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A Governing Majority, If You Can Keep It
Politics
A Governing Majority, If You Can Keep It
Trump has assembled a Republican coalition that, if maintained, can usher in a period of generational strength.
(Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Stories of historic comebacks are usually reserved for works of fiction; rarely in life, especially in politics, do we see a near-mythical resurrection. In living memory, only Richard Nixon managed such a feat at a national level, staging a political comeback in 1968, winning a 49-state landslide re-election, only to have his legacy lost to the Watergate scandal and his resignation.
While Trump still has four more years to craft his legacy, hopefully avoiding a Nixonian obituary, the 47th and 37th presidents share a commonality: Their comebacks were each forged by a new Republican Party. In the same way that Nixon brought formerly Democratic Southerners, ethnic whites, Evangelicals, and neoconservatives into the Republican Party in 1968, Trump added young men, a multiracial working-class, and urban centers in the GOP’s big tent.
Nixon’s 1968 election gave Republicans a blueprint that delivered them the White House in five out of six elections from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. So what has Donald Trump’s 2024 election offered? A governing majority, if they can keep it. Here’s how he did it.
Donald Trump is set to enter the White House for the second time with the highest favorability numbers he’s ever had. The Emerson College poll found that 54 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the 45th and 47th president. The YouGov poll has his favorables at 50 percent, the first time he’s been above unfavorables in his political career.
It may be difficult to remember in the afterglow of such a large election victory that Trump was at his most vulnerable position 20 months ago. In the aftermath of the 2022 midterm elections that saw disappointing results for Republicans and a series of Trump-backed candidates, including Kari Lake, Dough Mastriano, Tudor Dixon, and Herschel Walker, go down in defeat, a number of Republicans were ready to move on from The Donald and all the baggage he brought with him.
At the beginning of 2023, Trump found himself polling behind Ron DeSantis in New Hampshire and Florida, and he had just a small plurality in South Carolina, where former Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott managed to split enough votes to keep him in the lead. Nationally, polls found him leading with Republican voters by just single digits for the first time since 2016.
Americans overall, and a sizable population of Republicans, didn’t want to renew the Trump show for a seventh season. According to the Quinnipiac poll from February 2023, Trump’s favorability was -20 points nationally, he was losing a head-to-head matchup against Joe Biden, and about one-in-five Republicans had soured on him.
Trump was not out, but definitely down. After losing the 2020 election, January 6, and losses in the midterms, he needed to regain his image as the ultimate winner, the boss from The Apprentice, the tycoon who would risk it all to Make America Great Again.
His numbers slowly began ticking up in the Republican primary as he warred with his GOP opponents; his army of social media influencers and television surrogates denounced DeSantis and Haley as being weak and too liberal. Yet it was Trump’s vulnerability in the next few months that changed the state of the race permanently.
In late March, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s decision to indict Trump over payments made to Stormy Daniels through his lawyer galvanized his campaign in a way Democrats hadn’t foreseen. The indictment which seemed so overtly political in nature caused a massive rally-around-the-king effect. The RealClearPolitics polling average showed Trump’s overall lead in the GOP primary went from Trump +15 to Trump +30 in a matter of two weeks.
“If they can do that to him, they can do it to me,” was a sentiment I heard from more than one voter. What voters were really saying was, they’ve done this to me and now they’re doing this to him. Republicans had seen the double standards in law enforcement for some time. Why hadn’t Hillary Clinton ever received the same treatment over the email server she destroyed or Joe Biden over the classified documents he kept in his house or any of the experts responsible for poor decisions that led to the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, or the COVID-lockdowns that ruined countless lives? Trump being held to a different standard made him more relatable by people who felt the government was never on their side.
More charges followed in Georgia, Washington, D.C., and South Florida, all creating the same response from Republicans. For a population with deep distrust of Washington and politicians, there was no better endorsement of Trump than Alvin Bragg and Fanny Willis bringing these charges. Voters had a collective eye roll that the powers-that-be would do anything, say anything, and bring any charges possible to stop this man which made them trust him more.
By the time voting began in the primary, Trump had regained a commanding lead against both his primary opponents and Joe Biden.
According to the New York Times/Siena poll from December 2023, Trump had the support of 63 percent of all Republicans, including three-quarters of white Republicans without a college degree. For the first time, Americans had a higher favorable opinion of him than Joe Biden. Trump’s -12 favorability was substantially better than his successor’s -18 approval rating.
Rather than believing the left’s narrative that Trump was wildly corrupt, voters were overall split on whether the charges brought against him were political in nature, but Republicans were resolute that this was all done to stop him from running for president. More than 80 percent of GOP primary voters said it was a political hitjob, to just 14 percent who said the charges were serious.
