a bevy of tax, trade, and spending priorities that mostly benefit well-off professionals and richer blue states and municipalities.

The moderate approach provides a stronger national brand for Democrats than its alternative on the left, but still works best in fairly affluent suburban and metropolitan areas rather than in working-class precincts. Something more will be needed to reach these voters.

Although the moderate faction still holds the upper hand in terms of winning in competitive districts and states—and includes a number of politically astute members attuned to their local communities—the moderate institutional infrastructure has not fully adjusted to the departure of the working class from the party by developing attractive economic and social policies clearly aimed at these voters.

What is the moderate agenda for the working class? No one really knows since we haven’t seen one work in recent years. For example, moderate Joe Biden’s mix of big government spending plus government-wide “equity” measures turned into inflation and misplaced priorities that cost Democrats tons of voters and eclipsed his smarter moves to shore up key industries and support good working-class jobs. Moderates do not want a repeat of what happened to the Biden administration politically by mixing unpopular progressive social and immigration policies with an economic agenda that fails to convince working-class voters that Democratic majorities help them.

The Democratic Party is an unruly conglomeration of interest groups. No one faction has ever dominated the party for very long without pushback and adjustment from the other ideological faction.

The more difficult question for the party now is whether it can recognize that both of its main ideological models are insufficient for regaining the trust of working-class voters and rebuilding the historic party of the common man and woman.

One idea worth considering is to start up an American version of the “Blue Labour” movement that laid the groundwork for UK Labour’s electoral landslide in 2024 and its return to power after 14 years in opposition. Blue Labour founder and leader Maurice Glasman lamented the drift of his party away from working-class communities, and crafted an interesting mix of approaches out of Catholic social teaching and traditional labor activism that was place-based, pro-family, communitarian, patriotic, and socially conservative—like much of the working class itself.

Blue Labour was decidedly a British effort and a Labour Party-oriented intellectual and policy movement. But it had the right thematic approach and overall ideas that Democrats should consider as a model for better representing cross-pressured working-class voters who do not fit into either of their current progressive or moderate camps.

A Democratic Party version of the “Blue Labour” approach in America would likely include the following elements:

• Economic development in all regions—plus family security for all

• The dismantling of concentrated economic power

• Strong local communities and labor markets

• Secure borders

• Law and order

• Traditional values

• Love of country

As Democrats pick themselves up off the ground from their latest electoral drubbing, they would be wise to at least try some new institutional approaches to help flesh out an agenda and organizing model that better represents a huge bloc of working-class voters who feel the party does not reflect their lives, their priorities, and their values.

Otherwise, like the Labour Party’s long sojourn in the political wilderness, Democrats should prepare themselves for possibly 12 years of Trump-Vance rule and a full realignment of multiracial working-class voters into the Republican Party.

Share

Subscribe now

It will be months before we can get a more definitive look at what happened in 2024 in terms of demographic trends, but one thing is clear: Kamala Harris performed poorly among working-class voters.

Looking at the best preliminary data, AP Votecast indicates that the Democrats’ share of the overall working class (non-college) vote shrunk from 47 percent in 2020 to 43 percent in this election. These losses were concentrated primarily among non-white working-class men, whose support for Harris this year was down 11 percentage points compared to Biden in 2020 (69 percent for Biden; 58 percent for Harris). Exit polls tell a similar story, especially of a dramatic shift toward Trump among Latino men. Similarly, initial county-level analyses indicate that Harris’s support was down substantially in counties with a high density of working-class voters.

Ahead of the November election, those of us at the Center for the Working-Class Politics (CWCP) along with analysts like Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis at The Liberal Patriot, argued that the blue-collar vote was the key to the election—and sounded the alarm that Harris was losing it. We all warned that Harris’s prevailing message, haranguing voters about Trump as a threat to democracy, was a failing one. We feared that the Democratic Party, dominated as it is by out-of-touch media personalities and liberal activists, rightly or wrongly, was increasingly defined by causes, candidates, and rhetoric that alienated working-class voters. We counseled, instead, that the Harris campaign should focus its entire national campaign on a credible economic message and a palpable populism. We all worried that failing to speak to the anger and frustration of workers—in small-towns, rural areas, and deindustrialized cities alike—would lead to Democratic disaster.

