Donald Trump’s decisive victory last week came as a shock to many. The president-elect looks likely to win the popular vote, having run up totals not only in the swing states but also in deep-blue strongholds. Most surprisingly, the Trump campaign put cracks in Democrats’ dominance of big cities.
In fact, Trump most overperformed in large metro counties, according to analyst Jed Kolko. Compared with his run against Joe Biden, Trump ran 9 points closer to Kamala Harris in such areas—a bigger gain than he saw in suburbs, college towns, or military posts.
It wasn’t just a few cities, either. Trump improved on his 2020 performance in cities as diverse as Chicago, Detroit, and Dallas. He won Miami-Dade County outright. He got the closest margin for a Republican in New York City in 30 years. He won a precinct in lower Manhattan; one south Philadelphia neighborhood voted for him by almost three to one.
These swings are partly a byproduct of the surprising diversity of the Trump coalition, which exit polling suggests may have included a fifth of black men and a majority of Latino men. In New York City, Trump ran up votes not just on Staten Island, but in hyper-diverse Queens and South Brooklyn.
What happened? It’s not, as some might suspect, that the nation turned far right. Rather, it’s that Trump’s campaign understood how to speak to a key constituency: the forgotten middle. These voters want their cities to be safer, their schools to be better, and their culture to be saner. And Trump’s success with them clearly marks a path for repeatable political success in cities nationwide.
After all, insofar as Trump won on the issues, it was because he played to the middle. He worked to win the 30 percent of voters who prioritized the economy with promises of growth and tax cuts, while distancing himself from the GOP’s unpopular positions on abortion and entitlement reform. And his focus on immigration resonated with an electorate that has turned sharply against the chaos at the border under the Biden administration.
Just as importantly, voters were clearly not persuaded by Harris’s pretensions of moderation. She was almost certainly dragged down by the extremist positions she took in the 2020 Democratic primary. The Trump campaign deployed these to great rhetorical effect in, for example, the widely aired commercial telling voters “Kamala is for they/them; President Trump is for you.” And despite Harris’s drumbeat emphasis on abortion, Trump took half of voters who believe abortion should be legal “in most cases.”
What this indicates is not so much that the nation has become more conservative but that voters were motivated by issues—the economy, immigration, gender—where the moderate middle was willing to listen to conservatives. Moreover, Trump’s overperformance in deep-blue big cities suggests that even these voters are ideologically persuadable. Similarly, while many Democrats assume they will win nonwhite voters for reasons of identity, those voters, too, are more likely to vote based on the issues.
This does not mean that the Trump coalition is durable. Republicans are by no means guaranteed to continue making inroads in cities and among minority groups going forward. Rather, it means that a much broader portion of the electorate than previously thought is up for grabs—assuming that either party is willing to emphasize and address the issues that they care about.
For the Right, that means leaning into what Manhattan Institute external affairs director Jesse Arm has called “conservative popularism.” Voters are with conservatives when we talk about fiscal responsibility; merit in higher education; safe streets; skills-based immigration and a secure border; growth and the right to work; and a rejection of gender insanity. Those issues can win not just in deep-red states and counties, but in big cities, where residents are fed up with dysfunction, disorder, and dismissiveness from their elected leaders.
At the same time, the Left yet again needs to learn to check its worst impulses. Even voters in deep-blue California resoundingly rejected progressive policies, voting out four far-left prosecutors and mayors, and undoing a controversial soft-on-crime bill from a decade ago. If Democrats can’t commit themselves to common sense, voters will continue to punish them for it at the ballot box.
These lessons apply at the national level, but they are just as important—if not more so—locally. For decades, Republicans have spurned urban America as not worth their time. As a result, many of America’s once-great cities have languished under unaccountable, kleptocratic rule by far-left Democrats who care more about lining the pockets of public-sector unions than about citizens’ well-being.
Urban voters across the country are looking for something different. The right leader—Republican or Democrat—could give them the sane, smart policies they’re looking for. From Queens to Miami, in white and black and Latino and Asian neighborhoods alike, the verdict of a growing chorus of urbanites is clear: they want their cities to be great again.
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