It is extremely difficult for public figures with near universal name ID to change their public perception, oftentimes taking years of carefully constructed media appearances to slowly improve someone’s image. Donald Trump managed to do it in a matter of months with the help of Democrats. He went from being an internet bully-in-chief to a martyr whose only crime in the eyes of his voters was standing up against the forces that be.
He had his base back and, by March 6, had won the nomination. The party was firmly his.
When an assassin attempted to kill Trump on July 13, it only cemented the idea in voters’ minds that Trump’s detractors would do anything to stop him from becoming president. The fact that he survived because he happened to move his head just seconds before meant there was a divine providence protecting his life.
An old political trope is that a politician is never more popular than the day after they leave office. In a 2023 Gallup survey, every former president since 1960 with the exception of Bill Clinton is more popular than their last day in the White House.
And it’s true despite political partisanship. A majority of Democrats approve of the way Reagan, George W. Bush, and George H.W. Bush handled their job as president. Nearly 40 percent of Republicans say the same of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did a good job as president. John Kennedy has the overall highest approval rating of 90 percent, despite being president for only 1,036 days and having a scandal-ridden White House that nearly launched the United States into a nuclear war.
People look back at retired politicians and don’t remember them so much as they remember themselves in that time or the picture that’s been painted for them by the media and historians. A 60-year-old may look back at the Carter years and think less about the oil crisis and days of malaise and remember more their youth and the simplicity of the time, creating a fonder image of the president with that memory. It’s like hearing someone say of their childhood, “We were poor but we were happy.”
Trump’s legacy enjoyed the same reflection from the rearview mirror, especially in comparison to his successor’s handling of immigration, inflation, wages, crime, high interest rates, the wars in Ukraine and Israel and the retreat from Afghanistan. Americans collectively looked back on the Trump administration and remembered less turbulence across the globe, a robust economy, and controlled borders. Any memory of January 6 and COVID had been relegated to MSNBC’s viewership and #Resist libs’ social media.
It only helped Trump that the Biden administration and its media allies’ response to any criticism from voters was that they inherited the problem from Trump, it was worse under Trump, or that voters shouldn’t trust their feelings on the subject. Any voice dissenting from this narrative was considered blasphemous because they were helping a man they labeled as a threat against democracy.
The media’s increasingly unhinged narratives about Trump became more difficult to justify at a time when voters struggled to put food on the table or buy a home. At the same time, they were insistent that the Biden’s administration’s inability to get a handle on the border and rampant illegal criminality was not happening, or that it was actually a good thing that it was happening. (Think of all the new Uber Eats drivers coming from south of the border!)
It also helped that Trump wasn’t on social media outside Truth Social, where only his most loyal followers spent time. The media said Trump was unhinged, unwell, or in a mental decline, but voters saw none of it. This wasn’t 2016, when his tweets were breaking news; people weren’t inundated with the media’s opinion of daily Trump’s tweets and had anyway grown exhausted of how the media portrayed his “scandals” ranging from how many scoops of ice cream he ate to how chummy he was with foreign dictators. None of it mattered if they were struggling to buy eggs or felt unsafe in their community.
By April 2023, a CNN poll found that 55 percent of Americans viewed Trump’s presidency as a success, up 14 points since he left the White House. On the other hand, Biden’s presidency was thought of as a failure by over 60 percent of the country.
A Marquette University poll in May found that voters trust Trump more than Biden on the economy, immigration and the border, Israel, and foreign policy.
The Donald Trump who lived in people’s memory and the prosperity he brought during his first term was part of the person they were voting for, while the ailing and aging Joe Biden and the media that lied to defend him was who they were voting against.
“He is far beyond cogent, in fact I think he’s better than he’s ever been,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said on March 6 about Joe Biden when questions of his mental fitness came up in the media. “I’m about to tell you the truth, and ‘f’ you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically is the best Biden ever. Not a close second.”
About 10 weeks later, a bewildered-looking Biden stood before the entire country during the presidential debate and announced, “We finally beat Medicare.” These are probably the most consequential four words ever uttered during a presidential debate.
For millions of Americans, it was an indictment of the media as much as it was of Biden himself. The public knew what was so obvious for so long: There was something wrong with our president, and everyone from the vice president to the media had lied to the country about it. Everyone who had publicly questioned the White House narrative was called a conspiracy theorist or a right-wing stooge helping Trump. Those four words permanently sowed a level of distrust in the media’s narrative about this election that could never be undone.
