Phelim McAleer: Now that Trump has a wider following since 2016, Democrats face an electoral crisis
In November 2016, I attended a top secret closed-door meeting for American conservatives. Hillary Clinton said there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” working to destroy her husband. There wasn’t. Bill was the amorous author of his own downfall.
But if Hillary had been in this meeting, her fears would have been confirmed. There were right-wing donors, pollsters, consultants and strategists huddled together in a swanky hotel with tight security. There were even a few Hollywood celebrities. We were all sworn to secrecy. The first rule of the vast right-wing conspiracy was that no one talks about the vast right-wing conspiracy.
Many of the speakers were pollsters, and it was basically the millionaire consulting class telling the billionaire donor class what the working class was thinking and “please give us money to fix it”.
This 2016 meeting was supposed to be, after the inevitable defeat of candidate Donald Trump, part grieving funeral, part “I told you so” postmortem.
But it turned out to be a shocked celebration as Trump pulled off a victory very few had predicted. There was a fun atmosphere as America’s conservatives seemed to levitate with joy.
But it was such a shock that many people there didn’t seem to understand what had happened. One well-known pollster told us Republicans had a problem with Latinas that could only be solved by being nice to them – which meant letting more Latinas into the country legally and illegally – but mostly illegally.
The pollster didn’t mention, and everyone was too polite to ask, how she came to that conclusion after Trump had just won the election on the “build the wall” platform and accusing some illegal immigrants of being rapists.
There was also a feeling that Trump’s 2016 victory was a fluke – a happy accident. The pollsters said Trump’s victory was a blip – that the Republican Party was a declining party with a fading base of old white supporters.
Eight years later, it’s hard to believe anyone believes pollsters anymore. Everywhere you look, it’s clear Donald Trump has redrawn the American electoral map, and the Democratic Party is in an enormous hole of its own making.
The latest bad news for the Democrats comes in the “What Happened in 2024” report, a post-election analysis by the liberal leaning data firm Catalist. It paints a stark picture of Donald Trump’s electoral dominance and the Democratic Party’s collapse across key demographics. Catalist compiles voting history and census data from every US precinct. It is more accurate than exit polls because it uses real voting data.
According to Catalist, Trump gained 11 points with men, winning them 57% to 41%. He also picked up two points with women, narrowing the gender gap to 54% for Harris versus 44% for Trump. (Leftist received wisdom was that Trump was going to be defeated by an army of abortion-loving women. Turns out they only exist in fevered leftist minds.)
The report also highlights a seismic shift among Latino voters: Harris secured just 53% of the Latino vote, an 18-point swing toward Trump from 2020, compared to Clinton’s 70% in 2016. Latino men swung 14 points, and Latinas 17 points, toward Republicans since 2016, a devastating trend for Democrats given Latinos’ growing share in Sunbelt swing states like Texas and Arizona. Texas is the Blue Whale state for Democrats – they have been hunting it for years, believing next year will be the winning one. These results mean it is moving further away.
Perhaps most humiliating for Democrats is that Trump won young voters. The youth vote is historically a Democratic stronghold because they are, you know, the “cool party.” Turns out Taylor Swift fans only like her music.
Voters don’t like high prices, men pretending to be women playing in women’s sports, and children being mutilated in the name of gender affirmation. They also don’t like open borders and defunding the police to allow criminals a free run.
With Trump’s coalition now younger, more diverse, and broader, Democrats face an electoral crisis. But so far, they are not willing to drop the policies that led to their defeat. Their only hope is that voters might like Trump and not the Republican Party. But the Republican Party is becoming more and more aligned with Trump, and the Democrats are becoming more and more extremist. That could mean many more years in the political wilderness for the Democrats.
l Phelim McAleer is a Co Tyrone-born journalist/producer working in Los Angeles. You can find him on the social media platform X: @PhelimMcAleer