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Guest Essay

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

There are reasons to be cautious in interpreting the results of the 2024 election. The absolute numbers are not huge. Roughly six in 10 Hispanics voted for Joe Biden; five in 10 for Kamala Harris. Nine of 10 Black voters chose Biden; eight in 10 for Harris. More than four-fifths of Trump’s votes came from white people.

Close examination of the voting, however, reveals disturbing trends for the Democratic Party.

A large 2024 AP VoteCast survey of 110,000 voters shows that the biggest drops in support for Harris — 10 percentage points or more — were all among key minority Democratic constituencies.

The AP poll found that 66 percent of 18-to-44 year old nonwhite voters backed Harris in 2024, 11 points fewer than Biden’s 77 percent in 2020; nonwhite men without college degrees were 11 points less supportive of Harris than they had been of Biden; Black men with and without college degrees were even less supportive of Harris, backing her by 12 points less than Biden. In addition, young voters of all races aged 18 to 29, were 10 points less supportive of Harris than Biden.

From a broader perspective, these trends point toward a political future in which the bottom half of the income distribution, including voters of all races and ethnicities, will be increasingly dominated by Republicans and the top half by Democrats — a reversal of the New Deal coalition.

“The class realignment continues,” Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, wrote in an email:

Republican advantages among high-income voters have been replaced by Democratic advantages among high-education voters. Alongside these trends, racial group depolarization continues, with nonwhite voters becoming more divided between the parties. Polls and geographic returns show those patterns continuing or accelerating in 2024. Because this realignment follows global patterns and prior trends and has continued in down-ballot races, it is more likely to be stable.

The shifts have substantially altered the composition of the two parties. According to VoteCast estimates, Grossmann wrote,

College-educated whites now outnumber both nonwhites and non-college whites among Democratic voters for the first time. This is a pattern long in the making, but could be self-reinforcing: Democratic primary voters and activists are now even more disproportionately educated white voters with distinct values and priorities. And the external image of the party also reflects its changing coalition.

Have the cultural values of white progressives become a liability for the Democratic Party?

Grossmann:

White educated Democrats hold far more liberal views on the direction of American culture and institutions than other Americans. This has signaled to those who disagree with culturally liberal trends to side with Republicans. But the longstanding direction of public opinion on social and cultural issues is still leftward and could continue moving in that direction under Trump.

Representative Ritchie Torres of New York, a Democrat, in a Nov. 6 post on X, gave his opinion of the far left wing of the contemporary Democratic Party:

Donald Trump has no greater friend than the far left, which has managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea” or LatinX. There is more to lose than there is to gain politically from pandering to a far left that is more representative of Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok than it is of the real world. The working class is not buying the ivory-towered nonsense that the far left is selling.

Developing trends favorable to the Republicans and threatening to Democrats have evolved over the last three presidential elections in a way that signals strength and durability. It will be difficult for Democrats to reverse these dynamics.

On Nov. 5, Democrats gave ground everywhere, from deep blue to dark red regions of the country, from Massachusetts to Oklahoma.

“The architecture of Trump’s victory is clear,” Charlie Mahtesian writes in the Nov. 8 edition of Politico Magazine, “The Stunning Geography of Trump’s Victory”:

He managed to squeeze even more votes out of rural America — and that includes gains with rural Black voters. He continued to make significant advances with Latino voters, from the Southwest to the Acela Corridor. In big, diverse urban places — like Houston’s Harris County or Chicago’s Cook County — he pared down traditionally large Democratic margins. Many of the populous suburbs that so thoroughly rejected him in 2020 lost their anti-Trump edge. Even the biggest college counties........

© The New York Times