Within weeks, the whole house of cards came crumbling down. Trump was beating Biden by 5 to 6 points in the national popular vote according to polls from CBS News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and CNN. This election was on course to be a rout. Private polling had Trump winning Virginia, Minnesota, New Mexico, Maine, New Hampshire, and even New Jersey. Knowing how close the election actually was against Harris, it’s not inconceivable that Trump would have won all those states and put places like New York and Illinois into play.
For the first time ever, a Democrat knew what it felt like to be a Republican as the entire media, donor class, and political establishment pressed Joe Biden with wall-to-wall negative coverage and pressure to drop out of the race.
Biden did, Harris became the nominee, and overnight the woman who for four years had been compared to the bumbling, narcissistic Vice President Selina Meyer on the show Veep was being sold as the ultimate girl boss.
Donald Trump has been famous longer than the average American has been alive. For decades he was one of the most famous men in America and someone celebrities wanted to be photographed with until he descended on the golden escalator in 2016. Yet for the last decade, to be associated with Trump was to be considered a social pariah. You could be “cancelled” for wearing a MAGA hat or relegated to D-list celebrity status. That all changed during this election.
It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment, but there were a few signs, as when rapper 50 Cent posted a picture of Trump’s face on his hit album cover, Trump’s series of appearances at UFC fights with Dana White, the YouTube influencer and boxer Jake Paul’s endorsement, Joe Rogan’s interview, or the TikTok dances.
For the first time, it was socially acceptable and even cool to be a Trump supporter.
Now, obviously Trump didn’t have the A-list celebrity endorsements that Harris had; there was no Beyonce, Taylor Swift, or Oprah Winfrey to join him at a rally. He didn’t need them, though. He needed Americans who were on the fence and needed it to be okay to support Trump, especially women and minorities. So when the model Amber Rose spoke at the RNC, the rapper Kodak Black lent Trump his endorsement, or the wife of the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes came out supporting Trump on Instagram, it didn’t influence voters minds but just made it less fringe to support him either publicly or privately.
The UFC and podcasting played a major part in this evolution of the Trump brand. Trump entering UFC fights became a type of event in and of itself, as celebrities like Joe Burrow and Nick Bosa took selfies with him. Who sat next to Trump became an area of interest, as well as noting which fighters saluted him before or after the match. The stigma of being seen with this man was gone.
Podcasting added another layer to Trump’s appeal with young voters, especially young men. Want to hear Trump talk about UFOs, the assassination attempt, his favorite insults for political opponents, cocaine, football, Jeffrey Epstein, reviving the economy, and which celebrities he knew? Well, there was a podcast appearance about that. Trump spoke to any of these major podcasters about basically anything they’re interested in for hours at a time.
This was an important strategy not only for reaching out to the young college-aged male but also the young minority male vote. Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Andrew Schultz, Barstool Sports, and the rest have massive audiences of minority men, and this is supplemented for traditional campaign coalition teams. You don’t have to do “[insert ethnicity] for Trump” when you’re reaching out to a cross-section of podcast listeners.
A senior member of Team Trump said that the campaign benefited from having people of diverse ages on the campaign who could advocate for which podcasts to appear on and think outside of the box.
Being affiliated with Trump was just no longer radioactive. Podcastsers, social media influencers, and the UFC made Trump more relatable—while Oprah, Taylor Swift, and Beyonce made Harris more distant.
Labeling J.D. Vance “weird” always seemed, well, weird to me. Perhaps because I’ve known him for a few years and worked on a Super PAC supporting his 2022 Senate election, I knew he was as normal as anyone could be given his intelligence and incredible success. How many people serve in the military, become a best-selling author, literary celebrity, venture capitalist, senator, and vice presidential candidate by the time they’re 40? That is weird, I suppose.
Democrats worked overtime to paint him as the worst possible pick for vice president. Minnesota’s Gov. Tim Walz took pleasure in calling him “weird,” a phrase that was repeated on the campaign stump and on social media countless times.
Vance was largely left out to dry during his initial rollout. He certainly had many detractors within the GOP who didn’t want him on the ticket. This came from both figures at the center of the party, who felt he was too unorthodox and wanted someone that more closely resembled Mike Pence, and those on the more conservative side who wanted an older pick, someone who couldn’t be a natural successor to Trump and would retire in 2028 when he did. The negative onslaught against Vance, who had already spent nearly a decade since the release of Hillbilly Elegy in the media spotlight, reached a fever pitch once Trump announced him.
To his credit, Vance didn’t shy away from tough interviews; he met the challenge, sometimes appearing on three or four Sunday shows. He was taking on more combative interviews on any given weekend than Harris and Walz did during the entire campaign.
