Shifting Parties
Hello, I hope things are going well for you this holiday weekend! MLK Day is a special day for so many of us as he died combating the three great evils of racism, poverty and war.
The Iowa Republican Primary takes place today – barring something shocking Trump is expected to prevail. And tonight will likely be the end of the line for Ron DeSantis, who has gone all in on Iowa.
Nikki Haley will benefit from Chris Christie’s withdrawal in New Hampshire but still faces steep odds given Trump’s significant lead nationwide and in Nikki’s home state of South Carolina.
What would a Trump nomination mean in ’24? This week on the podcast I interview Patrick Ruffini, a pollster who wrote the recent book “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.” Patrick makes two major arguments. First, he says that the main dividing line between the parties now is not class - it’s education. About 64% of the electorate are non-college graduates, and the Republican Party increasingly dominates with this group.
In the old days, the Democratic Party did great among white, blue-collar workers. Today, not so much.
This also helps explain why Trump is so strong in the Republican primary as non-college voters vastly prefer him over Haley and others.
The second realignment is that nonwhite working-class voters are increasingly leaving the Democratic Party and voting Republican, “from the Cuban Americans of Little Havana, to the Hispanic voters of the Rio Grande Valley, to Vietnamese immigrants in Orange County, California.” This overlaps with Patrick’s education thesis, as there are plenty of non-college educated non-white voters who aren’t activated by the current Democratic Party’s emphasis on social issues.
Patrick’s analysis is a sobering wake up call to those who think that Biden is going to prevail over Trump because of a Democratic advantage among voters. Patrick observes, “Going into 2024 . . . it is weak support for an octogenarian Biden among Black and Hispanic voters, especially younger voters, that accounts for most of Trump’s improved standing in the polls.” The traditional Democratic coalition is fragmenting, shedding non-college voters in every group. The 2024 election is going to be determined by whether a critical mass of non-college educated blue collar workers in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina feel well-served by the status quo or prefer their memories of the economy of 2019.
If Trump wins the Republican nomination – which he could in the next 6 weeks – he would be the favorite against Joe Biden. The best way out is to put forward a new Democratic nominee that is unburdened by incumbency and centered on economically populist messaging – someone like Congressman Dean Phillips of Minnesota.
Moving forward, the answer is a popular movement designed to address inequities that are shared by Americans at every education level. “A college diploma, the most basic prerequisite for working in politics and the news media, was the very thing that blinded the elite to Trump’s appeal and hobbled those who wished to stop him,” Patrick writes. The Democratic Party didn’t understand this in 2016 – and it’s running out of time in 2024.
For my interview of Patrick on his book click here. To check out Forward, click here. To help out the Dean Phillips campaign click here – New Hampshire votes next week on Jan. 23rd!
