Donald Trump has engineered one of the most dramatic comebacks in American political history. Trump will become the first sitting president since Grover Cleveland in 1892 to win re-election to a second term after having been defeated on his first try. After leading the GOP to three stinging electoral defeats over the past six years, Trump’s sweeping victory last week rivals Richard Nixon’s feat of winning the White House in 1968 after his political career also seemed to be over due to his defeat by John F. Kenndy in the 1960 presidential election, followed by another defeat two years later when Nixon lost the race for governor of California.
The shift of many working-class voters away from the Democrats and Harris helped Trump produce the Republicans’ first popular vote victory in a presidential election since George W. Bush did it in 2004. Trump improved on his 2020 election performance in 49 out of the 50 states, while according to a New York Times poll, his vote count increased over his 2020 totals in at least 2,367 counties across the country and decreased in only 240 of them.
Not only will Trump win the vote in the Electoral College against Harris by the impressive margin of 312-226, but many of his fellow down-ballot Republicans also rode to victory on his coattails. As president, Trump will control a 53-47 Republican majority in the U.S. Senate thanks to GOP pickups in West Virginia, Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. It also appears that the current small GOP majority in the House will also survive the election, making it much easier for Trump to implement his legislative agenda and to get his judicial, cabinet, and administrative appointments confirmed once he takes over the White House again in January.
Also, even though they are still counting votes in California, it appears that Trump is likely to become the first Republican since 2004 to get 40% of the votes there statewide. In response to the crime wave and a sharp rise in homelessness, California voters have also overwhelmingly passed Proposition 36 which toughens penalties for shoplifting and fentanyl crimes. Angry local voters also ousted progressive San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón.
TRUMP VICTORY HAS OVERCOME ADVERSITY
Trump’s victory is even more impressive because of all of the abuse and injustices he has suffered leading up to his vindication by the voters at the ballot box. What other political candidacy could survive two impeachments, a congressional committee investigation stacked against him, two special prosecutors, dozens of state and federal felony indictments, and harsh public criticism from members of the old guard of his own party, as well as his former vice president and White House chief of staff?
Just as it did in 2016, Donald Trump’s triumphant return to the White House is fueling a raging debate between the party’s progressive and moderate wings about where to go from here.
In 2016, many Democrats — and some “Never-Trump” Republicans tried to minimize the importance of Trump’s victory by characterizing it as a one-time political fluke. But this year’s election victory by much wider margins, including strong gains across many different voter groups and his victory by a multimillion vote margin in the nationwide popular vote over Harris amount to a clear mandate whose long-term significance is impossible to deny.
As former Democratic National Committee chairman Donna Brazile admitted, “With Hillary’s defeat [in 2016], we said, the majority of us voted against that, and we felt like we could [legitimately] resist” Trump’s presidency. But this year, “[when] the American people rejected normalcy, decency, morality and chose Trump [by such a clear margin],” Brazile said that there is no choice for Democrats other than to accept it.
TRUMP’S TRANSFORMED REPUBLICAN PARTY
Donald Trump has succeeded in transforming the very nature of the Republican Party, turning it into a populist movement with a devoted working-class constituency. His America-first message and angry rhetoric appeal strongly to tens of millions of both white and minority blue-collar voters who feel abandoned and alienated by the college-educated liberal elites who now control the Democrat Party.
From the outcome of this election, it is obvious to Democrats from both wings of the party that they no longer know how to appeal for support effectively to the working-class voters who had long defined the core of the party’s identity. But they are deeply divided over who is to blame and what should be done about it.
Those Democrats who have tried to defend the record of the Biden administration’s economic policy to blue-collar union workers cite its huge investments in developing green energy and microchip manufacturing and its support of increased tax relief for families with young children. Biden demonstrated his support for labor by walking a picket line with striking auto workers and generated savings for the middle class and seniors on Medicare through measures requiring pharmaceutical companies to lower prescription drug costs.
But these measures failed to connect with working-class Americans because the administration failed to address their more immediate concerns about the impact of government spending-induced inflation which has driven up their everyday cost of living by more than 20% since Biden and Harris took office.
DEMOCRATS NEED A NEW ECONOMIC “BRAND”
“Democrats have a fundamental problem on their economic brand, and I don’t think it can be dealt with by just offering a couple of popular proposals or even the best message or ad test,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “I think we have to step back and develop an economic narrative that communicates that we’re in touch with people’s lives and that offers real help for working-class people.”