Walz’s inexperience doing interviews—especially in comparison to Vance, who did nearly one a day—proved a serious weakness in the vice-presidential debate. The two standing side-by-side lent itself to comparisons of the Nixon–Kennedy debates in 1960. Walz looked sweaty, stuttering, and incredibly nervous, like Fred Mertz during a scene from I Love Lucy; Vance was calm, collected, and threw TV-canny side-eyes at the moderators and his political adversary.
The debate was remarkably substantive, hearkening back to a different time in politics, one that the general public missed. Vance breathed a new level of intelligence to Trumpism—less flashy, more relatable, while being able to note the complexity of public policy.
His post-debate appearances also focused on the podcast circuit more, with comedians like Theo Von, Tim Dillon, and Joe Rogan. While they received less media attention than Trump’s, they destroyed any notion that he was weird. The majority of the top comments on the Theo Von podcast all had the same take, “This guy is supposed to be weird? He’s the most normal, down-to-earth guy.”
When the New York Times interviewed 13 young voters, three, two of whom were women, said they cast their ballots for Trump because Vance was on the ticket.
“I can’t believe it, but I did end up voting for Donald Trump. I made that decision when I saw J.D. Vance’s interview with the New York Times. He is the future of the Republican Party. I’m more voting for Vance than I am for Trump,” said Abigail, a 23-year-old graduate assistant who voted for Biden in 2020.
“I shocked myself and voted for Trump. No one tell my family. I was so impressed by JD Vance, the way he carried himself and how normal he appeared,” said McLane, a 25-year-old resident of Washington D.C. who wrote in Mitt Romney’s name in 2020.
Perhaps Vance’s family life, as a doting husband to a very successful lawyer and active father, helped appeal with young women who were on the fence and weren’t seeing the misogynist who defamed “cat ladies” that the media were talking about.
Despite promoting an image of a girlboss running a flawless campaign based on joy, Harris was always in trouble. To the public, the difference between her and Joe Biden was skin-deep; she could never fully explain how she would chart her own path for the country. Her campaign strategy seemed to be dodging interviews, palling around with celebrities, and laughing like a hyena in front of the cameras.
Almost every media narrative on her campaign was based on “vibes,” not facts. Reporters and television pundits proudly proclaimed that this election was going to show the biggest gender divide in American political history, but polls never showed that. Among aggregated public polls, Kamala was never doing better among women than Biden or Hillary Clinton. There were countless comparisons to Barack Obama, but they were never sincere. Whether you hate or love Obama, his defeat of Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary was meteoric, and the campaign had a genuine groundswell of support that defined the era.
During a series of softball interviews, Harris wasn’t able to answer the most basic question of how she differed with Biden on voters’ top issues, particularly immigration and the economy. It became a running joke how often she would say, “I grew up in a middle-class family.”
This was most evident on The View, where the most openly racist person on television, Sunny Hostin, asked Harris whether she would have done anything different than Biden.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris responded. “And I’ve been part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”
At a time when governing political parties across the globe were losing elections, this answer isn’t going to cut it.
Also hurting Harris were the radical positions she took in 2020 during the “Great Awokening,” when she championed Black Lives Matter activists’ calls to defund the police, open-border activists’ calls for amnesty and destroying ICE, and trans activists’ demands for taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries. She allowed herself to make decisions based upon the whims of the most mentally ill leftists on Twitter and in Democratic think tanks, which proved to be nightmarish when she became the party’s nominee.
Trump’s closing ad—“he’s for you and she’s for ‘they/them,’” in which he discussed Harris’s support for taxpayer funded transgeneder surgeries for illegal aliens—was especially brilliant because it played to two of her weakest points. Post-election, many politicians, including on the left, focused on how she was too supportive of the trans movement but her inability to come out for real enforcement on illegal immigration was also a big part of it.
In the postmortem of her election, Democratic strategists are finger pointing at Biden, Merrick Garland for not indicting Trump, and voters for refusing to see what they saw.
Ultimately, however, the party was suffering from a bad economy that it refused even to acknowledge and from candidates who were too far to the left for the country. They believed that Harris’s identity as a woman of color who supported abortion and “democracy” would be enough to win over voters when it ended up pushing them away.
Asking who is to blame for Harris’s failure to secure 270 electoral votes, Democrats need to only look in the mirror and reflect on the utter madness they have espoused over the last four years. “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Donald Trump’s victory defied all expectations: he won every swing state, the popular vote, and put states like New Jersey, Minnesota, and New Hampshire into play. His last term in office will begin much like his first term, with a Republican majority in the Senate and a small one in the House. But as divided as the party seemed when he first put his hand on the Bible and gave his “American carnage” speech, it is now more united than it has been in decades. Today, it is the MAGA party; Trump built it on his sheer ability to connect with people and defy decades of political orthodoxy that no longer served the public.
