7 Ways Trump Lost His 2024 Coalition |
Though the results could yet surprise us, it’s very likely the key story of the 2026 midterm elections will be the Republican Party’s loss of support from non-MAGA elements of the electorate who temporarily backed Donald Trump in 2024. To that extent it’s not just a matter of the White House party predictably losing ground in a midterm, which happens far more often than not. It’s a tale of trends reversing themselves that robbed Trump and his cohort of what many thought might be a political realignment making the GOP the majority party for years. So it’s worth a closer look: How, exactly, did Trump alienate these onetime supporters? Here are some tentative answers.
. Trump’s 2024 coalition was never as big as he claimed
The president has incessantly exaggerated his winning share of the electorate in 2024. On Election Night, he claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” Shortly after taking office, he told supporters he had “achieved the most epic political victory our country has ever seen” and “the biggest mandate in 129 years,” and one of his spokespeople boasted he had “decisively won every battleground state and became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years,” lines he would repeat often on Truth Social. In fact, he narrowly won the popular vote by 1.5 percent, far short of the usual 10 percent threshold for a “landslide,” which was smaller than the margins of victory for Joe Biden in 2020, Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008, and George W. Bush in 2004 (and smaller, for that matter, than Hillary Clinton’s popular-vote margin over Trump in 2016). Winning all seven battlegrounds is no big accomplishment, either; these were very close states, which is why they were called battlegrounds. Suffice it to say that Trump’s victory was legitimate but no great shakes by any historical........