Donald Trump was triumphant in last week’s inaugural address. He said that “a tide of change is sweeping the country,” that “my recent election is a mandate,” and that “the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda.” Setting aside the typical Trump hyperbole, this much is true: In the 2024 election, nine out of 10 counties in America moved to the right, and the popular vote shifted six points against the Democrats. And based on the best data we have so far, Trump did carry one out of five Black men, one out of four pro-choice women, and nearly one out of two Latinos. Between 2020 and 2024, young people apparently shifted more than 20 points to the right.
At the same time, many Democrats comfort themselves with a different story entirely: Donald Trump won quite narrowly — and with less than a majority of the popular vote — despite the highest inflation in a generation, approval for the incumbent party’s president stuck around 40 percent for more than two years, and nearly seven in 10 Americans saying the country was on the wrong track. The three critical states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) were decided by less than two points.
Focus only on the big shifts from 2020 and you might conclude that this election is the beginning of a generational realignment. Fixate only on the dodgy economic context and the close finish and you could come away thinking the outcome was simply circumstantial.
For people trying to come to terms with that inaugural ceremony — Trump taking the oath in a Capitol overrun by his violent supporters just four years ago — it’s a quandary that harkens back to Harry Truman’s wish for a “one-handed economist.”
The truth is that both interpretations miss the mark. It is only by fusing the two stories together that a clearer picture emerges: Neither party has built a majority coalition because neither party has figured out an effective and enduring pitch to 21st century voters.
The next presidential election will help determine the politics of the 2030s. The Democrats’ once dominant New Deal coalition is nearly a century old. Issues like immigration, artificial intelligence, and gender identity have superseded debates about unions and welfare. The new salience of new issues means different groups of voters are going to be drawn to each party; the coalitions are shifting because the landscape of American politics is shifting.
So much has changed even since 2008, when Barack Obama and John McCain made Joe the Plumber a household name. The debate over Obama’s tax plan dominated the last month of that campaign. Four years later, the candidates primarily fought over whether Democrats had done enough to help people recover from the global financial crisis.
In 2016, Donald Trump profoundly shifted the national conversation, campaigning on building a wall on the southern border and implementing a religious test to enter the country. Identity issues supplanted traditional economic concerns. Policies connected to people’s characteristics rose in importance to voters, and concern about marginal tax rates and health care faded.
Democrats and anti-MAGA Republicans should not misread this moment and assume that when Trump leaves the scene, Obama’s coalition will reassemble. To borrow a phrase from Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign: We are not going back. Last year’s result is the culmination of changes that began before 2016, were exacerbated in 2016, and have accelerated in the eight years since.
Democratic support among white voters without a college degree has been declining for decades, but the 2016 race caused such a collapse that Ohio and Iowa — bellwether states for decades, carried twice by Obama — moved firmly into the Republican column. That working class bug began to spread across ethnic groups in 2020, extending to Latino communities in South Florida and South Texas, before becoming an all-out contagion this year, costing Democrats millions of votes for which upscale college educated white voters cannot compensate. (They comprise only about a third of the overall electorate; non-college voters of all races are almost 60 percent.)
To take one example: In 2016, Hillary Clinton achieved the modern Democratic record of a 29-point victory in Miami’s heavily Hispanic Dade County. Four years earlier, Obama narrowly won Florida with a 24-point margin in Dade. But in 2016, Trump drove up such an extraordinary share (a higher turnout of the vote) and margin (a higher percentage of the vote) in rural and white working-class communities that Clinton lost the state by less than a point. In 2020, Joe Biden hit and exceeded his goals in mostly college-educated suburban counties around cities like Tampa and Orlando but failed to win Florida because his margin in Dade dropped to under eight points. In 2024, support for the Democratic ticket utterly crumbled: Harris lost Dade by almost 12 points and the state by more than 13. Diverse Florida — ground zero for the Democrats’ demography-is-destiny argument a decade ago — is now more red than Ohio, where more than eight in 10 voters are white.
It’s one thing to ask how Democrats got here, but another to think about how they get out. If Trump carries through his two signature commitments — sweeping tariffs and mass deportation — economists from across the political spectrum believe that growth will slow or even reverse, and prices will start spiking again. The same forces that hit Democrats in 2024 could slap Republicans in 2026, especially since they campaigned so explicitly on lowering consumer costs. That is consistent with the cyclical nature of politics, connected inextricably to economic fundamentals, especially among swing voters and especially in close elections.
