Ruy Teixeira: The Shattering of the Democratic Coalition

My favorite post-election meltdown is this idea that the center-right has an unfair “independent media” advantage after the left controlled legacy media for decades.
pic.twitter.com/oY0iGoyzIh

— Kyle Tibbitts (@KyleTibbitts) November 8, 2024

Several years ago, I did a big deep dive into the shift that was going on in the Republican and Democratic coalitions. I spent much of 2021 and 2022 looking at “Democratic Leaning Working Class” (DLWC) voters. I tracked the journey of MAGA voters from the 1990s to 2016.

Basically, the upshot of my research is that the Democratic coalition is shaped like an hourglass. Democratic elites are affluent metropolitan Whites who live in the big cities and inner suburbs. The Democratic base is the multiracial working class who are also concentrated in the metros. It is a top/bottom coalition against the White middle class who are Republicans.

The absolutely insane panic over Donald Trump among Democrats has always been about the threat he posed to the Democratic coalition. What essentially happened in 2016 is that a large chunk of the Obama coalition – alienated White working class voters in the Midwest – broke away from the Democratic base and evolved into MAGA. In 2008, Obama won every state between Philadelphia and Minneapolis. He won Iowa and Indiana. He won Ohio by 5 points. He was winning Wisconsin by nearly 14 points. He won Pennsylvania by 10 points. That’s the reason why he was able to do this.

Between 2008 and 2024, the big story in American politics is how Donald Trump has shattered the hourglass. The Democratic base of Democratic Leaning Working Class (DLWC) voters has been eroding and those voters have been drifting toward the Republicans. It happened again in 2020 when Trump started to show new strength with Hispanics which transformed Florida from a swing state to a Deep Red state. Meanwhile, college educated Whites who had traditionally supported Republicans like Mitt Romney began migrating toward the Democrats. The top of the Democratic coalition was growing in the suburbs while the bottom was collapsing. Eventually, I thought this shift would reach a tipping point where the Democratic Party would increasingly resemble the old Republican Party.

In 2024, Kamala Harris is hanging on in Minnesota by 4 points. She is only winning ILLINOIS by 8.5 points and NEW JERSEY by 5 points. She lost Texas and Florida by 14 and 13 points. NEVADA has flipped to Trump for the first time in 20 years. California and New York had the biggest swings toward Trump in the country. Trump has finally succeeded in making good on the threat he posed in 2016 which was breaking the Democratic coalition in half and reducing it to the sort of people who binge watch MSNBC.

Ruy Teixeria wrote the book on “demographics is destiny” in 2002 called The Emerging Democratic Majority. Last year, he wrote Where Have All The Democrats Gone? which explained how he got it wrong. The fatal flaw in his original thesis is that he assumed that Democrats would not alienate working class voters by taking such extreme positions on cultural issues.

Ruy Teixeira:

“The Republican Party, according to Democrats, has given rein to some of the darker impulses in the national psyche, has shown flagrant disregard for democratic norms and offers little to the American people in terms of effective policy. There is considerable truth to this indictment and Democrats have not been shy about making their case in uninhibited language, including the obligatory comparison of their opponents to “fascists” and “Nazis.”

Yet Democrats cannot decisively beat their opponents as this election has shown once again. The party is uncompetitive among white working-class voters and among voters in exurban, small town, and rural America. This puts them at a massive structural disadvantage given an American electoral system that gives disproportionate weight to these voters, especially in Senate and presidential elections. To add to the problem, Democrats are now hemorrhaging nonwhite working-class voters across the country.

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 at scale. The Democratic Party may be the party of blue America, especially deep blue metro America, but its bid to be the party of the ordinary American, the common man and woman, is falling short. …”

Demographically, we should have been doomed.

We have been saved by the fact that no one – black, White or Hispanic – who turns on their television can relate to people like Cool Guy Anand Giridharadas on Morning Joe.

WSJ:

“That’s a horror story for the Democrats. Mr. Teixeira, whose father was a Portuguese immigrant, says the Democratic values that repel blue-collar Americans of all races have opened a rift with the elites who reside in postindustrial “ideopolises.” Ms. Harris and her party were “heavily overindexed on liberal cultural issues, and were even using a language that was inimical to a lot of these voters.” The Democrats “pooh-poohed concerns about crime and immigration, and thought their ‘enlightened’ views about race, gender, abortion and climate were saleable to most members of the voting public.” Mr. Trump’s comeback proves they weren’t.

The Democrats have come to regard white working-class voters as “reactionary and racist,” Mr. Teixeira says. Those voters already defected to Mr. Trump in 2016, but what killed the Democrats this year was “losing nonwhite working-class voters hand over fist.” Mr. Teixeira notes that Barack Obama “carried the nonwhite working class or noncollege voters by 67 points. Harris has carried them with 33. That’s a halving of the margin among those who should have been the bulwark, the core, of the Democratic Party.”

“The Emerging Democratic Majority” was predicated on the party’s maintaining a “progressive centrism”—an ideology that, in Mr. Teixeira’s telling, lasted roughly from Bill Clinton’s first term to the beginning of Barack Obama’s second. Then Black Lives Matter and other manifestations of a “shadow party”—nonprofits, advocacy groups, the academy, parts of the media—began to dictate the Democratic direction. Sen. Bernie Sanders was “the last of the classic Democrats whose main center and focus was the working class.” An independent who sought the Democratic presidential nomination, “Sanders was considered a big threat to Hillary [Clinton], so she decided she would run to his left on cultural issues.” The party has remained rooted there ever since. …”

When you turn on your television to MSNBC or CNN, you are watching people who are in a metropolitan bubble. It is a peculiar class of people who live in the metros and who are talking to themselves. The average White man is alienated and repulsed by these people, but it turns out this feeling is much more widely shared and that explains what happened in the 2024 election.