I n a few years, there’s a good chance we look at Tuesday night as the death knell of Trumpism and the Maga movement. He has indelibly changed the face of American politics, and the basic structure of American institutions. And people are sick of it.
Fundamentally, nearly everyone’s lives are worse than they were a decade ago. People were willing to tolerate, or even welcome the coarseness, the attacks on American democratic norms, and the global foreign policy order.
But only because they believed they would get something in return: economic and physical security. Trump’s disastrous second term has shattered that myth, and fundamentally shattered the much prophesied realignment of the Republican party as a “working class party”.
Elections, especially wave elections, usually have a specific story. You could say 2016 was the collapse of the blue wall and working class white Democratic support. The 2018 vote was a Republican collapse among college educated voters in the suburbs. And 2020 was a continuation of educational realignment, and a sign of Trump’s surprising continued strength with non-voters. Then 2022 was a story about the Dobbs decision and Republican overreach causing backlash, particularly in midwestern swings states, and of backlash in blue states to Democratic government over crime and other concerns.
Two years ago, 2024 was a story about the collapse of a gerontocratic Democratic party with, in particular, young and non-white voters. The story this year is not the Republican party’s collapse or underperformance with a specific group, or a specific region (though the results in the south are shocking), or even for one specific reason. It’s a wholesale rejection of Trump and the Republican party, by every single segment of American society.
Republicans have hemorrhaged support, up and down the ballot, from coast to coast. Pre-election polls showed a massive blue wave, one so large even the pollsters themselves were tripping over themselves to say they didn’t trust.
But even the rosy polls missed the sheer scale of the blue wave. For a long time, there’s seemed to be two Americas, a blue and a red one, and 90% of people voted for the same party in every election.
Red states, really truly red ones such as Texas or Kansas or South Carolina, couldn’t go blue. We were too polarized. But Trump has managed something incredible: he’s depolarized America. Red America and Blue America can put their differences aside agree on something again: hating Donald Trump .
Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign
