The Pew report and the primary
Confirming Trump's more diverse coalition, Mamdani romps in the "Commie Corridor," luxury beliefs, inclusive populism, active vs. passive news consumption, Blue Substack, Dem heterodoxy
No. 365 | June 27th, 2025
🇺🇲 2024
The Pew validated voter study of the 2024 election, the last of the major accounts of how groups voted, is out.
Key topline takeaways:
Trump got within 3 points among Hispanics, a narrower margin than any of the exit polls or post-election reports.
He received 15 percent of the Black vote, in line with other estimates.
Asian American voters swung by more than 20 points, from 70-30 Democratic in 2020 to 57-40 in 2024.
Nonvoters favored Trump, and if everyone had voted, his margin would have expanded to 3 points.
One of their charts underscores just how much more diverse the Republican coalition has gotten under Trump:
Sabato’s Crystal Ball further analyzes the Pew report and compares its findings to other 2024 election post-mortems, including the Catalist and Edison reports.
🗽 NYC Mayor
The story of the week is Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City Democratic primary.
Michael Lange, a pro-Mamdani analyst who deserves credit for accurately calling the race, breaks down the seven distinct voter bases in the primary for The New York Times:
And here’s my breakdown of the city’s political communities, together with the election results. Earlier, I wrote that Mamdani would have to crack into the city’s minority working class base to win, normally a tall order for progressive candidates. It appears that he did so, while also scoring commanding margins in his base areas — the gentrifying neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens that Lange dubs “The Commie Corridor.”
Not only did Mamdani clean up in gentrifying neighborhoods, but he reshaped the electorate. Turnout was up more than 30% in his base and flat or down elsewhere. This graph from cinycmaps.com illustrates that, compared to the 2021 New York City mayoral election, voter turnout rose in white progressive neighborhoods and declined in Black communities.
Using this data, I asked to see how the first round would have shaken out if turnout by precinct was like 2021. Mamdani would have won the first round by 2.3 points instead of 7, a bigger shift than you normally get from turnout alone. And that likely understates things, if it was Mamdani voters — not just Mamdami precincts — that were likelier to turn out.
The New York Times published a short overview of how the New York City mayoral candidates fared across various neighborhoods and demographic groups.
Rob Henderson takes note of this to write that while Mamdani’s platform was superficially aimed at poor New Yorkers, in reality, they appealed to rich progressives who’d be shielded from the negative consequences of policies like lax policing — what Henderson has called “luxury beliefs:”
But while Mamdani pretends to be an ordinary person for political advantage, working-class New Yorkers see right through him. A recent Emerson poll projects him winning 57 per cent of white voters, but only 26 per cent of Black voters and 35 per cent of Hispanic voters. While 57 per cent of college-educated voters support Mamdani, only 23 per cent of those without a college degree do.
The latest results show Mamdani failing to win the support of the very people he claims to champion.
Working class voters know that, with his unrealistic promises, Mamdani sounds like a kid running for student council who promises longer recess and endless free pizza. It sounds great until someone asks who’s paying for the pizza, or discovers that “longer recess” means there’s no time to teach the 3Rs.
…If he wins the upcoming mayoral election, New Yorkers can expect to be governed by luxury beliefs. The elites will feel absolved, having elected a socialist who makes them feel less guilty about their wealth, while never having to suffer the consequences. And the working class will have to keep on struggling.
And Ruy Teixeira brings the fire in this post, arguing that Democrats can’t use Mamdani’s example to dial economic populism up to 11 while ignoring toxic cultural positions anathema to the working class:
It’s really is magical thinking to believe that simply changing the subject to economics will evaporate these cultural liabilities. Culture matters—a lot—and the issues to which they are connected matter. They are a hugely important part of how voters, especially outside of deep blue areas like New York City, assess who is on their side and who is not; whose philosophy they can identify with and whose they can’t.
Instead, for working-class voters in most areas of the country to seriously consider their economic pitch, Democrats need to convince them that they are not looked down on, that their concerns are taken seriously, and that their views on culturally-freighted issues will not be summarily dismissed as unenlightened. That’s the threshold test for many of the working-class voters Democrats need to reach and Democrats have flunked it over and over.
That’s why changing the subject to economic populism doesn’t work and won’t work outside of special cases like New York City—any more than talking incessantly about MAGA extremism/fascism did in the last election. Working-class voters aren’t stupid and they can tell when you’re just changing the subject and have not really changed the underlying cultural outlook they detest. Convincing voters of the latter is much harder and more uncomfortable for Democrats. But it has to be done, whether inclusive populists like it or not.
📰 Media Habits
Navigator has a fascinating report on “passive” vs. “active” news consumers.
Kyle Tharp explains that Substack has become a new hub for left-leaning political discourse.
👫 Demographics
Brian Schaffner and Caroline Soler of Good Authority argue that the widely discussed Democratic losses among Hispanic voters may be underestimated because many who adopt conservative views stop identifying as Hispanic.
🔵 The Democrats
Galen Druke (formerly of FiveThirtyEight) argues that the next Democratic presidential candidate should challenge their own party and offer a mix of ideological positions, much like Trump did in 2016.
The point is that any ambitious Democrats positioning themselves for 2028 shouldn’t think about picking between moderate and progressive lanes. They should pick both. They should also feel comfortable attacking the Democratic Party for its recent failures.
Voters’ views can change a lot in two years, but today that might look something like running on the right on immigration and on the left on health care. Health care is one of the single most important issues to Democrats. The party is also more trusted than the G.O.P. on the issue. Republicans are still more trusted on immigration, and it is a top issue to Americans overall. Such a strategy could also include, for example, a conservative critique of the debt and deficit, and a liberal critique of housing affordability. The state of the economy in 2027 and early 2028 will largely determine the winning message there.
The same goes for social issues: Assert that the goal is for all people to be treated with dignity and that Democrats got carried away with ideas that ultimately didn’t further that goal.