A couple of weeks ago, at our very own "Prospects for U.S. Democracy" event, I tossed a zinger at the panel: With polls showing a virtual tie between Vice-President Kamala Harris and now President-elect Donald Trump, how could she hope to win if her support among key Democratic bases was tanking? The data did not look good. Harris was hemorrhaging support from black men, Latinos, and union workers. Only single, college-educated women were standing firm. How, I asked, could she hold together a Democratic coalition that seemed to be fraying at every edge?
One panelist brushed off the question, insisting the polls were wrong and that minority voters would still flood the polls to support the first black woman running for president on a major party ticket. Another had a different take: Latino support, he argued, was slipping as these voters began prioritizing issues like economics and culture over Democratic calls for more permissive immigration policies. This shift, he claimed, reflects how Latinos are increasingly embracing an American identity that grows stronger with each generation.
Fast-forward to today, and here we are: Donald Trump just pulled off what no Republican has managed since 2004 – he won the popular vote. Even more surprising, he cobbled together a cross-racial, working-class coalition that propelled him to a landslide victory over Kamala Harris. As if that was not enough, he is poised to hold a solid majority in the House and a fairly comfortable margin in the Senate. The question on everyone's mind could not be clearer: How on earth did Donald Trump, a convicted felon who lost the presidency just four years ago, manage to stage such a staggering comeback?
To get to the bottom of this, you have got to look at the three pillars propping up the Democratic elite over the last couple of decades: insider politicians (think Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi,) elite universities, and the establishment media. Together, these three have been singing from the same hymnal, pushing a post-materialist vision of America that prioritizes group identity over individualism. Through the lens of intersectionality, they have sorted Americans into oppressors and the oppressed. Universities crank out academic theories to define these dynamics, which the media then packages for mass consumption, while Democratic politicians pitch equity-driven policies that openly favor what they call a 'coalition of the dispossessed' over those deemed part of the 'oppressor' class.
This vision of America was potent enough to carry Barack Obama to a second term in 2012, even as independents leaned toward Mitt Romney – thanks largely to a surge in minority turnout. The playbook comes straight out of “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” a 2002 book by Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, and Democrats have treated it as gospel ever since. Major outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post have leaned into this narrative too, especially since the early 2010s, ramping up coverage on concepts like ‘systemic racism’ and ‘racial inequity.’
Data from @DavidRozado on X (formerly Twitter) representing the skyrocketing inclusion of terms like ‘misinformation’, ‘racism’, and ‘extremism’ since the early 2010s.
But this theory does not stop with race; it extends into sex and gender. Democrats have aggressively promoted transgender issues (backing “gender-affirming care” for trans youth), embraced an expanded view on abortion rights (moving well beyond the Clinton-era ‘safe, legal, and rare’ stance), and pushed for LGBTQ+ topics to be integrated into school curricula. In this worldview, the so-called intersectional hierarchy becomes clear: straight white men sit at the top as the ultimate “oppressor class,” while LGBTQ+ black women are placed at the bottom. Men are generally considered more privileged than women, though there is plenty of murkiness around where groups like white women, minority men, and gay white men (among other groups) fit into this ever-evolving pecking order.
Then came the 2016 presidential election, a spectacle no one saw coming. Hillary Clinton, veteran of the Democratic establishment and self-styled heir to Obama’s coalition, launched her campaign with a heavy emphasis on her historic candidacy as the potential first female president. She leaned into her identity as a woman, banking on it to energize voters who had rallied behind Obama’s promise of change. Meanwhile, surrogates fanned out across big urban areas in critical swing states, Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland to fire up minority turnout, hoping to replicate the Obama magic. But it did not work. Voter enthusiasm lagged, turnout dropped, and Donald Trump, against all predictions – walked away with a shocking victory. Trump’s win, even with fewer votes than Romney’s 2012 Wisconsin tally, sent Democratic operatives into a tailspin.
