My piece in The Atlantic
The triple Trump swing counties, new racial voting data by state, Republicans' re-emerging electoral college advantage, persuasion beats turnout, don’t stress about demographics, 2026 wave unlikely
No. 362 | May 30th, 2025
🇺🇲 2024
I wrote a piece for The Atlantic arguing that Americans’ political preferences are increasingly dictated by their cultural and ideological preferences rather than their social and communal ties.
The realignment of the working class, which helped Trump win in 2016, would not stop with white voters. In 2020 and 2024, the realignment came for nonwhite voters. A basic tenet of the Democratic Party—that of being a group-interest-based coalition—was abandoned as the party’s ideologically moderate and conservative nonwhite adherents began to peel off in a mass re-sorting of the electorate. The Democratic analyst David Shor estimates that Democrats went from winning 81 percent of Hispanic moderates in 2016 to just 58 percent in 2024. And these voters were now voting exactly how you would expect them to, given their ideologies: conservatives for the party on the right, moderates split closer to either party.
This explanation for political realignment should concern Democrats deeply, because it can’t be fixed by better messaging or more concerted outreach. The voters moving away from the Democrats are ideologically moderate to conservative. Their loyalty to the Democratic Party was formed in a time of deep racial and inter-ethnic rivalry, when throwing in with one locally dominant political party could help a once-marginalized group secure political power. The system worked well when local politics was relatively insulated from ideological divides at the national level. But this wouldn’t last forever—and national polarization now rules everything around us.
The New York Times has another look at the education divide in the last election. About half the counties in the country swung towards Donald Trump in the last three elections. This was true of just 58 counties which swung towards Democrats in all of the last three elections.
Speaking of The New York Times, they have three job openings that would be perfect for readers of this newsletter:
Yale student Zachary Donnini, one of the forces behind their youth poll, is well worth a follow. He’s published the presidential vote (and swing) by race in every state. According to his estimates, Trump won Hispanics in 16 states and came within low single digits of winning them in big states like Georgia, North Carolina, and New Jersey. Get the data.
Also from Donnini, Republicans’ Electoral College advantage decreased in 2024 but will likely increase following expected red state gains in the 2030 Census.
Ryan Burge’s latest analysis illustrates Democrats’ incremental loss of Black religious voters.
Nate Silver argues that persuasion was a much bigger factor in Trump’s victory than turnout — and Democrats now need a different strategy.
And he’s spot on about Democratic operatives’ obsession with turnout over persuasion:
Second, turnout is something the campaigns believe they can influence at the margin through voter outreach and volunteer participation, such as phone banking and door-to-door canvassing. A lot of people are involved in these efforts, as compared to the smaller number who craft messages and ads. So, there’s a morale-boosting element from championing turnout.
Third, there’s probably a degree of motivated reasoning. Democratic campaign operatives are generally (much) more left-wing than their party’s voters. So they like strategies that imply candidates can win by motivating the party base, rather than pivoting to the center. Left-leaning media outlets often echo the same themes.
Keying off the big Catalist report, Matt Yglesias warns Democrats against overanalyzing demographics.
🇺🇲 2026
Important from the Center for Politics: while incumbent parties are usually on the back foot in midterms, the extreme partisan sorting of House districts in recent years makes big shifts in the number of seats in the House unlikely.
📊 Public Opinion
Yale Youth Poll’s most recent findings illustrate that 18-21 year old voters are more conservative than their 22-29 year old peers.
