President-elect Donald Trump raised eyebrows when he decided to hold a campaign rally in the Bronx in late May.
The New York City borough has been one of the most Democratic-leaning counties in the country for years. Trump won just 15% of the vote there in 2020 and 9% in 2016. Democrats viewed it as a stunt amid his criminal trial in Manhattan. Some suggested the crowd was made up of supporters far from the borough’s borders.
In the end, the rally stood out not because of anything Trump said or did, but because of who showed up. It was one of the most diverse rallies of his entire political career. And as Tuesday’s results started pouring in, it was clear Trump was on to something bigger, not just in the Bronx but throughout the country. His coalition had changed.
Results so far show Trump winning more than 27% of the vote in the Bronx, shrinking his margin of defeat there significantly. It was the best result for a Republican presidential candidate in the borough in 40 years.
Back in May, one of the Democratic officials who expressed doubt over who exactly showed up to Trump’s rally was Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who represents the district where the rally took place. Those doubts were erased on Tuesday.
“I despise Donald Trump,” Torres said. “I feel like he is a threat to the norms of liberal democracy, but he’s a brilliant politician. He has brilliant intuitions, and he knew that he was making inroads into communities of color.”
Torres said it would be unimaginable for a Democrat to win roughly 30% of the vote in one of the reddest, most rural counties in America, and he said the results necessitate a serious reckoning in the Democratic Party.
“Donald Trump’s greatest breakthrough lies not in cracking the blue wall in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin,” Torres added. “His greatest breakthrough lies in breaking the blue wall in the reliably Democratic urban centers of America, like the ultimate blue wall of the Bronx.”
The most dramatic and headline-grabbing shift of the 2024 election was among Latino men, who backed President Joe Biden by 23 points in 2020 and Trump by 12 points this year, according to the NBC News exit poll. It’s a trend that showed up in pre-election polling and was clear in precinct results.
But the shifts in the 2024 election were even more wide-ranging than that. Working-class voters shifted more toward Trump. So too did women, Asian Americans, voters of color at large, young voters, rural voters, independents and voters with household incomes under $100,000, the exit poll showed. Most demographics that were already favorable to Trump became even more so. Most that were favorable to Democrats became less so.
The only places Vice President Kamala Harris made real gains on Trump were with white, educated and wealthy voters.
In short, Trump has been able to engineer a near-wholesale rightward shift in the electorate in ways that he couldn’t in 2016 or 2020, when it seemed as though different constituencies were racing past each other in opposite directions. The trends have blown up long-held Democratic and Republican narratives about how Americans vote. It’s leading Democrats far beyond Torres to sound the alarm about the party’s future as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement grew to become the most diverse GOP coalition in generations and gave Trump the most decisive victory for a GOP presidential nominee in two decades.
“Insane, truly insane,” a Republican operative who described themselves as “shell-shocked” by the results on Tuesday said of his improvements with Democratic and Republican constituencies. Like others interviewed for this article, the operative would only speak anonymously to offer candid analysis of party strategy. “It was just everyone.”
An ‘anti-establishment’ election
Now, people on both sides of the fight are trying to nail down exactly what caused these shifts, and there are a few explanations.
First and foremost is anger over rising prices and a sense that Democrats did not do enough to curb them, even as inflation has slowed. Second is anger over a rise in undocumented immigration that Biden’s administration only started to combat years into his presidency, after opinions had hardened. And Democrats felt there was a clear impact from Trump’s nonstop ad campaign targeting Harris for comments she made in 2019 about favoring taxpayer funding to provide gender transition care to prison inmates.
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., thought Trump’s gains with women — in addition to independents and minority voters — were particularly notable, given how much focus Democrats placed on abortion rights in the first presidential election after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling in 2022.
“Yes, abortion was on the ballot,” Mace said. “But so too was the kitchen table, so too was gasoline, so too was immigration.”
Moreover, Trump clearly benefited in the closing weeks from being seen as the change agent and the anti-establishment figure, a sense that was boosted by his campaigning with onetime independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who represented Hawaii as a Democrat but is now a Republican; and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.
“They don’t like the traditional parties,” Mace said of these voters. “People hate both sides, quite frankly. And what Trump brings to the table is he’s … seen as a man of the people.”
“The guy just won the popular vote, something nobody predicted this year,” she added. “And it’s this anti-establishment theme that he is tapped into that nobody has done in a really long time.”
Trump himself commented on these shifts during an interview with NBC News, saying: “I started to see realignment could happen because the Democrats are not in line with the thinking of the country.”
There’s also specific outreach Trump engaged in to reach minorities and young voters, particularly his efforts to campaign on popular (and not explicitly political) podcasts in an effort to reach young men, a demographic that has leaned Democratic in recent years. The NBC News exit poll showed Harris winning voters under 30 years old by 11 points this fall after Biden won them by 17 points in 2020.
