The newly elected president of the United States, Donald Trump, raised his eyebrows decided to hold a campaign In the Bronx in late May.
New York City has been one of the most Democratic states in the country for many years. Trump managed to collect only 15% of votes there in 2020, and 9% in 2016. Democrats thought it was a stunt. During his criminal trial in Manhattan. Some suggested the crowd was made up of supporters from far beyond the neighborhood boundaries.
In the end, the rally stood out not because of anything Trump said or did, but because of who showed up. It was one of the most diverse rallies of his entire political career. As the results began to roll in on Tuesday, it was clear that Trump was up to something bigger, not just in the Bronx, but across the country. His coalition has changed.
So far the results are showing Trump won more than 27% of the vote in the Bronxsignificantly reduces the margin of defeat there. It was the best result for a Republican presidential candidate in 40 years.
Again in May, one of the Democratic officials who voiced his doubts As for who exactly came to Trump’s rally, it was Ritchie Torres, the representative of DN.Y., representing the district where the rally was held. Those doubts were cleared on Tuesday.
“I hate Donald Trump,” Torres said. “I think he is a threat to the norms of liberal democracy, but he is a brilliant politician. He has brilliant intuitions and he knew he was reaching into communities of color.”
Torres said it would be unthinkable for a Democrat to win nearly 30% of the vote in one of America’s reddest, most rural counties, and said the results necessitated a serious reckoning within the Democratic Party.
“Donald Trump’s greatest achievement is not breaking the blue wall in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin,” Torres added. “His greatest success lies in breaking the blue wall in America’s staunchly Democratic urban centers, like the last blue wall in the Bronx.”
The most dramatic and most noticeable change in the 2024 election was among Latino men. He supported President Joe Biden by 23 points In 2020 and Trump is up 12 spots this year, according to an NBC News poll. This is a trend that is evident in the pre-election survey precinct results.
But the changes in the 2024 elections were more extensive. Working-class voters are more likely to lean toward Trump. Exit polls showed that women, Asian Americans, light-skinned voters, younger voters, rural voters, independents and voters with household incomes of less than $100,000. Most demographics already favorable to Trump have increased. Most favorable to Democrats became less so.
The only place where Vice President Kamala Harris made real gains over Trump was among white, educated and affluent voters.
In short, Trump was able to shift the electorate almost wholesale to the right in ways that he was unable to do in 2016 or 2020 when different constituencies appeared to be running in opposite directions. The trends have upended long-held Democratic and Republican narratives about how Americans vote. Leads Democrats are too far behind Torres to sound the alarm about the party’s future Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement has become the most diverse GOP coalition in generations, giving Trump the most decisive victory for a GOP presidential candidate in two decades.
Describing themselves as “shell-shocked” by Tuesday’s results, Republican operatives called it “crazy, really crazy” progress on Democratic and Republican constituencies. Like others interviewed for this article, the operative will speak only anonymously to offer a candid analysis of party strategy. “It was just everybody.”
“Anti-establishment” election
Now, people on both sides of the struggle are trying to pinpoint what caused these changes, and there are several explanations.
Above all is anger over rising prices and a sense that Democrats are not doing enough to curb them, even as inflation slows. The second is anger over the rise of undocumented immigration, which the Biden administration began to tackle years into his presidency after views hardened. And Democrats felt a clear impact A non-stop ad campaign targeting Harris for comments Trump made in 2019 on prioritizing taxpayer funding for gender transition care for prison inmates.
Rep. Nancy Mace, RSC, thought of Trump gains with women — along with independents and minority voters — was especially notable given how much attention Democrats focused on abortion rights in the first presidential election since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022.
“Yes, abortion was on the ballot,” Mace said he said. “But so was the kitchen table, so was gasoline, and so was immigration.”
Moreover, Trump has clearly benefited in recent weeks from being seen as an agent of change and an anti-establishment figure. former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who represented Hawaii as a Democrat but is now a Republican; and the richest man in the world, Elon Musk.
“They don’t like traditional parties,” Mays said of those voters. “People clearly hate both sides. “What Trump brings to the table is that he seems to be … a man of the people.”
“The guy just won the popular vote, something nobody predicted this year,” he said. “And it’s this anti-establishment theme that nobody’s done in a long time.”
Trump himself commented on these changes During an interview with NBC Newssaid: “I’m beginning to see that realignment could happen because the Democrats are out of step with the thinking of the country.”
