For years, the media has assumed that demography is destiny, that a more diversified country would lead to an ascendant Democrat Party while reducing Republicans to an ineffectual rump. President Trump has proven them completely, catastrophically wrong, doing what they would have said was impossible.
After President Donald Trump’s stunning victory last year, I described it as the greatest political story ever told. Simply put, only one President in history, Grover Cleveland, had won two non-consecutive terms, but the broadly popular Cleveland didn’t face anything close to the political and legal onslaught including two impeachments, over ninety indictments, and thirty something convictions. Even in the immediate aftermath, it was apparent that President Trump had also remade the Republican coalition, at least temporarily earning more votes from minorities and young people than ever before while improving on his performance in 49 out 50 states including such progressive bastions as California and New York. Some of the numbers were truly astounding. In 2020, he lost the Latino vote by 23 points. Last November, he won them by eight. He also made tremendous gains among the black community, doubling his level of support in key states like North Carolina and Wisconsin. He increased his share of young voters and women voters, reducing Vice President Kamala Harris to 55% from President Joe Biden’s 60%, and 54% down from 57% respectively according to CBS News. The numbers among men, particularly young men of all racial backgrounds, were even more striking: He won men under thirty outright, 56% to 38%. Incredibly, he even increased his margin among conservative voters, up four points, and white evangelicals up five. The result was a significant improvement in his share of the vote across the entire country, even the deepest blue states. There are dozens of counties that hadn’t gone Republican in decades that cast their vote for Trump, many of which are minority-majority such as Miami-Dade. In at least one case, a county in Texas hadn’t voted for a Republican since William McKinley in 1896, but they too voted for Donald Trump this cycle. Last weekend, the New York Times of all outlets expanded on these numbers with an even more in depth analysis stretching back to President Barack Obama’s second election in 2012. If anything their findings are even more astounding, almost unbelievable. Between 2012 and 2024, over the course of three elections, President Trump has increased the Republican share of the presidential vote in almost half the counties in the entire country, some 1,433 out of a little over 3,100. By comparison, Democrats, under some combination of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris have done so in only 57. “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.” As even the Times proclaimed, “It is a staggering political achievement, especially considering that Mr. Trump was defeated in the second of those three races, in 2020.”
A closer look at the numbers in these “triple trending” counties is even more revealing. The total population of the counties that have trended Democrat three times in a row is only around 8.1 million, but those that have gone Republican boast almost 43 million residents. Not surprisingly these days, the Democrat enclaves tend to be “concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets” while “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.” This includes significant inroads into some of the country’s “bluest” strongholds such as New York City, Philadelphia, and Honolulu, where President Trump lost by significantly less than in 2016. In New York, for example, 43 of 62 counties voted more Republican by at least 10 points compared to 2012 including urban areas such as the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn; meanwhile, the only county that kept moving in the Democrat direction was a college town, Ithaca, known as a progressive bastion. In Texas, which conventional wisdom claims has been trending Democrat in recent years, President Trump made successive gains in 124 of 254 counties. While many of these gains were in rural areas, the biggest were concentrated in what is considered the most Hispanic county in the entire country, Starr County boasting a population of 96% voting age Latino. There, President Trump has increased the Republican vote share by an incredible 89% compared to 2012 and by more than 50% across seven heavily Latino counties in South Texas. This has led even Democrat Congressman Richie Torres to claim, “We could be entering a world where the greatest predictor of voting behavior is no longer race. 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.”
