The Democratic Coalition Has Shattered. Here’s How to Rebuild It.

This article is reprinted from the Substack newsletter “The Liberal Patriot.”

The Republican Party, according to Democrats, has given rein to some of the darker impulses in the national psyche, has shown flagrant disregard for democratic norms, and offers little to the American people in terms of effective policy. I think there is considerable truth to this indictment, and Democrats have not been shy about making their case in uninhibited language, including the obligatory comparison of their opponents to “fascists” and “Nazis.”

But stern warnings about the dangers of your opponent are meaningless. What matters is that Democrats cannot decisively beat their opponents, as this election has shown once again. The party is uncompetitive among white working-class voters and among voters in exurban, small-town, and rural America. This puts them at a massive structural disadvantage given an American electoral system that gives disproportionate weight to these voters, especially in the Senate and presidential elections. To make matters worse, Democrats are now hemorrhaging non-white working-class voters across the country.

The facts must be faced. The Democratic coalition today is not fit for purpose. It cannot beat Republicans consistently in enough areas of the country to achieve dominance and implement its agenda. The Democratic Party may be the party of blue America, especially deep blue metro America, but its bid to be the party of the ordinary American, the common man and woman, is falling short.

There is a simple—and painful—reason for this. The Democrats really are no longer the party of the common man and woman. The priorities and values that dominate the party today are those of educated, liberal America. They only partially overlap with those of ordinary Americans. 

This election has made this problem manifest in the starkest possible terms, as the Democratic coalition shattered into pieces. Trump not only won, he won fairly easily, carrying all seven swing states and, much to Democrats’ shock, the national popular vote. If the Democrats are to learn from this election, they must start with understanding the demographic trends driving this shift. 

Before the election, there was much debate, bordering on denialism, about whether and to what extent demographic trends revealed by most polling data would actually undercut the Democratic coalition in the election. Now that we have results, it is clear those trends were real—and they are bad news for Democrats. 

Here are some of the most important trends in this election, which I have identified by comparing 2024 and 2020 AP VoteCast data—which I consider to be far superior to the exit polls.