Surely, they thought, it could not be that Hillary was a lackluster candidate who managed to unite Republican antagonism with leftist discontent. No, the narrative quickly took a different turn: American had experienced a “whitelash.” White, working-class men supposedly rebelled against the tide of multiculturalism, using their privilege to derail the election of America’s first female president. This convenient storyline framed Trump’s victory as a retrograde reaction, not a rejection of Clinton’s politics.
Since then, the Democratic Party has doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on a culture war narrative. Trump and his supporters became the avatars of racism, sexism, and every other ‘-ism’ that might fuel outrage. The new mission was to mobilize an ‘intersectional’ base with accusations and labels, and, for better or worse, ‘woke politics’ took center stage. This worldview, treating disparities as proof of discrimination, became gospel. Figures like Nikole Hannah-Jones emerged in elite Democratic circles, pushing revisionist narratives like the 1619 Project, which recast America’s founding as not occurring in 1776 under the banner of freedom but in 1619 under the shadow of slavery. The message was clear: the culture war was not going anywhere—it was just getting started.
So, what is the real issue with this kind of messaging? Let us put aside the moral mess it creates, where power, not virtue, defines one’s moral worth – and focus on the practical flaws. First off, this perspective all but strips individual agency from minority voters and demonizes an entire block of voters: the white working class. In the minds of some Democratic elites, it is simply assumed that the ‘dispossessed coalition,’ a grab bag of minority groups will loyally vote blue. Why? Because, as the thinking goes, only the Democratic Party champions ‘their’ issues: relaxed immigration policies, progressive policing, and unrestricted abortion rights.
But here is the kicker: this view is ironically, even insidiously, reductive. It assumes that all Latinos, for instance, think alike and back open borders. Never mind that Latinos come from a vast array of backgrounds, from Cuban-Americans to Mexican-Americans, with very different perspectives and priorities. Then there is the inconvenient truth that groups like Latinos and Muslims tend to be more socially conservative, often worlds apart from the values of progressive elites in urban enclaves. Issues like gender theory in schools, for example, do not exactly play well with socially conservative communities who find these elite-driven policies antithetical to their core beliefs (see the protests in Dearborn, Mich. last year over the teaching of gender theory in schools).
The irony? For many minority voters, it looks like these privileged Democratic elites in government, academia, and the media are projecting their own values and priorities onto them, leaving their genuine concerns – like jobs, economic security, and quality education for their kids, on the back burner.
Let us be honest, selling a vision of America as irredeemably oppressive and forever stamping out hope might resonate in liberal strongholds, but outside those bubbles? Not so much. In fact, this gloomy worldview only made Trump’s cultural appeal stronger, pulling in not only his base but a good chunk of independents, too, who saw the anti-America rhetoric as a bridge too far.
What Americans want is pretty simple: a government that works and a vision that makes them proud to be Americans again. But the Biden administration? They have offered the opposite. We saw expansionary fiscal policy on steroids, an immigration stance that waved through somewhere between seven to 10 million illegal immigrants, and a foreign policy portfolio that ended in two major wars and a botched Afghanistan pullout that left the country’s reputation in shambles. So how did the Biden team, the Harris campaign, and their loyal surrogates respond? They shrugged off inflation, dubbing it part of a ‘vibecession.’ They ignored the border crisis for years, opting to push a failed bipartisan border bill in their last hour, one that would have only rubber-stamped the unprecedented surge of illegal immigration. They doubled down on the idea that the Afghanistan withdrawal was somehow a success, despite it being the single event that tanked their credibility in the first place.
When you mix toxic ideology with poor governance, you do not get reelected – you get rejected. Instead of offering any affirmative reason to vote for them, Democrats leaned hard into fear-mongering about Trump, painting him and his supporters as Nazis out to dismantle democracy. The twist? Most Americans did not buy it. Faced with pressing issues, they saw through the scare tactics and knew exactly where to place the blame.
And that is how we arrived at the improbable reality where the Republican Party under Donald Trump has built a multi-racial, working-class coalition, a phrase that would have sounded absurd just a few years ago. Yet, here we are. According to the latest CBS News exit polls, Trump made significant gains across a range of demographics: up 27 points among Latino voters, three points among black voters, 13 points among young voters aged 18-29, seven points with women, 14 points with voters earning less than $50,000, and 12 points with non-college-educated voters.
