Love him or hate him, the second election of Donald Trump as president of the United States establishes him as one of the most significant and astounding figures in American history. With this second win, Trump has also done more to change the conventional wisdom than any American political figure in nearly a century.
Only 15 presidents have served two or more terms, so Trump’s victory already places him in elite company. Time served in office is certainly one of the ways we rate our presidents, but there is much more to the Trump story. The 2024 election will change how we look at presidential electoral coalitions. As pollster Patrick Ruffini wrote, “The FDR coalition is being dismantled piece by piece and reassembled in Donald Trump’s GOP.” Trump made gains among blacks, particularly among black males, which would be devastating to future Democratic electoral hopes if sustained. For years, Democrats have counted on winning overwhelming majorities among black voters. Republicans have long hoped that they could just get into double digits, thereby blunting the Democratic dominance among blacks. This year, they did it, garnering 13 percent of the black vote.
Similarly, the Jewish vote, three-quarters of which typically goes to Democratic presidential candidates, also shifted. Democrats still won a majority of Jews, but Republicans got 32 percent of the Jewish vote, which similarly eats into Democrats’ expected margins in ways that could be hard for them to overcome. A more worrisome sign for Democrats may be in the New York Jewish vote, where 46 percent of Jews in America’s largest Jewish population voted for Trump, potentially signaling where this community will be going electorally in the future.
Most devastating of all of the shifts was probably the Hispanic vote. For years, Democrats have counted on this demographic as part of their coalition, even as their policies have not always appealed to conservative, Catholic, pro-law-and-order Hispanics. Trump won 45 percent of the vote, suggesting that Hispanics may, like Irish and Italian Americans before them, be moving away from voting as a distinct coalition. Republicans made these gains among Hispanics despite constant allegations that Trump was racist. Democrats, though, have called seemingly every Republican presidential candidate of the last 60-some years racist or fascist or both, and that long record makes it hard for voters to take the claim seriously. Trump’s success among Hispanics shows that policies matter more than rhetoric. It also raises the question: If the affected community does not consider a behavior racist, does the white liberal media’s definition of racism matter?
This new coalition and the resulting victory in the Senate—and likely in the House as well—raises the question of whether Trump has a mandate for his policies. In early 2021, author Jon Meacham told Joe Biden to act boldly, as if he had a broad mandate from the electorate. Biden had won a narrower presidential victory than Trump has just achieved, and he had barely won the Senate, thanks to Republican fumbling of two Senate races in Georgia that January. That advice, to try and make FDR- or LBJ-style changes without enjoying comparable levels of congressional support, was likely the Biden administration’s original sin. The overreach and miscalculation inherent in that advice contributed to Biden’s consistent unpopularity, which, along with his increasing debility, caused his removal from the presidential contest this past summer.
In a similar vein, the election shows that the mainstream media cannot force a bad candidate down the throats of the American people. Kamala Harris ran in 2020 for the Democratic nomination and lost badly, dropping out before even facing the voters. As vice president, she frequently caused embarrassment with poor interview performances or stories of staff dysfunction and was effectively sidelined by the Biden administration. She was rescued by Biden’s dropping out of the race, but the artificial ballast she got from being the Democratic nominee against the hated Trump could not survive her extended exposure. The Harris team seemed to know this, and initially kept her from the press—so much so that the avoidance of scrutiny itself became a story. Eventually, that strategy became unsustainable, so her team let her appear for interviews in friendly environments. Even here, however, she seemed unable to answer even basic questions. In part, her difficulties were caused by the box she was in: she was afraid of offending progressives by renouncing her unpopular left-wing views, yet she was aware that these views were anathema to the vast, non-woke middle of the electorate that she needed to win. What this meant was that Harris could not take advantage of a friendly media. Nor could her vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, also bad on his feet and bearing the additional burden of being afraid to say anything resembling a policy position.
In the end, Harris would have suffered an even greater defeat had not the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and NPR pulled for her as hard as possible. Even so, the effect of all their efforts were likely less significant than Joe Rogan’s three-hour interview with Trump, which logged more than 45 million downloads on YouTube. Anyone who listened to it with an open mind did not hear the monster caricature of Trump, but a more thoughtful and knowledgeable figure than many had been led to believe.
All this speaks to bracing new realities: the mainstream media has lost its power to persuade. The Democratic coalition that maintained the vaunted blue wall is no longer. And the disruptor Donald Trump, carving his place into the nation’s political history, has more of an electoral mandate for change than any incoming president since Barack Obama in 2009.
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