The Democrats dreamed of an invincible coalition. Trump turned it into dust

Donald Trump swept to victory on Tuesday by wooing groups of voters that Democrats once believed would help them win the White House for a generation.

After Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, many claimed that the liberal voting coalition that elected the first black president was growing stronger, as the makeup of America changed.

Older, law-abiding whites were dying, and non-white Americans were projected to outnumber them by 2044. College-educated professionals, young people, blacks, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, and blue-collar workers were part of the “coalition. of ascension”.

These voters depended on cultural issues and supported a functioning federal government and a strong social safety net. And they made majorities in enough states to ensure a Democratic lock on the Electoral College — and the presidency.

“Demographics,” these optimists like to say, “is fate.” However, sixteen years later that conclusion seems to have turned to dust.

The divide began to form when college-educated voters defected to Democrats in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections. Then they broke away from Trump in 2016. While Joe Biden, with his work-friendly reputation built over a century, won enough to retake the White House in 2020, his success was a short-lived relief.

This year, Trump has added to his gains with blue-collar workers by also reaching Democratic margins among young, Latino and black voters. He recorded a coalition of climbers.

According to exit polls, Trump won:

– 13% of the black vote in 2024 compared to 4% for Republican John McCain against Obama

– 46% of the Latino vote this time, while McCain got 31% in 2008

– 43% of voters are under the age of 30 against McCain’s 32%

– 56% of those without a college degree – back in 2008, it was Obama who won the majority

Speaking Thursday after his triumphant return, Trump celebrated his diverse coalition of voters.

“I started to see a reunion possible because the Democrats don’t align with the way the country thinks,” the president-elect told NBC News.

Trump did it with a tough message on immigration that included border enforcement and mass deportations — policies that Biden and Democrats backed away from when they took over from Trump in 2021, lest they anger immigrant rights activists in their liberal home state.

Illegal border crossings have reached record levels under the Biden administrationmore than eight million meet migrants at the Mexican border.

“If you watch Hillary Clinton’s video back in 2008 in the primaries, she talks about making sure that walls are built, making sure that illegal immigrants are deported, making sure that everyone learns English,” said Kevin Marino Cabrera. a Republican commissioner in Miami-Dade County. “It’s funny how far to the left it is [the Democrats] they are gone.”

This week, Trump became the first Republican since 1988 to win that Latino state in Florida. He also won Starr County in south Texas, which has a 97% Latino population, with 57% of the vote. In 2008, only 15% of the state voted for McCain, a Republican.

Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican strategist who focuses on the Latino vote, told the BBC that the problem with “demographics is the end” is that it risks treating all non-white Americans as a “victimized racial minority”. “But that is not and has never been the way Latinos see themselves,” he added.

“I hate that if you’re black, you have to be a Democrat or you hate black people and you hate your community,” Kenard Holmes, a 20-year-old student in South Carolina, told the BBC during the presidency. primaries earlier this year. He said he agrees with Republicans on some issues and feels Democratic politicians are taking black voters for granted.

As other states are still tabulating their results, Trump has currently increased his electoral margin in at least 2,367 US states, while only losing in 240.

It wasn’t just the number of states Trump won that made the difference, either. Kamala Harris needed to send important points to the cities to reduce Republican power in rural areas. He kept failing.

For example, in Detroit’s Wayne County, which the latest US census reported was 38% black, Harris won 63% of the vote – well below Joe Biden’s 68% in 2020 and 74% for Obama in 2008.

Polls suggested that the economy, and immigration, were the two most important issues to voters – with polls showing Trump has an advantage over Harris.

His economic message cut across racial divides.

“We’re sick of hearing about identity politics,” said Nicole Williams, a white saleswoman with a black husband and mixed-race children in Las Vegas, Nevada — one of the battlegrounds that Trump has fought this year.

“We’re just Americans, and we just want what’s best for the American people,” he said.

Democrats are already engaged in soul-searching, as they suffered defeats in elections that put the White House, the Senate and, possibly, the House of Representatives in Republican control.

Different parts of the group offer their own, often conflicting, advice on the best path from the wilderness back to power.

Left-wing Senator Bernie Sanders, a two-time Democratic presidential nominee, also criticized identity politics and accused the party of abandoning working-class voters.

Some centrist Democrats, on the other hand, said the struggle to connect with voters goes beyond the economy and immigration. They point out how the Trump campaign has been able to use the cultural message as a tool to dismantle the Democratic coalition.

Among the Republican targets in this year’s election are defunding law enforcement, cracking down on illegal border crossings and petty crimes like shoplifting, and providing greater protections for transgender Americans.

Many arose after the killing of George Floyd in 2020 and the resulting rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as other efforts to advance social justice and acknowledge the dark parts of American history.

However, within a few years, some of those positions proved a liability for Democrats as they tried to win over persuasive voters and keep their coalition intact. Harris, for example, backed away from some of the positions he had taken when he first ran for president in 2019.

In the final month of the presidential campaign, Trump’s team made the vice president’s past support for taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries for federal prisoners and immigrants a priority.

Another ad concluded: “Kamala is theirs. President Trump is yours. “

The Trump campaign spent more than $21m on transgender ads in the first half of October — about a third of all advertising spending and nearly double what they spent on immigration and inflation, according to data compiled by AdImpact.

The kind of investment a campaign makes if it has solid data that shows the ad is moving public opinion.

After Trump’s landslide victory, Congressman Seth Moulton, a centrist from Massachusetts, said his party must rethink its approach to cultural issues.

“Democrats spend more time trying not to offend anyone than being brutally honest about the challenges that many Americans face,” Mouston told the New York Times. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them to be run over by a male athlete or former male athlete, but as a Democrat I should be afraid to say that.”

Progressive Democrats, on the other hand, reject that interpretation, and say that advocating for the rights of minorities has always been at the core of the party. Congressman John Moran wrote to X in response: “You should find another job if you want to use the election loss as an opportunity to elect the most vulnerable.”

Mike Madrid, a political strategist, has a brutal assessment of where the Democratic Alliance is today.

“The Democratic Party predicted what was essentially an unholy alliance between working-class people of color and rich white people driven by cultural issues,” Madrid said. “The only glue that held this coalition together was anti-Republicanism.”

When that glue doesn’t stop, he said the team is mature.

The upcoming election is sure to be held in a Democrat-friendly political environment. And Trump, who has shown a unique ability to attract young and very young voters to the polls, ran his last campaign.

But the 2024 results will provide plenty of fuel for Democratic Angst in the coming days.

The Harris campaign itself believes that it lost to Trump because he was facing public anger due to the economic and social unrest after the Covid pandemic.

“He has faced unprecedented storms and obstacles beyond our control,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a letter to her staff. “The whole country moved to the right, but compared to the rest of the country, the states of the field saw very little movement for him. It was very close to the places where we were competing.”

Moses Santana, a Puerto Rican who lives in Philadelphia, comes from a population that was seen as a Democratic Alliance a decade or so ago. But when he spoke to the BBC this week, he wasn’t so convinced that the Democrats were silent when they were in power – or that their message today connected with Americans like him.

“You know, Joe Biden has promised many things that are going on, like he will cancel student debt, he will help people get their citizenship,” he said. “And that didn’t happen. Donald Trump is coming [people] something new.”