There is also the special aid that Trump is engaged in reaching minorities and young voterscampaign efforts on popular (and not overtly political) podcasts to reach young men in particular, a demographic that has leaned Democratic in recent years. An NBC News exit poll showed that Harris won voters under 30 by 11 points this fall, after Biden won by 17 points in 2020.
“Inflation hurts everyone, regardless of age, color or where they live,” Mike Berg, a senior official at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NBC News. “Trump’s strategy of switching to apolitical podcasts to reach low-propensity voters was also a stroke of genius.”
The moment came when Tim Murtaugh, Trump’s senior adviser, realized the president-elect would make a big splash among voters who weren’t expected to be in the GOP coalition. When the Teamsters refused to support the campaign, breaking with decades of precedent. It came after Biden moved towards the shore union pensions.
Murtaugh noted that the Teamsters not only refused to endorse, but polled in swing states, including Pennsylvaniait showed Trump winning over a large number of members.
“To me, that was a big and clear sign that Donald Trump is turning the party into something that prioritizes the concerns of working people,” he said. “He launched MAGA in 2015, highlighting our trade imbalances and the associated job destruction. “He feels that the government and the elite do not care about people’s situations and frustrations.”
An NBC News exit poll showed Trump won voters in households with incomes below $100,000 by 4 points, a demographic that Biden increased by 17 points in 2020. After supporting him by 8 points in 2020.
“We don’t have an easy way here”
The biggest concern for one Democratic politician was the movement among young voters. This person said the leading segments of Generation Z are feeling masculine, bucking the long-standing trend of younger voters becoming more liberal.
“These guys are like, ‘Trump is great. He’s a man, great. He is cool. Great bro. He’s cool,” the Democrat said. “Everybody’s like, ‘Wow, wow, Latinos and African-Americans love Republicans now.’ No, men wanted men. Men wanted a man.”
“We don’t have an easy way out here,” the man continued. “We have to convince people that we’re the adults in the room, we care about the economy, we care about their pocketbooks, we’re cool people, we’re not communists, we’re not sexualizing their children. , we will not ban … Zyn.
Democrats acknowledged that Harris faces a tough environment and has just over 100 days to make his case to the country. They also pointed out that his losses were less significant in battleground states where the campaign spent time and resources than in places like New York, New Jersey and Illinois, where it did not send a message to voters.
But there was also a sense among Democrats that having a candidate and campaign under close scrutiny, as in the last presidential election, might not be as helpful as longtime party hands believed.
“People … are longing for somebody to tell them the damn truth,” said one Pennsylvania Democrat. “Regardless of whether we know that Trump is not telling the truth, people believe that he is telling the truth. And what happened [Tuesday] it was a Louisville Slugger baseball bat that went over the head of the Democratic Party for not telling people the truth. And the truth is, some of their lives are bad. Admit it. No one has a perfect solution to fix this, but admit it.”
The man issued a scathing warning to Democrats about voters drifting away from the party this cycle, especially young voters.
“One lap, okay. Two cycles, if they vote that way, you start to stand out, and if a person votes for a party three times in a row, you’re never going to get them back,” he said. “And so you better go and listen to these people tomorrow or you’re going to lose them and it’s going to be a generation.”
State and national surveys anticipated these changes: In the pre-election bookletthe progressive Working Families Party found that many moderate, working-class voters on the border between the two parties fit into a demographic they called “anti-awakening traditionalists”—who largely agreed with Democrats on economic policy and Republicans on social issues. norms.
A progressive strategist said that while Harris has good messages about fighting inflation and making housing more affordable, the vice president has not made it clear that voters are right to be concerned about their economic situation.
“They had good solutions that I thought would be a good fit,” this person said. “You can’t tell people that something they feel is wrong. I think that’s where they get mixed up.”
Torres, who returned to the mostly Black and Latino Bronx, said many Americans feel the country is headed in the wrong direction, worried about rising prices and frustrated by an “unprecedented wave of migration,” especially in places like New York. strained local governments.
“We hoped that Donald Trump was so radioactive that we could overcome this challenge, but we were wrong,” he said.
He said part of the problem is that the Biden administration has worried the left wing of the party too much, particularly on immigration, which he says has slowed its response to the crisis. He added that the conflict over immigration and inflation had led to a “total collapse of Latino support” for Democrats.
“We need to remove ‘we have a messaging problem’ from our vocabulary,” Torres said. “If 70% of the country thinks we’re going in the wrong direction, we don’t have a messaging problem. We have a reality problem. Inflation and immigration are not messaging issues. These are real problems.”