The Winged Nike of Pennsylvania Avenue: The Current American Plurality

The Winged Nike of Pennsylvania Avenue (full series)
It Wasn’t Just the Presidency | The Current American Plurality
How the Left Lost | Cautions and Conclusions

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The Current American Plurality

Since before the first election of President Barack Obama, Big Philanthropy and liberal interest groups have awaited the rise of a “New American Majority.” This New American Majority, a derivation from the demographic projections that inspired The Emerging Democratic Majority, was to be based on a “rising American electorate” of Generation Z and millennials, unmarried women, and “people of color,” especially Latinos—or “Latinx,” if you are the 2021-vintage Voter Participation Center.

And, as the “unmarried” adjective in the “unmarried women” segment betrays, these groups were expected to be loyally Democratic, turning the “emerging” majority into a potentially permanent one. Before the 2016 election, then-Democracy Alliance president Gara LaMarche wrote:

There is one sure path to a progressive victory in the 2016 election, and that is to excite, mobilize, and turn out at the polls the communities of what have been called the “new American majority”—African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Pacific Islanders and other communities of color, young people and women, as well as progressive white voters. This case has been most powerfully made by author and analyst Steve Phillips in this year’s key political book, Brown is the New White.

LaMarche continued, noting that the Republican candidate in the way of “a progressive victory in the 2016 election” was perhaps uniquely unsuited to the world of the “new American majority”:

Donald Trump is getting trounced in these communities, and his numbers are unlikely to improve, since racism, xenophobia and misogyny are not incidental to his candidacy, but its essential fuel.… Some polls find Trump’s support at no more than 17% of Latinos and 20% of millennials, a yawning gender gap, and a standing in the African-American community barely higher than cancer.

But all trends continue, until they cease. In 2020, Democrats were warned that Latinos were not entirely on-board with the Everything Leftist program, as south Florida and Texas’s Rio Grande Valley swung against the national tide. Asians had swung to Republicans, especially down-ballot. President Joe Biden sent Donald Trump into Floridian exile on the backs of the “falling” suburban and white American electorate changing their votes, not by super-powered rising groups marching to the Democracy Alliance drum.

And in 2024, LaMarche’s 2016 totems were all cast down by Winged Nike. Donald Trump won a Republican Party record 46 percent of Hispanic voters—and an outright majority of Latino men—in the national exit poll, with county-level results suggesting he may have even exceeded that total. Millennials and younger voters, those born after 1980, voted for Vice President Harris by only a 51 percent to 46 percent margin. The gender gap, expected throughout election season to power Vice President Harris to victory, favored Republicans, as former President Trump widened his 2020 advantage with men and narrowed his 2020 deficit with women. And while Black voters remained loyally Democratic, former President Trump narrowed his 2020 deficit even as Black turnout declined (a plausible sign of dissatisfaction with the dominant party in one-party areas).

Progressive institutions are left asking, “What happened?” The “new American majority” voted not as a loyal bloc for the “emerging Democratic majority” but divided itself with strong support for the “current American plurality”—the Republican Party of President-elect Donald Trump. Substantial evidence suggests that the progressive movement and the Democratic Party that is its electoral vehicle misjudged the communities that it claimed would make up its New American Majority.

Start with Latinos, the implicit power behind the New American Majority’s permanence as natural population growth and especially expanded immigration (and amnesty-with-citizenship for Latinos already illegally present in the country) grew their numbers. Liberals and especially the network of progressive Groups like United We Dream, UnidosUS (formerly National Council of La Raza), and CASA de Maryland acted on the apparent belief that the most important issue to Latino Americans was liberalizing border crossing and amnesty for illegal immigrants. This liberal stance would tie the “Latinx community” to the progressive movement of “oppressed” groups opposed to the “oppression” of the past, just like liberal civil rights reforms tied Black Americans to the Democratic Party in the 1960s. Former President Trump’s intemperate remarks about various Latin American countries and communities would seal the deal, showing him to be fully on the side of the “oppressors.”

But the Groups were wrong. As the Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez noted shortly after the election, Hispanic Americans are politically aligning their interests with the broader national mainstream that many if not most of them want to join or have joined. As Dan McCarthy noted in his review of Trump’s success with Latinos, immigrant groups that are aligning with the national mainstream often take populist positions on new immigration. Further, border-region Latinos (like those in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley) opposed the disorder the Biden administration’s de facto open-border policies had brought. And Latino conservatives, who had already begun to break with their legacy Democratic allegiances, continued to shed those allegiances.