Unfortunately, these warnings came true on Election Day. The Democratic Party lost the working class, and with it any chance of forging a durable majority coalition for the foreseeable future. What’s worse, thanks to Harris’s negative coattails, candidates who best appeal to working-class voters—from Ohio’s Sherrod Brown to Pennsylvania Congressman Matt Cartwright (PA-8)—were dragged down by the top of the ticket. The few Democrats who have had success in Trump leaning areas are now even fewer.

Led by Kamala Harris, who dominated the college-educated vote by 14 points, the Democratic Party is now even more alienated from the voters it needs to build governing majorities. There should be a sense of outrage on the left and center-left. A Republican Party now stuffed with tech and finance billionaires, led by Donald Trump, whose slumlord father was literally the subject of a Woody Guthrie ballad, is soundly winning the working-class.

Yet, we fear that few lessons will be learned, as they were largely not learned after Trump’s victory in 2016. Nonetheless, based on our work at CWCP, here are a few lessons that should be learned.

Find and run working-class candidates. If the Democratic Party wants to get serious about winning back workers, it ought to enlist the labor movement to help recruit talented, blue-collar candidates, something like what the New Jersey’s AFL-CIO candidate training program has been doing successfully for decades. There is clear evidence that candidates from a working-class background are viewed more favorably by working-class voters across racial and ethnic lines. Because such candidates come from the same communities and workplaces as the voters they aim to represent, they are best positioned to speak credibly to their interests and aspirations. Yet, as work by the CWCP has shown, only a tiny fraction of congressional candidates have a working-class background.

A potent example of the power of working-class candidates is Dan Osborn, an industrial mechanic turned steamfitter who ran an unlikely independent campaign against a mega-rich mainline Republican in deep-red Nebraska. Though he was ultimately unable to overcome the headwinds that so strongly favored conservatives across the country, Osborn outperformed Harris by a larger margin than any Democratic Senate candidate competing in a competitive state with the exception of three-term incumbent Jon Tester of Montana—whose own bona fides as a life-time farmer certainly gave him a similar leg up (although not enough this time around). Running as an independent, and not as a Democrat, surely helped Osborn, providing him real distance from the party’s worst baggage. But it’s not wrong to see his surprising strength as stemming from his working-class biography as a strike leader, a Navy man, and a real heir to the prairie populism of old. Candidates like this are not a silver bullet, but because of their personal closeness to the workers they seek to represent, they have a much easier time persuading their neighbors than would a typical “Brahmin left” liberal.

Remember—populism works. The House candidates who outperformed Harris the most in competitive districts—such as Gabe Vasquez (NM-2), Marcy Kaptur (OH-9), Matt Cartwright (PA-8), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-3)—employed some of the strongest economic populist language in the field, calling out economic elites and putting the working class in the center of their appeals. Vasquez, for instance, outperformed Harris by an average of 5 percentage points across the counties of New Mexico’s 2nd district. Here is a typical message from his campaign:

New Mexico’s workers and small businesses are the backbone of our economy...For too long the nation’s largest corporations haven’t paid their fair share, while CEOs and wealthy investors inflate their salaries and dividends. They do this while refusing to increase pay or benefits for workers. We can’t afford to allow this to continue.

These candidates’ success is consistent with our analysis of campaign messaging among all 2022 Democratic candidates, which found that candidates who employed a high level of economic populist messaging performed substantially better than other candidates, particularly in districts with a high density of working-class voters. The Democratic Party is at its strongest when its candidates champion the common man against big business and the billionaire class. And they have a real opportunity to credibly attack the GOP as the party for the rich (even if the GOP is currently trending as a party of the people). The Republicans are increasingly funded by billionaires like Tim Mellon, Richard Uihlein, Miriam Adelson, and Elon Musk who topped the list of spending this cycle. In fact, they won the lion's share of billionaire campaign cash this cycle (72 percent of campaign donations from billionaire families went to Republicans). Beyond funding, the GOP is increasingly governed by a roster of megarich office-holders, like hedge-fund manager Dave McCormick (net worth $165M), coal-baron Jim Justice (net worth $450M), auto-dealer magnate Bernie Moreno (net worth $100M)—and of course, Donald Trump himself. Democrats need to make clear that a government led by conservatives is a government of, by, and for the rich.

Of course, the fact that Democrats raised even more money than Trump this election cycle—fueled by high-dollar contributions from Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley—presents a huge obstacle for the party to present itself as a populist counterbalance.                          

