How the Democrats lost their identity

Last Tuesday's realignment was decades in the making.

Sen. John Fetterman campaigning for President Joe Biden, July 2024. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images).

Hi, all! Apologies for the radio silence on here for the past several months. As many of you likely know by now, over the summer I became the Chief Political Analyst at The Liberal Patriot, where I had previously been an occasional contributor. At some point, I’ll share a post with more details about that change, the vision of the TLP project, and what my plans are for the future of this blog. But for now, feel free to follow me there as well for more of my analysis.

Today, I wanted to share some of my initial thoughts about last week’s election results, which were just published in Persuasion. I hope they offer everyone something to consider. -MB

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As we continue to sort through the wreckage of last week’s election, one thing has become very clear: Donald Trump gained ground relative to 2020 in almost every state and with almost every demographic group. Even the most reliably Democratic constituencies, including racial minorities, shifted in his direction, an ominous sign that their coalition may not be as solid as they once thought. Indeed, these results shone a spotlight on long-festering problems in the Democrats’ coalition, which have left them a shell of their former selves—as the party not of the multiracial working class but of society’s elites.

Though it may be hard to believe this fate has befallen the party of FDR, these changes didn’t happen overnight. Democrats were long considered by many Americans to be the party of the common man and woman. Mark Brewer, of the University of Maine, has found that in every presidential election between 1952 and 2004, the trait voters said they most liked about the Democrats was that they were “the party of the working class.” By contrast, the biggest mark against the Republicans was that they were viewed as the party of big business and the upper class.

These perceptions created a clear divide between the parties’ coalitions during that period: Democrats were likelier to win lower-educated and lower-income voters while Republicans were the favored party of many college-educated and affluent Americans.

At the same time, the parties had also begun to polarize along racial lines. Following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act under President Lyndon Johnson, black Americans almost uniformly threw their weight behind Democrats while white voters—especially white southerners—began moving toward Republicans. For a time, this came at the expense of the Democrats: from 1968 through 1988, they won the presidency just once, in 1976.

However, by the 1990s, the country was growing more diverse and better educated. Bill Clinton was a beneficiary of this new reality, as he made sweeping gains with women, young people, voters of color (specifically, Hispanics), and college-educated voters. Importantly, he also retained significant support from white Americans and lower-educated voters, who made up the vast majority of the electorate. As Clinton rode this coalition to victory twice—marking the first time since FDR that a Democrat had won two full terms as president—some political observers saw the emergence of a new majority, one that could consistently win elections using the formula Clinton had used.

In 2008, Barack Obama built on the Clinton coalition, bringing in even higher levels of support from almost every major party constituency, including blacks, Hispanics, Asians, young people, and women.¹ But that year saw the rise of another trend as well: Obama became the first Democratic nominee since at least 1988 to decisively win voters who held a bachelor’s degree. He also fared far better with high-income earners than past Democrats had. These were the first signs of a growing professional class whose cultural values had aligned many of them with Team Blue—a departure from the past.

Obama’s two wins led Democrats and Republicans alike to believe in the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis. Gone were the days when Democrats needed to win a majority of white voters, a feat they had found nearly impossible to achieve since the 1960s. Now, the party that represented America’s demographic future stood to lead it as well.

But no sooner did that consensus emerge than Donald Trump arrived on the scene. Trump disrupted the Democrats’ plans for building a dominant coalition and, in the process, helped precipitate a dramatic realignment between the two parties—one rooted in economic and social class. This change has tipped the demographic advantage in favor of Republicans and left Democrats at very real risk of losing many of the voters who not long ago were expected to deliver them a permanent majority.

In 2016, non-college-educated voters, a group that had backed Obama by four points in 2012, swung to Trump, who won them by six. This was a core driver of Trump’s win, as these voters made up a whopping 63 percent of the electorate that year. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton gained substantial ground with college graduates, who went from also backing Obama by four points to supporting her by 15. This was an early sign that Democrats would struggle to win without a critical mass of working-class voters behind them.

Four years later, as Joe Biden defeated Trump, the education gap grew even wider. Biden improved on Clinton’s advantage with college-educated voters by three more points, while Trump’s margin with non-college voters remained virtually unchanged—likely the difference in the outcome. Even in Biden’s victory, though, there were signs that the traditional Democratic coalition wasn’t holding. The clearest example was the rightward swing of Hispanic voters, who had backed Clinton by 38 points but supported Biden by only 26. There were also more modest signs of eroding support among black and Asian voters. In fact, a key driver of Biden’s win was improvements with white Americans: he lost them to Trump by only 13 points compared to Clinton’s 17-point deficit.

It seems plausible that because Democrats found success in 2020 and unexpectedly did so again in the 2022 midterms, they overlooked real problems under the hood of their coalition. Now, these problems finally caught up with them.

Initial data from the 2024 AP VoteCast survey shows that Kamala Harris matched Biden’s margin with white voters, but Trump made historic gains with non-white voters. He earned the highest share of Asian support since 2004, the highest share of black support since 1976, and the second-highest share of Hispanic support ever (he even nearly won Hispanic men outright). All this points to an American electorate that is becoming less polarized along racial and ethnic lines. While that may be a welcome development for society, it comes at the obvious expense of the Democrats, who had hoped these voting blocs would help them build a demographically dominant coalition for years to come.

Meanwhile, the transformation of the parties along class lines appears to be moving full steam ahead. Harris came close to matching Biden’s level of support among college-educated voters, winning them by 14 points. But perhaps just as telling: she carried voters earning at least $100,000 by seven points—by far the largest margin for a Democratic nominee in the modern era. On the other side, Trump became the first Republican nominee on record to win low-income voters, narrowly carrying them by three points. He also continued growing his advantage with non-college voters, winning them by 13 points—the largest margin for the GOP since at least 1988. And his 44% support from union households marked the greatest share for a Republican since Ronald Reagan.

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Looking at this picture, it’s hard not to see that the Democrats have now become the party of the very thing they have long fought against: the elites. This stands in sharp contrast to their longtime image as the party of the working class, which is further and further in the rearview mirror. According to political scientist Matt Grossmann, college-educated white voters this year became a plurality of the Democratic coalition for the first time ever, surpassing both non-college whites as well as voters of color.

On a more practical note, this new coalition also risks putting the Democrats on electorally unsound footing. Although college graduates are more reliable voters than their non-college peers, they also constitute a much smaller share of the population. Without a meaningful share of working-class voters in the mix, the party will struggle to be competitive.

Strategists and pundits will argue in the months ahead about the best path forward for the Democrats, but suffice it to say: from both an electoral and moral standpoint, the party’s aim should be to return to its roots as the party of the people.

A version of this piece first appeared in Persuasion.

1. Data here, as for all post-2008 elections, is based on collation across a variety of sources—exit polls, the AP VoteCast survey, Catalist’s “What Happened” reports, and Pew Research Center’s voter-validated studies.