The book that explains the 2024 election

Revisiting Party of the People, one year later

Yesterday was Election Day. And it was also around one year ago that my book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, was released.

I think the ideas in the book held up pretty well yesterday. Donald Trump made another round of historic gains with nonwhite voters, flipping Miami-Dade County red for the first time since 1988, and outright winning South Texas, a mainstay of the Democratic Party for more than a century. The gains extended to swing states, where Trump made solid gains among Puerto Ricans in Allentown, PA and Dominicans in Hazleton, PA. Overall, the exit polls show him within 10 points among Hispanic voters, making historic gains among Asian voters, and winning almost a quarter of Black men. And he did this while continuing to build on his gains with the white working class—and also gaining pretty much everywhere else. He further eroded the Democrats’ nonwhite working class majority to the low 30s, down from 67 points when Barack Obama was running for re-election in 2012.

For the first time, the income curve was inverted: that is, the Republican nominee won more support from low-income than high-income voters. Previously that was only true among whites, but now it’s true for all voters. We are starting to see a united front of working class voters across racial lines that will go so far as to change decades of established voting patterns to vote against uncontrolled illegal immigration, lax attitudes towards crime, and liberal ideas about race and gender that make absolutely no difference to them in their day-to-day lives.

Emblematic of this shift was Starr County, Texas, a 97-percent Hispanic county I visited while reporting on the book. It went from Clinton +60 to Biden +5 to Trump +16. This was the most Democratic county in the country in 2012.

If you thought 2016 and 2020 were a fluke, yesterday confirmed they were almost certainly not. The Realignment is here to stay.

Below is part of my initial launch post one year ago:

Today is the day! My book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP hits bookstores. I was as surprised as anyone about the result of the 2016 election. So I spent the next few years listening and learning. This book is the result of that effort. 

The Republicans used to be seen as the party of wealthy elites and the Democrats the party of blue collar workers—and now that’s being turned upside down. Because of this, the “demography is destiny” ideas of eternal Democratic majorities never materialized. And now it’s Republicans who are on offense with voting blocs who represent a decisive majority of the country. 

Party of the People is also a hopeful story about the country, not just the two parties. Contrary to the media myths, the old divisions that separated Americans politically and in other ways by race and ethnicity are gradually fading. This is what’s making Republicans competitive in areas they never dreamed of winning before. 

There is a temptation to talk about these trends solely in terms of Donald Trump. But as I demonstrate in the book, they’ve been unfolding for more than 50 years, from Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority,” through Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush’s surges in blue-collar and rural counties, to Republicans now being on the precipice of realigning a substantial share of the nonwhite working class. 

The early 2024 polling—especially the New York Times polls this weekend—show that 2016 and 2020 were no one off. Barack Obama’s rainbow coalition—forged fifteen years ago this week—is severely weakened. Joe Biden and Democrats are struggling mightily to hold their old coalition of liberal whites and moderate nonwhites together.

Regardless of who has the advantage in 2024 or any other election, how we should think about the parties and who they stand for has permanently changed. There will be no going back to the parties we had before. And that’s a wake-up call for the establishment in both the Republican and Democratic parties. It’s also an opportunity for both parties—to win a multiracial mainstream middle class majority that’s more economically populist than most Republican politicians today and more socially moderate and un-woke than the current Democratic party.