Progressive economic policies are not the enemy. Republicans and establishment Democrats will surely argue that Harris lost because she was too far left on economic policy. (Harris’s positions on cultural issues are another story and were certainly a liability with working-class voters.) After all, didn’t Biden’s large-scale spending packages lead to the inflationary spiral that caused Harris’s defeat? Americans, they will say, just want low taxes and free markets.

But this theory is not borne out empirically, as surveys consistently find that many progressive economic policies are popular, especially those built around the promise of high-wage jobs and high-quality public services offered to all.

For instance, across 12 surveys we identified (including three conducted by the CWCP) that asked American voters their opinion of a federal jobs guarantee, we found an average of 59 percent support for a jobs guarantee, including, according to a recent CWCP survey, among Pennsylvania voters in October of 2024. The same pre-election Pennsylvania poll similarly found that 58 percent of respondents were in favor of a policy that would “Expand Medicare to cover all US citizens.” This is consistent with our analyses of data from the Cooperation Election Study (CES) which shows that majorities of Americans have consistently supported expanding access to Medicare since 2009, particularly working-class Americans, of whom between 70 and 80 percent of Americans supported Medicare expansion in 2022.

These findings are far from outliers. A recent YouGov survey found that 65 percent of Americans support establishing a law to strengthen workers’ right to bargain collectively, 56 percent support a substantial hike in corporate tax rates, and 66 percent support an increase in the federal minimum wage to 15 dollars an hour. This latter figure is consistent with the massive Nationscape survey of the 2020 electorate, which consistently found that over 60 percent of the electorate supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, as well as our analysis of CES data which found overwhelming public support for raising the minimum wage, especially among working-class Americans.

We are not arguing that Harris would have won simply by embracing these specific progressive economic ideas. But nor was her economic program a distinct liability. Americans remain rightly skeptical of government programs that involve a lot of spending and yield few observable benefits for their families and communities. Moreover, Democrats have to learn that good economic programs mean very little without a good marketing program tied to them (it's why FDR made sure “Social Security” was written on every paycheck and why Trump made sure his own signature was on the COVID-19 relief checks). Still transformative economic and universal social policies—from Social Security and Medicare to unemployment insurance—that address American workers’ sense of being left behind economically and socially are a fundamental component of a long-term policy solution to Trumpism and class dealignment.

Republican economic proposals, despite some populist rebranding, are fundamentally anti-tax and anti-labor. While the GOP does have plans to juice GDP, like Trump’s massive corporate tax cut and deregulation proposals, the party’s opposition to pre- and redistribution combined with their continuing opposition to strong labor laws, will mean that new economic gains will mostly accrue at the top of the income scale. Workers will see crumbs. Progressives need to say this repeatedly while proposing compelling policies to bring back high-wage blue-collar manufacturing jobs, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, and renew our rotting public services.

The “shadow party” is a serious liability. While it’s not likely that the Democrats’ pro-union and pro-infrastructure policies cost them votes, it is likely that a focus on unpopular progressive appeals hurt them. The problem is that Harris, like most Democrats, didn’t really focus any of her own campaign appeals on the kind of “woke” rhetoric that many voters attach to the Democrats. In fact, we found that in the 2022 midterms very few Democrats talked about divisive cultural issues at all. So, what gives? The Democratic Party ecosystem is filled with media figures, foundation directors, NGO administrators, and an array of high-profile actors, activists, and advocates. And this group, the Democratic “shadow party,” has enormous power over the Democratic Party’s image. Consider that while Harris herself was reluctant to make the election about her race or gender, those in the shadow party immediately organized high-profile cringeworthy events like “White Women for Kamala,” “White Dudes for Harris,” and “Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders for Harris” that insisted on putting identity issues front-and-center.

And what about those Republican attack ads that claimed Harris wanted to give inmates free sex-change surgery? What sounded like a Fox News fever dream was based on a real quote that Harris gave in response to a 2019 questionnaire from the ultra-liberal American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Or consider the decision by some Harris backers, like Progress Action Fund, to spend millions on pro-pornography ads, seemingly unaware that young men’s dependence on OnlyFans is a sign of a much larger loneliness crisis for which Democrats promised to do nothing at all.

Yes, it's not fair that the right wing has a well-built propaganda machine that can exploit these cultural flashpoints and tie them to the party, but the problem is inside the house as well. Ultra-progressive organizations have a distinct interest in forcing Democratic politicians to take incredibly unpopular maximalist stances to demonstrate to their donors and members that they have real influence. These organizations, of course, have no accountability to the electorate yet they make it increasingly difficult for Democrats to communicate their relatively popular economic policies.