Lake said about 60% of voters say that they don’t believe Democrats have any real economic plan. Those who do recognize that such a plan does exist believe that it is mostly designed to benefit those who are already economically better off, such as the college graduates whose student loans Biden has been trying to forgive. On the other hand, Lake said, Americans can see with much more clarity Trump’s brand of conservative populism calling for tax breaks, “America first” trade policies like higher tariffs, and less federal regulation on businesses which eventually generates more jobs for everyone.
“Trump beat us with populist economics,” Lake said, adding that Democrats’ struggles with keeping the support of the working class have been developing for years. “It’s not just one loss. This has been building, and I think this [election defeat] is a call to action to get an economic brand that includes working people.”
Democrat Congressman Henry Cuellar, who won a hard-fought re-election campaign in his Texas congressional district along the Mexican border that Trump carried, said that the Biden-Harris open border policies were a major liability for all of his fellow Democrat House members. There has long been an “undercurrent of tension” among Latinos in his district, Cuellar said, who are frustrated by the support the federal government has given to undocumented immigrants, in the form of food, shelter, and health care.
PEOPLE IN TEXAS ARE FED UP WITH THE OPEN BORDER
This year, “the dam busted here where all of a sudden people said enough is enough” and voted for Trump, Cuellar said and added that the problem is not new. “Some of us have been talking about border security for a long time.”
But instead of addressing voter concerns about the cost of living and the open border, Harris spent much of her campaign repeating President Biden’s warning voters about the dangers of a second Trump presidency, based upon the exaggerated Democrat narrative about the Jan. 6, 2021 riot by Trump supporters at the Capitol. She called Trump increasingly “unstable and unhinged” and out for revenge and power, and a threat to American democracy.
Harris’ campaign rhetoric resonated mostly with college-educated voters and “never Trump” Republicans who had already decided to vote for her, as had those who wanted to see the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision reinstated. But for most voters in last week’s election, those issues took a backseat to the high costs of their groceries, rent, and gasoline.
Trump had also undercut the Democrat use of the Roe v. Wade issue to generate support for Harris by announcing his opposition to any right-wing federal law that would overrule the measures that have already been passed by several states that would reinstate some of the Roe v. Wade provisions that the liberals want restored.
CAN DEMOCRATS OVERCOMe THE CULTURAL DIVIDE?
David Axelrod, former longtime adviser for President Barack Obama, also raised the problem of the growing cultural divide separating most Democrat activists and blue-collar voters. Axelrod likened the Democrats to “missionaries” in their approach to non-college-educated voters — a message of “we’re here to help you become more like us.”
“There’s a message of unspoken and unintended, I think, disdain that was felt,” Axelrod said in an interview on CNN. “If you’re talking about democracy over the kitchen table — and I care deeply about that issue — you probably don’t have to worry about the food on your table, about the cost of it.”
It’s not as if Harris was unaware of the issue. In response to the polls reporting the complaints of blue-collar voters, on the campaign trail, Harris offered proposals to make housing more affordable for first-time buyers, to make more capital available for Americans starting small businesses, and to extend the existing child tax credits.
But while she claimed that reducing consumer costs was her top priority, Harris was unable to escape from the shadow of Biden and his failed economic policies, which voters blamed overwhelmingly for high inflation, as well as the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border.
BERNIE SANDERS SPEAKS THE TRUTH
In the wake of last week’s catastrophic election results for Democrats, the root problem was most vividly described by Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been called, “the last of the classic Democrats whose main center and focus was the working class.”
Sanders said, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
But Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison rejected Sanders’ critical analysis by arguing Harris and Biden had supported many of the same policies that Sanders has championed. Harrison also called Biden “the most-pro-worker president of my lifetime” who saved union pensions, and whose policies created millions of jobs.
He also said that if Harris had won the election her various economic proposals would have “fundamentally transformed the quality of life and closed the racial wealth gap for working people across this country.”
VOTERS ALIENATED BY DIVISIVE DEMOCRAT CULTURAL ISSUES
Others blamed last week’s election defeat on the Democrat party’s left wing for pushing divisive cultural issues such as its “woke” support for transgender rights and the chaos on the college campuses due to antisemitic Gaza war protests for which voters held Harris responsible because she was Biden’s vice president. An effective Trump campaign ad was a clip from a popular daytime network TV talk show called The View, in which one of the female hosts asked Harris if there was anything that the Biden administration had done over the past four years that she would have changed if she could.
Her self-incriminating answer was, “Nothing comes to mind,” belying Harris’ claims that her presidency would be different from the long record of Biden’s failures over the past four years.
Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky said the average person in Saginaw, Michigan, doesn’t think it’s fair that their daughter has to compete in athletics with someone biologically stronger than her.
DEMOCRATS NEED MORE OUTRAGE AND COMMON SENSE
Roginsky also emphasized the lack of outrage from Democrats over pro-Palestinian protests this year that effectively shut down some colleges and universities.
“Democrats are no longer perceived as the party of common sense. In our quest not to offend anyone, we come across as totally out of line with how regular people think,” Roginsky said.
Congressman Ritchie Torres, an Afro-Latino who represents the poorest district in the country in the South Bronx of New York City, described the Democrats’ problem in an interview on MSNBC. “Republicans are masterful at weaponizing the words of the far left against the Democratic Party, and the losses among voters of color, particularly Latinos, is nothing short of a catastrophe for the party,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board suggested that if Democrats want to find a scapegoat to blame for their loss to Trump last week, all they have to do is look in the mirror.
That is because the outcome of the election “was less a resounding endorsement of Mr. Trump than a repudiation of progressive governance.” Here are a few examples:
FAILED BIDEN-HARRIS POLICIES
- The failure of Bidenomics. Democrats once understood that private business drives growth and higher incomes, but now they believe instead that government spending creates wealth. That is why they passed, on a party-line vote, a $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief bill that wasn’t really needed, fueling the highest inflation in decades and leading to their defeat last week.
- Cultural imperialism. Since taking power in 2020, Democrats have been turning their identity politics into woke government policy and injecting it into gender-based school curriculums over the objections of parents.
Democrat elite liberals also began using the term “Latinx,” which they invented and which sounds to many Spanish speakers like illiterate cultural imperialism. That probably played a role in Trump winning 46% of the Hispanic vote and 55% of Latino men.
- Regulatory coercion. In pursuit of their climate change obsessions, the Biden-Harris administration approved an EPA rule that will reduce the sale of gas-powered models to only 30% of new car sales by 2032, and has already caused layoffs of large numbers of American auto workers.
- Lawfare. Democrats have deliberately stretched the law and abused the justice system to criminally indict Trump four times and bankrupt his family business with a civil suit.
The strategy backfired by turning Trump into a martyr in the eyes of GOP voters and guaranteed his victories in the Republican primaries.
- Breaking democratic norms. When the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s efforts to forgive student loans as an infringement upon the power of Congress, he tried again and dared the Court to stop him. Democrats tried to override the Senate filibuster to seize control of the nation’s voting laws from the states, and impose a national law that would reinstate the Roe v. Wade decision after it was ruled unconstitutional by the High Court.
The outcome of last week’s election was also a message by the voters to the Democrats that on all of these issues, they had gone too far.
DIVISIVE DEMOCRAT RHETORIC GOES BACK TO MRS. CLINTON
William McGurn, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the Democrats are to blame for the harsh tone of our recent presidential elections, starting with Hillary Clinton. At a 2016 Manhattan presidential campaign fundraiser Mrs. Clinton famously told an audience of liberal elites and celebrities that half of Trump’s supporters were a “basket of deplorables.”
During Joe Biden’s White House inauguration speech four years later, it sounded as though he was going to try to keep his campaign promise instead to unify the nation. But in 2022 he used a prime-time television address in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall to denounce Trump’s MAGA Republican supporters as threats to the nation who “fan the flames of political violence.” Since then, he and Harris have both repeated publicly on many occasions their accusations that Trump is a fascist. They also raised no objections when their supporters compared Trump to Hitler, which might have inspired the two recent assassination attempts against him.
Fortunately, Trump and his campaign were able to withstand this constant stream of snide and disdainful anti-Trump remarks, as well as biased and accusatory news articles, television panels, and declarations by elitist liberal political experts. Their condescension and criticism came through loud and clear, but it did first Biden and then Harris little good.
VOTERS HAVE LEARNED WHOM THEY CAN BELIEVE
That is because so many Americans have learned to ignore the false claims and accusations promoted by the anti-Trump news media and press, such as the bogus narrative about nonexistent Russian collusion, the scientists and health experts who misled us about Covid, the 51 former U.S. intelligence officials who said that Hunter Biden’s laptop had “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” the federal and state prosecutors who prevent Trump’s re-election by manufacturing bogus criminal indictments, the FBI and Justice Department officials who lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, and the attempts by government prosecutors to pressure Trump’s advisors into giving incriminating testimony against him.
Trump and his supporters mostly reacted to all of it with humor rather than anger or despair, because they never took themselves so seriously.