Earlier with this week, the progressive “explainer” website, Vox.com supplemented this analysis and confirmed some of the exit poll results mentioned earlier by reporting on additional studies of the 2024 election conducted by a Democrat leaning firm, Catalist. As they put it, “Catalist’s findings are especially authoritative, as the firm tracks the actual voting behavior of 256 million Americans across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In other words, they are not relying purely on surveys of how people said they would vote, but also hard data showing which party individual voters registered with, and which elections they did and did not show up for.” Catalist divided the electorate into repeat voters, some 126 million Americans that voted in both 2020 and 2024, and new voters some 24 million who didn’t vote in the last cycle. Of the 126 million repeat voters, President Trump increased his share from 48.4% to 50.6%, and of new voters, he won them for the first time by about 3%, even though “Democrats have historically won new voters by comfortable margins, largely because young Americans were overwhelmingly left-leaning in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020.” At least part of both shifts were because “younger voters were significantly more Republican in 2024 than they had been in 2020.” Not only did Vice President Harris perform 3 points worse with women under thirty, she performed 9 points worse with men in the same age bracket. Further Vox via Catalist, also found that nonwhite “voters got redder” while white voters in general remained similar to President Obama’s 2012 numbers. “Harris actually won the same share of the white vote that Barack Obama had in 2012. And her support among America’s white majority was only 2 points lower than Biden’s in 2020. But like previous 2024 autopsies, Catalist’s report finds that Democrats suffered steeper losses with nonwhite voters, particularly those who were young, male, and/or politically disengaged.” Most of these losses were due to a collapse among young black men, who supported President Trump by about 10 more points than 2020. Latino support also dropped significantly, declining by 9 points, from 63% to 54%, which was already a drop from the 70% Secretary Clinton won in 2016. Incredibly, President Trump won an outright majority of male Latinos by 3 points, once again driven by young men, whose support for Democrats Vox described as falling “off a cliff.” In the 18-29 year old bracket, Vice President Harris’ support declined 16 points overall. Asian American and Pacific Islanders also backed President Trump more than previously; after choosing President Obama over Governor Mitt Romney in 2012 by 74% to 26%, Vice President Harris won only 61% in 2024. “Taken together,” Vox concluded, “all these figures paint a disconcerting picture for Democrats. The party has long wagered that time was on its side: Since America’s rising generations were heavily left-leaning — and the country was becoming more diverse by the year — it would become gradually easier for Democrats to assemble national majorities, even as the party bled support among non-college-educated white voters. And it’s true that Democrats still do better with young and nonwhite voters than with Americans as a whole. But the party’s advantage with those constituencies has been narrowing rapidly. Last year’s returns suggest that demographic churn isn’t quite the boon that many Democrats had hoped, and can be easily outweighed by other factors.”
What are we to make of all this? First, if President Trump was any other politician, he would widely be regarded as one of the greatest practitioners of the art who ever lived. That he has done so his way, largely breaking every rule and norm in the modern era, defying conventional wisdom and battling the establishment at every turn, only makes it more remarkable. Second, President Trump clearly has a broad, diverse base of support that makes it rather difficult to believe many of the recent stories about his supposedly declining poll numbers or so-called voter remorse. Even discounting the reality that polls have never accurately measured his real world support and performance, what are the chances these voters would defy the establishment by voting for him in November only to abandon him barely six months later due to the perpetual outrage expressed by that same establishment? If they didn’t listen to them then, they seem unlikely to be listening now and likely to give President Trump an opportunity to more fully enact his agenda, rather than reacting in real time. Third, President Trump offers the Republican a once-in-a-generation if not once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to forge a new, larger, more diverse, and more powerful coalition than almost everyone would’ve thought possible less than a decade ago. For years, the media and the establishment has assumed that demography is destiny, that a more diversified country would lead to an ascendant Democrat Party, forging a coalition that would not be defeated while reducing Republicans to an ineffectual rump. President Trump has proven them completely, catastrophically from their perspective, wrong, doing what they would have said was impossible, but it remains to be seen whether he truly is a once in a century political phenomena and these new voters are bound only to him, or the coalition can persist after he leaves office. Undoubtedly, some of the coalition is bound together by his unique personality and charisma, which remain grossly underrated by the establishment, but that doesn’t divorce it entirely from policy or messaging. Whether you love him or hate him, President Trump speaks to issues that resonate with large swaths of the electorate including immigration, economic mobility, the increasing insanity of our infatuation with transgenderism and critical race theory, and more. If his policies produce the unique combination of a strong economy, secure borders, and stability around the world he was known for in his first term, despite the many claims of his detractors and granting this is a rather large if, the voters that propelled him to the Presidency twice might well be inclined to consider the next Republican candidate, or at least Republicans can hope.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 