Trump is a unique politician; we’ll never see someone like him again. The coalition he built was equally as special. According to AP VoteCast, Trump’s path to victory brought together a majority of Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, 47 percent of millennials, who made up the base of Obama’s coalition, and a shocking 47 percent of Gen-Zers, who get their news on TikTok, X, and Instagram.
The base of his party is the working-class white men and women, especially ethnic whites, who delivered Appalachia, the South, and the Rust Belt; one in four black men, who helped him win in Georgia and North Carolina; and nearly half of all Hispanic and Asian men, who made a big difference in the Southwest and counties in big blue states like Nassau, New York; Passaic, New Jersey; Riverside, California; and precincts across Massachusetts, Illinois, and Virginia.
There’s also the women’s vote, which Trump only lost by single digits—the most narrow of all three of his elections.
So why did this coalition come together for him?
In part, because voters had become exhausted by the narrative that he was an existential threat to the nation. Liberal hyperbole about Trump’s tenure was unfounded to the lived experience of his first term. We never got the world war they promised. That’s the problem with the man chanting “the end is near”; eventually it has to come. For the Trump panickers, it never did.
Second, was the dishonesty of the media in refusing to acknowledge basic truths most Americans felt. The economy isn’t in great shape, illegal alien gangs were operating in cities and municipalities where they’d never before been present, and crime had increased in large parts of the country. Their refusal to acknowledge what people were going through made this election in part a referendum on the media which so heavily was tipping the scales for Kamala after spending three years lying about Joe Biden’s health.
Ideologically, Trump also ran as a moderate, but not in the sense most politicos understand it. When the average person thinks of a moderate, they may immediately think of someone like Susan Collins or Joe Manchin, when in fact moderates hold far-left and far-right positions on various issues that make them seem moderate when you average them out.
A University of California, Berkeley study from 2014 found that the average moderate voters tended to hold left-wing positions on Social Security, Medicare, and marijuana while having right-wing positions on immigration, the environment, and unions. That’s basically where Trump’s rhetoric lay, along with other conservative positions on Israel, crime, and taxes. While Harris’s team insisted that she had backed away from more radical positions from her past, she never backed away from them publicly. In fact, when she was asked how she voted on a California amendment to raise the punishments for certain drug and theft crimes, she wouldn’t state her position. She felt that her answer could be too divisive, splintering her far-left base. The amendment passed with nearly 69 percent of the vote.
That essentially tells the story of the modern Democratic Party, ignoring the overwhelming majority to chase the most fringe segments of their base on issues like crime, immigration, and the economy. According to the Fox News exit survey, voters trust Trump more than Harris on all those issues.
Trump, on the other hand, was able to moderate on issues like abortion, chasing moderate voters and correctly believing that the overwhelming majority of pro-life voters wouldn’t abandon him. So when 63 percent of Americans said in exit polls that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, Trump won a third of their vote, while holding on to 83 percent of pro-lifers.
It should come as no surprise then that the Fox News survey showed that 52 percent of respondents believed Donald Trump had the right policy ideas for the country compared, to 47 percent for Kamala Harris.
Part of this majority coalition is unique to Trump, certainly many minority voters who cast a ballot for a Republican for the first time backed Democrats running in the House and Senate. Yet that doesn’t have to be forever. Just as Nixon created the coalition that put Republicans in the White House in five out of six presidential elections, Trump may have created such a winning coalition for the long term.
Trump was these voters’ first foray into voting Republican, but as so long as the party is able to a more working-class party and more trusted on the issues of crime, immigration, and the economy, and as long as Democrats continue to surrender to the most radical segments of their base, they’ll have a path to the majority.
As we close the book on Trump being a candidate for office, it’s worth reconsidering the words of Abraham Lincoln: “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise—with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
Donald Trump disentangled the Republican Party from the dogmas of neoconservatism, moving past the bygone days of Reagan and Bush and reaching out to voters who were always within reach but never felt a political party spoke to them. Some say he conducted a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, but in fact all he did was see a million-dollar bill on the ground and pick it up. Democrats and the corporate media cannot help but push against him—they have too much at stake in the current political system—but if the GOP can continue to build itself up as a working-class party that advocates for the forgotten man, it will keep Trump’s governing majority.
The post A Governing Majority, If You Can Keep It appeared first on The American Conservative.
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