Many Trump voters simply laughed when elitist investor Mark Cuban said that only women who were weak or stupid could support Trump, or when Joe Biden and his campaign surrogates insisted that Bidenomics was a smashing success and that the voters who disagreed were just not smart enough to appreciate how good they had it.
MEETING VITRIOL WITH LAUGHTER
This also began with Mrs. Clinton’s “deplorables” label which Trump’s supporters took on as a badge of honor. It emerged again at the end of this year’s campaign from Trump himself after President Biden called Trump’s supporters “garbage,” in an effort to capitalize on a joke told in bad taste by a comedian at Trump’s highly successful Madison Square Garden campaign rally. Republicans light-heartedly started to dress themselves up in garbage bags, and Trump himself responded by holding a press conference in a garbage truck and addressing a rally in Wisconsin wearing a garbage man’s reflective vest.
Unlike his liberal elite Democrat critics, Trump doesn’t look down on his working-class supporters and seems to genuinely enjoy their company. That is why he can work at a McDonald’s drive-thru window or ride in a garbage truck and look comfortable while doing so. It is also why his supporters believe him when he tells them, “They’re not really after me. They’re after you. I’m just in the way.”
Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who makes no secret of her dislike for Trump, wrote in her Wall Street Journal column that she thinks that in voting for Trump last week, tens of millions of Americans were choosing the conservative path that Trump has laid out for this country, rather than for the man himself, of whom they disapprove on a personal level.
They are supporting Trump’s “path” because it provides an uplifting message about America that was lost, but which they yearn to hear again, “They want the old sense that their kids are being launched into a society and culture that’s healthy and vital. Exuberance, expansion, Musk to Mars, drill, baby, drill — we’re going to be exciting again!”
Furthermore, by giving Trump and the Republicans control of the new House and Senate, too, voters have given them the tools they need to turn that conservative “path” into legislation and actual government policies.
DEMOCRATS NOW HAVE AN IDENTITY PROBLEM
On the other hand, Noonan suggests that in light of their rejection by the voters Democrats need to redefine what their party stands for. “When I was a kid, they were the party of the working man, the little guy. That’s the Trumpian GOP now. When I was a young woman, they were the antiwar party. That’s the Trumpian GOP. . .
“The party has lost its specific character and nature; it’s no longer a thing you can name.”
Veteran Democrat political demographer Ruy Teixeira was the co-author with John Judis in 2002 of a book entitled, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which predicted that racial population trends would give Democrats permanent control over the federal government.
In a post-election interview published by the Wall Street Journal, Teixeira said that he no longer believes that will take place because his conclusion was predicated on the Democrats maintaining the “progressive centrism” ideology that was dominant roughly from the start of Bill Clinton’s first term to the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term. After that, Black Lives Matter and other left-wing nonprofits, advocacy groups, academics, and elements of the mainstream media began to dictate a much more extreme ideological orientation for Democrat Party policies.
DEMOCRATS HAVE LOST TOUCH WITH THEIR GREATEST SOURCE OF STRENGTH
The party has veered sharply away from its “greatest strength, which is uplifting the working and middle classes. The Democrats are no longer the party of the people. They’ve lost touch with the working class,” and their policies are now determined by elite members of “the professional class.”
Teixeira also agrees with GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini that the Republican-leaning “populist, multiracial, working-class coalition” that enabled Trump to win last week’s election is “a real thing, and it’s here to stay.” That is a major problem for Democrats because many of the ordinary working-class voters who make up that new coalition don’t even understand the “weird” language that Democrats are using to describe their “boutique liberal ideas around race and gender,” while at the same time, Democrats were ignoring the main concerns being voiced by those voters over rising crime and illegal immigration.
Instead, the Democrats convinced themselves that they could still win national elections by appealing to most members of the voting public by running on their “enlightened” views about race, gender, Roe v. Wade, and climate change. However, Teixeira says, the extent of Trump’s sweeping victory last week proves that they were wrong.
In accordance with their “woke” ideology, liberal Democrats had already come to regard the white working-class voters who supported Trump in 2016 as “reactionary and racist,” Teixeira said. But what killed Democrat hopes for a victory in this year’s election was “losing non-white working-class voters [who used to make up the bulwark of their voter base] hand over fist.”
MORE VOTERS ARE MOVING TO THE RIGHT
Teixeira said that “it was clearly in the cards that [the Democrats] could lose.” What took him by surprise was the “thumping rebuke” of their loss and the “uniformity of the rightward movement [of voters] across geographies and demographic groups.”