Denying social problems doesn’t make them go away. Over the nearly ten years since Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut, he has consistently highlighted very real problems in American society. From crime and street violence to drugs and homelessness to diminished wages and the crisis at the border, quality of life issues have gotten worse for people across the country. Between 2020 and 2024, many American cities experienced a major spike in violent crime, drug overdoses reached staggering heights, and price hikes ate into modest wage gains. The victims of these social crises are, of course, overwhelmingly working class. And yet many leading progressives denied or downplayed the pain of inflation, the crime wave, the ongoing mass layoffs and offshoring, disorder at the border, and the addiction crisis in their own backyards. That persistent denial of reality may help explain why Trump’s biggest gains in 2024 were concentrated in large metropolitan urban counties.

In our last poll before the election we found that those voters who indicated that they were either recently “unfairly fired” or those who reported job insecurity heavily favored Trump. Post-election data confirmed this exact pattern. As the economist Jed Kolko observed, counties with a “higher unemployment level in the year leading up to September 2024” were “associated with a bigger swing in the county vote toward Trump in 2024 versus 2020.” Trump may be a liar, misdirect, scapegoat, and dog whistle. But he doesn’t tell workers that their anxieties about contemporary American social problems are unfounded.

Adopt a class theory of politics. Already figures in the Democratic orbit are claiming that Harris lost as a result of sexism or racism. David Axelrod, top advisor to former president Barack Obama, was unequivocal in his post-election analysis: “Let’s be honest about this. Let’s be absolutely blunt about it: There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country, and there is sexism in this country.” Prejudice no doubt persists as an ongoing challenge, but its existence just doesn’t hold up as an explanation of last Tuesday’s results. According to AP Votecast, Harris’s support among black voters was 8 points lower than Biden’s (a drop from 91 percent to 83 percent), and she performed remarkably poorly among Latino voters. Indeed, early indications suggest that Trump may have actually improved his vote share among Pennsylvania’s Puerto Ricans. That’s after weeks of media elites and progressives trying to hang Tony Hinchcliffe’s “island of garbage” joke around Trump’s neck like an albatross. And while Kamala won women overall, Trump actually carried working-class women.

These demographic breaks just do not comport with the official progressive narratives about race and sex. They indicate that an entirely different social cleavage has rent the nation. It’s the class divide. Democrats have become the party of high-earning, big city professionals and they just cannot speak to, speak like, or even understand, working-class concerns. To change that they must first recognize it. And to do so they need to retire the theory of politics that says that the party must run people of this or that ethnicity, or must run a woman, or must run a gay man, etc. A class theory of politics would scrap the petty tribalism that dominates so much of liberal analysis and instead focus heavily on the real social divides in American life. It would see that the reason Harris underperformed in nearly every single county relative to Biden cannot be the mysterious work of white supremacy or patriarchy but instead must be, at root, economic.

Keep in mind Democrats still need unions. One of the fateful decisions made by the Clinton-era New Democrats was to pull the party away from the labor movement. Clinton’s disastrous decision to sign NAFTA combined with party insiders' belief that dynamic emerging constituencies would be able to replace blue-collar voters in the Democratic coalition, while a new donor class could displace the unions’ institutional support for Democrats. These decisions, combined with broader economic shifts, helped weaken the influence of labor in American political life. Working-class associational life has shrunk overall but it has also changed, labor unions in small towns have been replaced by NRA gun clubs for example, marking a distinct political drift rightward. The Teamsters' much publicized decision to sit out the election likely helped contribute to Harris’s defeat, but it was itself the result of the clear distance union workers, and even labor officials, now feel from the Democratic Party despite their obvious shared economic interests.

Working-class associational life was vital to the Democrats’ ability to congeal the New Deal coalition. And if any hope of rebuilding that coalition, or one like it, is to emerge it will likely come through the revitalization of the labor movement and the support of that movement by the party.

Harris’s voters should be outraged, not because Donald Trump won so resoundingly but because the Democrats lost. And further, because she herself dragged down many of the candidates that could have helped to fortify the party for the future.

Democrats need a reckoning, and a lot of soul-searching, if they are going to ever reclaim their mantle as the party of the working class.

Dustin "Dino" Guastella is Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 and a research associate with the Center for Working-Class Politics. Jared Abbott is the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics.

Share

Subscribe now