The state of the Democratic Party is in its worst shape in 50 years. While they whine about President Trump and laughably peddle pro-working class talking points, the data shows the messaging isn’t working. It’s due to a) no one flat-out believes it, b) the party has the worst salespeople selling it (i.e., Temu Obama), and c) there are no working people within the ranks of the Democratic Party.
It's so bad that even The New York Times could not spin it. They also noted Trump’s stunning political accomplishments for the GOP, including increasing its voter share in a swath of counties, whereas Democratic growth has been pitifully anemic, dare I say even election-killing if it continues. And we haven’t even touched their dismal communications strategy. The publication also highlighted two states that could predict our political trajectory. Again, it’s terrible news for Democrats. It’s to a point where the old ways of liberals winning elections no longer work (via NYT) [emphasis mine]:
All told, Mr. Trump has increased the Republican Party’s share of the presidential vote in each election he’s been on the ballot in close to half the counties in America — 1,433 in all — according to an analysis by The New York Times.
It is a staggering political achievement, especially considering that Mr. Trump was defeated in the second of those three races, in 2020.
By contrast, Democrats have steadily expanded their vote share in those three elections in only 57 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties.
These counties, which we are calling “triple-trending,” offer a unique and invaluable window into how America has realigned — and still is realigning — in the Trump era. They vividly show, in red and blue, the stark changes in the political coalitions of the two parties.
The scale of Mr. Trump’s expanding support is striking. While roughly 8.1 million Americans of voting age live in triple-trending Democratic counties, about 42.7 million live in Republican ones.
Even more ominous for the Democrats are the demographic and economic characteristics of these counties: The party’s sparse areas of growth are concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets.
Yet Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.
Counties that have become steadily more Republican exist in some of the country’s bluest strongholds, including New York City, Philadelphia and Honolulu. Mr. Trump’s party is still losing in those places, but by significantly less. At the same time, Mr. Trump has driven Republican margins to dizzying new heights in the nation’s reddest bastions.
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All told, 435 counties voted more Democratic in 2024 than did so in 2012, by an average improved margin of 8.8 percentage points.
And 2,678 counties became more Republican, by an average of 13.3 percentage points. That’s six times as many counties moving toward the G.O.P. than toward the Democratic Party — and by a substantially wider margin.
The erosion of working-class support — among Black, white and Latino voters alike — has unnerved every ideological wing of the Democratic Party.
Ben Tulchin, a pollster who worked on Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns, said the old political calculations for how Democrats can win elections were now obsolete.
“The math doesn’t work,” he said.
Sounds familiar, right? After the 2008 and 2012 elections, the Republican playbook of winning the south, west, Midwest, and spending beaucoup bucks to win Ohio was out. Now, that Obama coalition is ours, and it’s unbeatable. Ohio is now reliably red. We’ve smashed through the blue wall—no other Republican could do this except Donald J. Trump, whose built a coalition where its voters live in key counties and are efficiently geographically distributed. It’s why the approval numbers for Trump aren’t that impactful. I don’t believe them either. the liberal media is always pushing some low approval number to suppress GOP enthusiasm, but Trump could still be competitive and dare I say, win nationally with 44 percent. That’s not me; that’s lefty data scientist David Shor who has warned his party against doing dumb stuff, like doubling down on whacko immigration policies that crystalized under the Biden administration. The Times cited New York and Texas as potential windows into our political trajectory. It’s quite red:
In Texas, Mr. Trump made successive gains in 124 of its 254 counties, from rural, nearly all-white places to diverse counties along the southern border where he achieved many of his greatest increases in vote share in the entire country.
The biggest swing in the nation since 2012, moving 89 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor, occurred in Starr County, which includes Rio Grande City and borders Mexico. It is also the nation’s most predominantly Latino county, with a 96 percent Hispanic voting-age population.
All told, Mr. Trump steadily improved his vote share over the three campaigns by more than 50 percentage points in seven heavily Hispanic counties in South Texas.
[…]
…in New York, where 43 of the state’s 62 counties voted more Republican by at least 10 percentage points in 2024 compared with in 2012. The overall margin of victory for Democrats statewide was slashed in half.
The lone New York county to trend continuously toward the Democrats was Tompkins County, home to Ithaca, an overwhelmingly progressive university town where nearly 60 percent of residents have a college degree
Yet counties that have shifted three times toward Mr. Trump include not only far-upstate counties, like St. Lawrence and Lewis, with vanishingly small nonwhite populations, but also some of the nation’s most diverse areas, like the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn.
“We could be entering a world where the greatest predictor of voting behavior is no longer race,” said Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from the Bronx. “Donald Trump’s greatest achievement — his greatest electoral achievement — lies not in breaking the blue wall in the industrial Midwest, but in beginning to break the blue walls in states like New York, and in counties like the Bronx.”
Democrats have been restricted to their strongholds, which are now urban islands and enclaves of the insufferable rich college whites. You’re not going to win anything with that band.
The hole Democrats must crawl out of is massive, and it’s not possible given the increasingly exclusionary agenda they’ve adopted. Democrats whine about what Trump does, but never say what they’d do. They don’t have anything because everything Trump has done is working. The market is stabilizing; the credit downgrades aren’t new. They’ll get past that, too. Trade deals are being renegotiated. Investment is coming back, and egg and gas prices are dropping. The only thing stopping Trump and the Republicans right now is…Trump and the Republicans. It makes me nervous since this is a classic recipe for someone fumbling the ball.
Another thing: the Trump coalition is unbeatable, but I’m not banking on it being transferable. Trump has been a godsend to the GOP. It’s transformed it for the better. A Reagan Republican or a Romney type could have never done what Trump has done for the party in turning it into a political juggernaut.
What happens in 2028? I’m not saying we should push for a Trump third term, but we’ll see, right?
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