For both parties — surfing the wave of national ups-and-downs, squeezing out a narrow win then a close defeat — the tectonic plates of politics have shifted. It has happened many times before.
For nearly a century, from the end of the Reconstruction Era in 1876 until the Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964, the Democratic Party dominated the so-called “Solid South.” But in that year’s presidential election, Barry Goldwater, who opposed civil rights legislation, carried five southern states, despite Lyndon Johnson’s landslide. Mississippi and South Carolina didn’t desert the Democrats because of the economic cycle; this was a change that reflected the electorate’s underlying values, one that endures today.
Similarly, since 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt established it as the “party of the people,” Democrats have believed they were the coalition for the common man. But it has been a long time since Bill Clinton won West Virginia by more than he won California. Democrats today may believe they support the working class, but the working class no longer supports them.
The great switch this century, in which Democrats gave up communities with a Hobby Lobby but won neighborhoods near a Whole Foods, seemed to be working so long as two conditions held: First, that non-college educated minorities voted differently than working class white voters; and second, that Democrats hit a floor with non-college white voters and could maintain that low but critical level of support. In 2024, both those pillars fell.
Twelve years ago, Obama won about four in 10 white voters without a college degree; according to the exit polls, Harris was down to about a third. In 2020, also according to the exits, Biden won 70 percent of working-class voters of color; in 2024, Harris was down to 64 percent. Even with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban campaigning alongside a nominee pushing a 28 percent capital gains rate, there is a limit to how many upscale college-educated white voters a Democratic candidate can win.
Where will more votes come from? Democrats should launch an intensive examination of what were transient trends — and what issues were more fundamental — before reaching conclusions about why they lost ground. But it is not too early to reach three critical judgments.
First, dismissing voter criticisms on culture and immigration because they may upset interest groups in their coalition, or hoping that they will fade in importance, is highly risky. Harris’s positioning from her first presidential run (all of it on tape!), and the Biden-Harris administration delay in dealing with an out-of-control border until their last year in office, were serious liabilities.
Second, the emerging conventional wisdom on the left that Bernie Sanders-style populism would help win the voters Democrats need is belied by the fact that a Bernie Sanders-style candidate has yet to win a single swing state or swing district — and that many of Sanders’ views (from abolishing private health insurance to decriminalizing border crossings to raising taxes on the middle class) are unpopular among the very voters Democrats must win back. Sanders himself underperformed Harris in Vermont; Elizabeth Warren won fewer votes than Harris in Massachusetts.
Third, the information ecosystem has fundamentally changed — a 2008-style media strategy will not work in 2028. Nominating a candidate comfortable with unconventional interviewers and new formats is a necessity. Not even 6 million viewers saw Harris’s interview on 60 Minutes. Joe Rogan’s interview with Trump got more than 50 million views on YouTube alone.
Successful candidates meet voters where they are. Both the medium and the message must reflect the times. Coalitions that produce substantial victories — victories that endure beyond a single election — need to be anchored in the issues and values driving voters today. The New Deal is old, and the Obama era is over.
As winners, Republicans have the first shot at offering compelling solutions to 21st century problems. Democrats should watch and listen — watch which Trump voters start to disapprove of his performance in office (they may not be the vaunted Obama-to-Trump voters; they may be lifelong Republicans), and listen to the pain points in their lives. Are they worried about public schools failing to prepare students for a future dominated by A.I.? Are they anxious about the increased costs of mobile and digital services that everyone now needs to get by? Do they need help taking care of their families — both aging parents and young children — while working full time? Are they concerned they will never be able to own a home? These are some of the challenges of the 2030s, and a winning response will not reassemble a coalition from the 1930s. It will build a new one.
There’s something else: In politics, what you’re fighting about is often as important as what you’re fighting for. Successful politicians pick fights that unite people already inclined to vote for them and divide the other side, that highlight an issue which plays to their advantage. Too often, after parties lose an election, they waste time on purity tests and internecine fights, on looking backward rather than figuring out the future. This time, Democrats should aim to really learn from voters — asking what their problems are, not what their problem is.
Brian Goldsmith is a political journalist and media consultant who advises candidates, companies, and independent groups. He’s a principal at Kona Media LLC and contributes to groups including the Pacific Council, the Democratic Majority for Israel, and the Mainstream Dems PAC.
Lynn Vavreck is the Marvin Hoffenberg Professor of American Politics and Public Policy at UCLA, a contributing columnist to The Upshot at The New York Times, and a recipient of the Andrew F. Carnegie Prize in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
