In 1980, nearly three-quarters of voters nationally were white Americans without college degrees. In 2024, it was about 40 percent. Greater cultural diversity explains some of that, but the key element that changed our politics so much wasn’t about ethnic identity but rather education.
In 1980, a college degree was far less essential as a stepping stone to success and entry to the managerial class. Only about 17 percent of all adults older than 25 back then had a bachelor’s degree or more. Now, a four-year degree is the ante price even for many kinds of administrative jobs. Accordingly, about 40 percent of adults now have college diplomas, a share that will continue its climb as those baby boom Americans who were new in the less credentialist job market of 50 years ago pass away — and out of the demographic tables — in large numbers over the coming 15 years or so.
What changed our politics, though, wasn’t so much that more people were going to college, but rather that those who did and those who did not started voting very differently … the white ones, anyway.
According to the University of Virginia Center for Politics analysis, Black voters from 1980 to 2020 were not only consistent in their preference for Democrats, but also there was no significant difference between Black voters with or without college degrees.
Over the same period, white voters without college degrees went from narrowly favoring Democrats (2.2 points in the 1980s) to overwhelmingly favoring Republicans in the 2010s (23.7 points). College-educated white voters went on exactly the opposite trip, going from solidly Republican (12.2 points) to kind of Democratic (2.5 points). What the heck happened there?
…In each of President Trump’s three presidential contests, a majority of his overall support came from white voters without college degrees. That would be an alarming degree of dependency on one shrinking demographic group, unless … you could score increasingly high shares of those voters.
The last time Republicans won the national popular vote before 2024 was in 2004. That year, white working-class voters split about evenly, with a slight edge for then-President George W. Bush. He got a little more than half of a group that was back then a little more than half of the electorate itself.
Twenty years later, the white working class made up about 40 percent of the electorate, but Trump won 66 percent of them. Like a diver on the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, Republicans are going from increasing heights into a smaller and smaller pool. Which is fine, as long as you hit the target.
Which is why, if you are a Republican, you might want to let your eyes drift through the crosstabs of the most recent survey from Marist College’s excellent polling unit. Trump’s approval rating among whites without college degrees — the same voters that went for Trump by a 2-to-1 ratio in 2024 — is 46 percent. Trump is at 43 percent with these voters on his handling of the economy, including an abysmal 38 percent among the women of that group. These voters don’t even like the tariffs that are supposed to be a boon to them: 35 percent approve of Trump on the import taxes.
On how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is conducting its operations? The white working class clocks in at 40 percent approval. On foreign policy generally, it’s 43 percent. On Greenland, it’s 13 percent.
Democrats do love a good government shutdown—though this time it’s just the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which includes ICE, that would be deprived of funding. Last time around in October, they said the government shutdown was over the price of health care, one of their best-polling issues with voters. That fight fired up their base and may have helped them win big in elections in New Jersey and Virginia.
This time they may shut down the government agency responsible for immigration enforcement, one of their worst-polling issues in recent years. Put this way, the Democrats’ strategy doesn’t seem to make sense.
But it does make sense to Democrats today and for a very simple reason: the Trump administration has managed to take an issue Republicans have dominated for years and turn it into a big loser for the GOP on multiple fronts.
Public approval of Trump’s handling of deportations, and specifically his use of ICE, has plunged precipitously. Trump now polls heavily net negative on the immigration issue, not far off his overall net negative job approval. As Nate Silver points out:
On average, over the course of his term, Trump’s net approval on immigration has been about six points better than his overall rating; it had been his least-bad issue. Now, that gap has mostly evaporated.
To be clear, the public hasn’t completely changed its mind on the issue of illegal immigration. Far from it. There’s still majority support for deporting all illegal immigrants back to their home countries, as shown by recent polls from Cygnal (which was taken after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis) and from Marquette University. Significantly, the Marquette poll, which was taken after the killing of Renee Good but before that of Pretti, showed essentially no change in support for deportation from their November poll.
Consistent with this, the Cygnal poll shows majority support for “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcing federal immigration laws to remove illegal immigrants from the U.S.” And according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, voters still prefer the Republican party over Democrats when asked who would better handle immigration, and especially border security. This is confirmed by the even more recent Marquette poll, which showed Republicans preferred over Democrats by 18 points on “immigration and border security.”
But that’s the theory. When it comes to the Trump administration’s practice, as instantiated in ICE’s real world activities, voters are strongly negative on the results. Approval of ICE has plunged precipitously. In The New York Times’ latest poll, approval of ICE has sunk to just 36 percent compared with 63 percent disapproval—a net negative approval of a whopping 27 points. Among the critical independent voter group, disapproval has hit a remarkable 70 percent. Even the fringe view that ICE should be abolished is getting a more sympathetic hearing from the public.
As to specific tactics, voters in the poll overwhelmingly feel ICE has gone too far—61 percent versus 26 percent who think they’ve been about right and 11 percent who think the tactics haven’t gone far enough. Other polls have similar results. These views are likely to get even more lopsided in the wake of Pretti’s death.
It wasn’t so long ago that the idea of actively and aggressively resisting immigration enforcement belonged to a small slice of the activist left. That is no longer the case. Thanks to how severely the Trump administration has overplayed its hand, resistance to enforcement has been mainstreamed and receives tacit support even from many who believe the Democrats are not trustworthy on immigration, and who still support the overall goal of cracking down on illegal immigration.