Meanwhile, Harris only saw slight improvements in a few categories, up three points among black women, one point among white voters, five points among those 65 and older, and one point among college graduates.
The takeaway is clear: this new Trump coalition sees the GOP as the party that is serious about tackling real issues like inflation and immigration. But it is not just about policy, it is about cultural tone, too. Unlike the Democrats, who often approach politics through the lens of identity and oppression, Trump’s GOP offers a message that does not disparage white voters while treating minority groups as individuals rather than as blocks within a hierarchy of oppression.
So when TV pundits like Rachel Maddow and Sunny Hostin claim Harris’s defeat reflects America’s supposed rejection of multiracial democracy and an embrace of misogyny, it is pretty clear that ideology is doing the heavy lifting here, not reality. When academics like Professor Tressie McMillian Cottom insist that the takeaway from this election is to double down on identity politics because Trump supposedly leaned into white identity (even though he lost a point among white voters), it is worth contrasting that claim against the seismic shifts in Latino-majority areas like Starr County, Texas, which swung from +60 to Clinton in 2016 to +16 to Trump in 2024. Kamala Harris’s campaign represented the last two decades of mainstream Democratic thinking: divide voters into an oppressor/oppressed matrix, hoping to assemble a permanent majority coalition without actually addressing material issues (on top of failing to seriously differentiate from the incumbent administration with a 40 percent approval rating).
The New York Times’s shift from 2020 map representing the rightward shift that occurred on Election Day
Contrast that with the messaging that once brought Democrats landslide wins in the Bill Clinton years. Back then, they leaned into a moderate, socially liberal approach, blending economic populism with neoclassical policies that appealed to the median voter. Clinton’s Democratic Party knew how to build a genuine big tent coalition without alienating people based on relative power dynamics, and they crafted policies people actually wanted.
Fast forward to 2024, and it is a different story. This Democratic Party bet big on intersectional credentials, unwavering support for abortion, and a bizarre strategy of painting a politician who left office in 2021 as the real incumbent. But it all seemed like window dressing, with little to say about what voters actually cared about: the cost of living, unchecked illegal immigration, and the general direction of the country. In short, it was a campaign tailored for the echo chamber, not the American electorate.
That is why ads like ‘Kamala Harris is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you’ hit such a nerve with voters. In reality, Harris is not the biggest loser from this election, the Democratic elite, the three-legged stool propping up her vision, took the real hit. She was never the architect; she was the avatar. For people like Barack Obama, this election should be a wake-up call: his 2012 coalition is a one-time deal, held together by his charisma, not a replicable strategy. It is time for him to take a cue from George W. Bush’s post-presidency and step aside, letting new leadership emerge. The same goes for stalwarts like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
As for academia, it is high time they face the reality that concepts like intersectionality, critical race theory, and gender theory are not universal truths – they are divisive ideologies, both in theory and practice. Treating them as unassailable gospel only alienates students and the public alike. And the media? Their trust problem is not going away anytime soon. They have swapped objective journalism for partisan posturing, all while pretending nothing has changed. Three years of ignoring the sitting President’s decline was bad enough, but the last five months were an eye-opener: wall-to-wall praise for Kamala Harris, even as she dodged interviews and barely campaigned, was the final straw for many. And let us not forget the pile-up of misleading narratives – Trump-Russia collusion, the ‘very fine people’ debacle, the ‘bloodbath’ story, and more.
The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. Either they pivot toward a vision that sees people as individuals with real, material concerns, or they double down on a postmaterialist oppressor/oppressed framework that has left them scrambling for relevance. The choice is theirs, but so are the consequences.
Author Note:
I highly recommend reading Ruy Teixeira’s post-election analysis to better understand his original theory and how he has since critiqued his theory. He also wrote a book in 2022 with John Judis explaining how his initial theory failed to come to fruition.
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