The focus on Trump’s intemperateness, which started the moment he descended the Golden Escalator in 2015 and continued through the media-orchestrated panic about an insult-comic’s derisive remarks about Puerto Rico at the Trump campaign’s Madison Square Garden rally in the final days of the election season, also missed the mark. Many Latinos are fine with crude and crass entertainment and do not share professional-class liberal sensibilities about language. Giancarlo Sopo, a Spanish-language media consultant who had worked on Trump’s 2020 campaign, posted a Twitter thread shortly after the election illustrating the content of the popular American Spanish-language entertainment news show “El Gordo y la Flaca”—“The Fat Guy and the Skinny Chick”—featuring very PG-13-and-just-barely clips, alongside jokes that would not fly on English-language daytime television.

Sopo’s conclusion? “Whoever told Dems Hispanics share the PC sensibilities of white liberals committed malpractice.… No one should be shocked that Hispanics don’t vote like kids at Sarah Lawrence—it’s a different culture.” Indeed, Trump’s intemperateness compared with his more strait-laced Republican predecessors in the mold of Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) might even have helped him: As Sopo argues, “It’s easy to see now why many Hispanics didn’t feel at home in a country club GOP seen as puritanical. By and large, Hispanics aren’t socially conservative—at least not in the WASP sense.”

Latinos were not the only major constituent of the Rising American Electorate that the institutional progressive movement misread. Women were supposed to power Vice President Harris and the Democratic ticket to victory with abortion access as their foremost concern. As New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister wrote in a long screed against the brash crop of Gen X-and-younger Republican women: “if the women of today’s Republican Party are upending gender conventions in unprecedented fashion, they’re doing it in service of a party that has never been more openly hostile to women and their rights.” Indeed, Democratic committees supporting the Harris campaign, most notably Vote Common Good and the Lincoln Project, thought the hostility was so great that they produced advertisements featuring celebrities reminding potentially Republican-leaning women that they didn’t have to tell their husbands that they voted for Democrats.

Democrats noticed they had a problem with young men—just about half the “millennials and Gen Z” who were supposed to constitute the Rising American Electorate. So, while former President Trump (reportedly with the guidance of his youngest son, Barron) toured bro-culture podcasts like This Past Weekend with Theo Von, the Barstool Sports show Bussin’ with the Boys, and The Joe Rogan Experience, the biggest show of them all, the Vote Save America political committee spun out by Pod Save America parent Crooked Media put out a widely mocked web ad with actors saying that they were “man enough” to vote for Vice President Harris and other men should “man up” and do likewise.

But the Great War of the Sexes did not come to pass. Trump did as predicted and expanded his margin with men from eight points in 2020 to 13 points in 2024. But Harris did not do as predicted and rally women to her cause, as the Democratic margin with women shrank from 15 points in 2020 to eight. As comedian and cultural commentator Bridget Phetasy wrote in a post-election piece:

The Democrats realized too late that they had Bud Lighted their brand. You can’t be openly hostile to men for two decades and expect to retain the male vote. And judging by Trump’s gains with both genders, you also can’t be incapable of defining what a woman is and expect women to believe you care about them, either.

Other groups, not exclusively those named as part of the “rising American electorate,” also shifted their allegiances. In 2020, President Joe Biden had secured a majority of Catholic voters; in 2024, his vice president lost them by a wide margin. While exit polls were unclear, precinct-level election-results data suggest former President Trump did unusually well for a Republican with Jewish voters, or at least Jewish voters who identify their Jewishness by religious observance. Muslim enclaves in Michigan swung hard toward the former president despite his support for Israel, in part perhaps a reflection on Trump’s campaigning on a peacemaking platform and Vice President Harris surrounding herself with ex-Republican hawks like ex-Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) on the campaign trail. Even the irreligious, a strong Democratic base constituency, shifted toward the GOP.

Perhaps the most conspicuous change of the party coalitions was one of class. Previously, the highest income group was a comfortably Republican constituency, while lower income Americans voted for the party of Big Labor and Big Government, the Democrats. In 2024, that reversed, with exit polls showing former President Trump winning households making less than $100,000 by three points while Vice President Harris won households making more than that sum by five. Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, author of Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP in 2023, saw many of his predictions borne out.

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In the next installment, the Left decisively lost the 2024 election because of the excesses of Everything Leftism.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-winged-nike-of-pennsylvania-avenue-part-2/