R.I.P. The Emerging Republican Majority (2024-2024)

One of the most common errors of punditry is to over-interpret the results of individual elections. For that and some other reasons, the idea that Trump had established a new majority coalition much more diverse than his 2016 coalition became something like conventional wisdom after the 2024 elections. But this was premature at the time and as the thermostat turns has not borne out in 2025:

It is a matter of fact that Donald Trump won the 2024 election in large part by shrinking the vote margins for Kamala Harris among non-white, working-class, and young voters, relative to past Democratic nominees.

But the interpretation of Trump’s 2024 win is a matter of opinion. Some, like the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, have argued Trump’s inroads with traditionally left-leaning voters represented a fundamental realignment in American politics. He is not alone in arguing this. Many in the Democratic Party, too, interpreted Trump’s 2024 win as a historic blow — the performance of a coalition on life support. On marches the emerging Republican majority. Left-liberalism is dead.

Other analysts have been more skeptical. On the subject of realignment, political scientists have tended to land on the answer “it’s complicated.” For one thing, they argue, the national shift away from Democrats in 2024 stemmed mostly from non-ideological and non-Trump variables, such as inflation and the pandemic. Longer-term trends, too, have been pushing voters toward either party regardless of what nominees say or do, including the sorting of conservatives, regardless of race, into the Republican Party. Yes, residual group-level swings exist, but they are mostly small. Trump doesn’t look so indomitable in Dec. 2024 if you account for all the variables that set him up for victory (and it was a small victory at that).

It is clear now that claims of a fundamental realignment of American politics have been highly exaggerated. The 2024 election is best seen as an anti-incumbent election stemming from economic anxiety, most but not entirely driven by rising inflation during Joe Biden’s presidency. The elections held this week were a continuation of the anti-incumbent sentiment from last year — this time directed toward the new party in charge. The biggest difference between 2024 and 2025 is that Republicans are running the country now, instead of the Democrats.1

But for the realignment theorists, it’s actually worse than it looks. From 2024 to 2025 Republicans lost the most support — 25 points, on average — among the very voters they theorized would remake the GOP into a vast, multi-racial, working-class coalition. Today’s Chart of The Week looks at subgroup vote choice in 2025. The data suggests Trump’s winning coalition has all but evaporated — if it ever existed at all.

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This evidence suggests we should interpret the Republicans’ losses not just as a normal thermostatic reaction to the party in power, but a reflection of both profound anger, and regret, at the consequences of the 2024 election. I have seen some commentators argue that America is just “getting what it voted for” and voters are reacting to that.

On the contrary, the polls have long shown that voters did not vote for the current policy outputs of the Trump administration, and disapprove of Trump’s agenda on pretty much every account.

We can argue about whether swing voters should have known what they were voting for, but the fact is that a lot of them were either ignorant, misinformed, or dismissive of the ideas they didn’t like, but either way they just don’t want a lot of what Trump has actually done. And frankly, a lot of coverage of the election was consistent with the theme that Trump would just bring back 2018 again — extremely effective campaign strategy, but not a good strategy for dealing with what actually happens when you take office.