Perhaps one of the most devastating aspects of President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive 2024 victory for the left is that it has shattered the persistent liberal myth about the rise of a supposedly permanent Democrat majority.
That myth emerged in the early 2000s with the publication of The Emerging Democratic Majority. In that 2002 book, political scientists John Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued that demographic and cultural shifts in the United States were reshaping the electorate in favor of the Democrat Party. They claimed that the rise of professional, knowledge-based workers, increased diversity through immigration, and urbanization in key metropolitan areas was creating a “new majority” of voters leaning Democratic. The book also emphasizes the growing political influence of suburban and exurban voters, whose values tend to lean more progressive over time.
Barack Obama’s sweeping victories in 2008 and 2012 initially seemed to confirm Judis and Teixeira’s thesis. The country was indeed becoming less white at an accelerating pace, and this development seemed to carry with it a gradual shift leftward among the electorate and the country as a whole.
Notably, The Emerging Democratic Majority contains a great deal of nuance and context, stressing that Democrats’ emerging coalition is not guaranteed but contingent upon the party’s ability to address economic inequality and maintain unity among diverse groups. However, many Democrats only extrapolated the broad strokes of the argument. They distilled it down to the simple aphorism “demographics is destiny,” asserting that because of changing demographics, there may never be another Republican president.
Trump’s victory in 2016 delivered the first blow to Democrats’ delusions about a permanent majority. Judis and Teixeira were correct that states like Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada, which were normally Republican strongholds in the latter half of the 20th century, became purple and then leaned blue. But Trump’s strength with working-class voters saw Democrats’ “blue wall” in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania crumble, handing Trump the presidency.
Democrats appeared to get things back on track in 2020, but even then there were some early warning signs about what was to come in 2024. Biden won the presidency, but it wasn’t thanks to the diverse coalition that Judis and Teixeira outlined. In fact, Trump won 12 percent of the black vote in 2020, up from eight percent in 2016. Trump’s share of the Hispanic vote also shot up 10 points, from 28 percent to 38 percent.
This year, however, the floodgates fully opened, flipping the myth of the “emerging Democratic majority” on its head. 16 percent of black voters cast ballots for Trump, including a notable 30 percent of black men. Trump also won 45 percent of the Hispanic vote, the best-ever performance for a Republican presidential candidate. Despite an eight-year campaign from Democrats and the corporate media to brand Trump a racist and misogynist, he only continued to gain ground with minorities and women.
In a post-election article republished in The Free Press, Teixeira acknowledged that the shape of Trump’s 2024 victory means “the Democratic coalition has shattered.”
“The party is uncompetitive among white working-class voters and among voters in exurban, small town, and rural America,” Teixeira writes. “This puts them at a massive structural disadvantage given an American electoral system that gives disproportionate weight to these voters… The facts must be faced. The Democratic coalition today is not fit for purpose. It cannot beat Republicans consistently in enough areas of the country to achieve dominance and implement its agenda.”
Teixeira goes on to detail a now common criticism of the Democrat Party emerging in liberal circles; namely, that the party has become the party of wealthy liberal elites while not just abandoning but scorning the interests and values of everyday Americans.
“Before the election, there was much debate, bordering on denialism, about whether and to what extent demographic trends revealed by most polling data would actually undercut the Democratic coalition in the election,” Teixeira continues. “Now that we have results, it is clear those trends were real—and they are bad news for Democrats.”
Not all Democrats have had the same clear-eyed analysis of the situation facing the party as Teixeira. In the immediate aftermath of the election, a litany of cable news pundits suggested Harris’s loss was due to black and Latino men being “sexist.” On MSNBC, Al Sharpton outright accused black men of “misogyny.” Joy Reid similarly accused white women of being racist for not showing up for Harris.
But the fact remains that voters of all races and backgrounds simply didn’t believe that Harris would defend their interests, no matter her “intersectional” identity. Donald Trump listened to the American voters and structured his campaign around opposing illegal immigration, combating inflation, and restoring peace to the international community, which is what they consistently told pollsters they were most concerned about.
Democrats have spent the better part of two decades indulging their most far-left impulses, taking for granted that demographic shifts in the United States would create for them at least a viable, if not outright dominant, electoral coalition. That calculation was incorrect, and now it is Democrats who may be facing an “emerging Republican majority.”
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