What was particularly significant, Teixeira added, were the advances Trump made in attracting Hispanic voters of the Texas counties along the Mexican border, and in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, which hadn’t voted for a Republican since 1988. Trump’s enhanced appeal to black voters, and especially black men, helped him to reduce the size of his losses in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee and enabled him to win in the three key “blue wall” states that sealed Trump’s victory.
Teixeira also said that Democrats overestimated the strength of the Roe v. Wade issue in the election because they had so much success in using it to win the 2022 midterm elections and in special elections where the voter turnout is much lower than in presidential elections.
DEMOCRATS CAN NO LONGER COMPETE IN HIGH-TURNOUT ELECTIONS
According to Teixeira, that highlights another problem for today’s Democrats, the fact that they can only win in low-turnout elections because they are relying so heavily upon a smaller number of highly motivated, college-educated voters. As a result, “the lower the turnout is, the better off [the Democrats] are.”
Teixeira also notes that working-class voters are “not on board with the Democrats’ climate catastrophism. They are not anti-fossil-fuels the way that most Democrats seem to be these days.” That is because of the climate change narrative, which is “a matter of almost religious faith among dominant elements of the Democratic Party,” but which makes most working-class voters angry because “they see that the whole clean-energy-transition obsession has not been good for capitalism writ large.”
He adds that what the outcome of last week’s election should make clear to Democrats is that they can’t challenge the Republicans successfully “without moving to the center on cultural issues.” Democrats have to be “for law and order. We have to be tough on the border.”
Until that happens, Teixeira predicts that the Democrats as a party will remain uncompetitive among white working-class voters and voters in exurban, small-town, and rural America. This will “put them at a massive structural disadvantage given an American electoral system that gives disproportionate weight to these voters, especially in higher turnout Senate and presidential elections. To add further to the problem, last week’s election has shown that Democrats are also now hemorrhaging nonwhite working-class voters across the country.
“The facts must be faced,” Teixeira insists. “The Democratic coalition today. . . cannot beat Republicans consistently in enough areas of the country to achieve dominance and implement its agenda at [a nationwide] scale. The Democratic Party may be the party of deep blue metro America, but its bid to be the party of the ordinary American, the common man and woman, is falling short.”
In addition, Teixeira says, Democrats need to “give up on this [liberal] equity baloney and start talking about equal opportunity, and fairness, which is what people really believe in.
“Go back to Martin Luther King. He had the right idea. You ought to judge people by their character, not the color of their skin.”
Teixeira also cited as a model “[Bill] Clinton was used to talking to people who didn’t agree with him. I think Democrats need to discover that again. They need to ask themselves, ‘How do we talk to people who don’t agree with us?’”
HOW THE DEMOCRAT COALITION WAS SHATTERED
Finally, Teixeira explained how the components of the Democrat coalition were shattered into pieces in last week’s election. “Trump not only won, he won fairly easily, carrying all seven swing states and, much to Democrats’ shock, the national popular vote. “
The gender gap: Contrary to many pre-election predictions, Harris’s lead among women voters was actually smaller than Biden’s in 2020, 7 points for Harris vs. 12 points for Biden. At the same time, Trump’s lead was better among men last week, at 10 points vs. 5 points in 2020. Add them all up and you will find that the overall gender gap remained the same at 17 points in 2020 and in 2024, which was a major disappointment for Democrats who had expected a sharp spike in their margin among women which never materialized.
Democrats were also expecting a surge of support among women voters under the age of 30, but in fact, Trump and the Republicans got a 29-point boost from young men of that age, while Harris’ support from young women fell by 14 points compared to what Biden received from then in the 2020 election.
The youth vote: Democrats also suffered a major loss of support from all voters under the age of 30. Their margin of victory fell from a 25-point advantage for Biden in 2020 to a mere 6 points for Harris in last week’s election.
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR REPUBLICANS TO LOCK IN THEIR ADVANTAGE
The only good news for Democrats from these election results is that it is too soon for Republicans to claim to have secured a permanent majority among these groups of voters. It is also not clear whether Trump won last week’s election based on his own merits in the eyes of most voters or voter anger at Harris because of her close association with the failed policies of the Biden administration.
But for the time being, Trump and the Republicans hold a clear political advantage over the Democrats. They now have an opportunity to lock in that advantage for future elections by responding promptly to the needs and expectations of the working-class voters who have newly joined his MAGA political movement, while the shell-shocked Democrats remain in post-election disarray.