“Inflation hurt everyone regardless of their age, skin color or where they live,” Mike Berg, a senior official at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NBC News. “Trump’s strategy of going on apolitical podcasts to reach low-propensity voters was also a stroke of genius.”
Tim Murtaugh, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said the moment he realized the president-elect was going to have a large swing in his favor among voters who were not expected to be in the GOP coalition came when the Teamsters declined to endorse in the campaign, breaking decades of precedent. That came after Biden moved to shore up the union’s pensions.
Not only did the Teamsters decline to endorse, Murtaugh noted, but they also released polling in swing states, including Pennsylvania, that showed Trump winning over large numbers of their members.
“To me this was a huge, clear sign that Donald Trump was remaking the party into something that prioritizes the concerns of working people,” he said. “It’s the way he began MAGA in 2015, spotlighting our trade imbalances and the resulting destruction of jobs that went along with it. He has empathy for the situations and frustrations of the people, and their sense that the government and the elites don’t care about them.”
NBC News exit polling showed Trump winning voters in households with incomes under $100,000 by 4 points, after Biden carried that demographic by 17 points in 2020. Voters who never attended college favored Trump by 28 points in the exit poll after backing him by 8 points in 2020.
‘We have no easy path here’
For one Democratic policy aide, the biggest concern was movement among younger voters. Feelings about masculinity were leading segments of Gen Z to break from the longtime trend of younger voters being more liberal, this person said.
“These kids are like, ‘Trump is cool. He’s the man, he’s great. He’s cool. It’s cool, bro. He’s cool,’” the Democrat said. “Everyone’s like, ‘Whoa, whoa, Latinos and African Americans like Republicans now.’ No, the men wanted a man. The men wanted a man’s man.”
“We have no easy path here,” this person continued. “We need to convince people that we’re the adults in the room, that we care about the economy, that we care about their pocketbook, that we’re cool dudes, that were not communists, that we’re not sexualizing their children, that we’re … not going to ban Zyn.”
Democrats acknowledged Harris was facing a difficult environment and only had just over 100 days to make her case to the country. They also pointed to her losses being much less substantial in battleground states where she invested time and resources than in places like New York, New Jersey and Illinois, where the campaign was not messaging to voters.
But there was also a sense among Democrats that having a tightly controlled candidate and campaign, as they have in a string of recent presidential elections, might not be as beneficial as longtime party hands believe it to be.
“People yearn for … someone to tell them the goddamn truth,” a Pennsylvania Democrat said. “Regardless of whether we know that Trump is not speaking the truth, people believe that he is. And what happened [Tuesday] was a Louisville Slugger baseball bat going upside the head of the Democratic Party for not telling people the truth. And the truth is, some of their lives suck. Acknowledge it. No one has the perfect solution to fix it, but acknowledge it.”
This person had a stark warning for Democrats over the voters who drifted from the party this cycle, particularly younger voters.
“One cycle, OK. Two cycles, if they vote that way, you’re starting to teeter on the edge, and if an individual votes for a party three straight cycles in a row, you’re never getting them back,” this person said. “And so you better go and listen to these people tomorrow, or you’re going to lose them, and it will be generational.”
State and national polling previewed these shifts: In a pre-election handbook, the progressive Working Families Party found a lot of moderate, working-class voters who straddle the line between the two parties fit into a demographic they dubbed the “anti-woke traditionalists” — largely agreeing with Democrats on economic policy and with Republicans on social norms.
A progressive strategist said that while Harris did have good messaging around fighting price gouging and making housing more affordable, the vice president did not make clear that voters were right to be upset with their economic conditions.
“They had good solutions that I think would have fit well,” this person said. “You can’t tell people that something they’re feeling isn’t right. And I think that’s kind of where they messed up.”
Back in the Bronx, an overwhelmingly Black and Latino county, Torres said many Americans felt the country was headed in the wrong direction, were concerned with rising prices and were frustrated by “an unprecedented wave of migration,” particularly in places like New York, that strained local governments.
“We were hoping that Donald Trump was so radioactive that we could overcome that challenge, but we were wrong,” he said.
He said part of the problem was the Biden administration worrying too much about upsetting the party’s left flank, particularly on immigration, which he said slowed its response to dealing with the crisis. Backlash over immigration and inflation led to a “complete collapse of Latino support” for Democrats, he added.
“We have to expunge from our vocabulary the words ‘we have a messaging problem,’” Torres said. “If 70% of the country thinks we’re headed in the wrong direction, we do not have a messaging problem. We have a reality problem. Inflation and immigration are not messaging problems. These are reality problems.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