President Trump has staged a master class in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. It underscores a lesson neither party seems interested in learning. Both have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters, who would never vote for the other party anyway, over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way. They have not operated as institutions geared to construct broad coalitions and win large general-election victories. Instead, they have focused on fan service—satisfying their most partisan and loyal constituencies.
Ironically, America’s 50-50 political divide has made it difficult for either party to break out of this pattern. You might think that two minority parties would each feel pressure to expand their coalitions and construct a majority, but actually, both have behaved as if they were the rightful majorities already. Each finds ways to dismiss the other’s wins as narrow flukes and treat their own as massive triumphs. Indeed, each has responded to close election losses with various forms of denial.
This is sustainable only because elections are so close. Politicians learn big lessons from big losses or big wins, so neither party has learned much in a long time, and neither can grasp that it isn’t popular and could easily lose the next election.
The good news about Donald Trump’s efforts to take control of the upcoming election is that the legal changes he’s seeking to make won’t get through the Congress. The bad news is that his illegal efforts might succeed.
When Trump first raised the topic on a podcast over the weekend, his own press secretary felt compelled to say he was only referring to his support for the SAVE Act, now pending before Congress, which would require a raft of documentation from those trying to register to vote. Given the 60-vote threshold that the bill will run up against in the Senate, however, the nation will be saved from SAVE by Democratic opposition.
Similarly, Trump has no legal authority to get states to send him their voter rolls, which he fairly lusts after so he can strike likely Democratic voters from these lists. That absence of legal authority was rather glaringly revealed last week when Attorney General Pam Bondi offered Minnesota a deal: If the state just forked over its rolls, she hinted that the administration might just withdraw its ICE and Border Patrol goons. No administration action has revealed so starkly as Bondi’s ploy the fear Trump harbors about the coming election, and the absence of legal channels available to him to rig or curtail it.
As we’ve seen in Atlanta over the weekend, Trump can use the FBI to try to seize ballots, though he’s being sued by local government officials over that action. Come November, he could, I suppose, send in the feds to stop the vote counting in Democratic cities (and keep in mind that virtually every large American city is heavily Democratic). The problem with that is that if an urban county can’t certify its votes, neither can the state in which it’s located certify its votes. Impounding the ballots in, say, Harris County (Houston and its suburbs) means that Texas can’t certify its statewide election results for senator, governor, and its members of Congress and the legislature. Trump would probably be fine with that if he’d interceded in so many states that the new Congress couldn’t convene, but it’s hard to imagine that Republican elected officials would feel the same way.
New York Times essayist Thomas B. Edsall proposes a “Project 2028” for Democrats, which he describes as “an outline of items in a hypothetical 2028 Democratic Party platform designed to restore the party’s appeal to centrist working- and middle-class voters.” Edsall adds, “My suggestions are subject to challenge and dispute, and as usual, I have sought out comments from strategists and political experts. In the expectation that this will turn out to be a more-than-one-column project, I welcome comments, critiques and suggestions from readers. What did I miss? What did I overemphasize?”
Here’s an excerpt of Edsall’s opinion essay:
Mission Statement
The Democratic Party is committed to equality of opportunity and to democratic, competitive markets in which discrimination by race, creed, sex or ethnicity is prohibited and the chance to get ahead is broadly shared.
The party’s focus will be on supporting the aspirations of working men and women rather than privileging the interests of those who have accumulated extraordinary wealth through market power, inheritance or political influence.
The Democratic Party believes government has a substantial obligation to secure this equality through access to education, housing, public safety and protection from poverty, especially in childhood.
The party rejects a politics that seeks to guarantee equality of outcomes, which risks undermining growth, productivity, innovation and beneficial competition.
The party believes that economic growth is essential to the maintenance of public support for policies promoting fairness, equality, better schools and more housing.
The party is committed to ensuring an equal chance for all people to succeed to the best of their ability while making sure everyone who wants to work can get a job that pays enough to live a secure, middle-class life.
The Democratic Party welcomes proposals to better the lives and opportunities of Americans, particularly the working and middle classes, from all sources, regardless of ideology or party affiliation, including Republicans.
Here, for example, is what Edsall suggests via “Sex and Genders”:
The Democratic Party recognizes the legal and policy precedence of biological sex in certain contexts. Transgender Americans should not, however, face discrimination in employment, education, housing or public life, and they should be free to live in accordance with their gender identity, including their choice of names, dress and pronouns.
At the same time, in settings where physical differences materially affect fairness, safety or privacy — such as competitive sports and certain custodial settings — the party believes policy should be grounded in biological sex.
Edsall includes some critical comments from issue experts, including William Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a former deputy assistant to President Bill Clinton for domestic policy, who writes:
While every American should have access to quality, affordable health care as a matter of right, Democrats understand that achieving this goal will require major changes in the current health care system, including increasing the number of pediatricians, gerontologists and primary care doctors while expanding access to community-based clinics.
We encourage all large businesses to make on-site health care available to their employees. We will attack all aspects of the current system — including excessive concentration, counterproductive regulations and distorted government payment schedules — that raise costs and diminish access to basic care.
The following article, “Seven Principles for a 21st Century Left”by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:
Recently I argued that the left’s 21st century project has failed. After the era of social democracy sputtered out at the end of the 20th century, the left embarked on a new project they hoped would remedy the weaknesses evident at century’s end and inaugurate a new era of political and governance success. We are now a quarter of the way through the 21st century, which has witnessed both a genuine “crisis of capitalism” (the Great Recession of 2007-09) and the systemic breakdown of the COVID era (2020-22). Enough time has gone by to render a judgement: despite ample opportunity to advance their cause, the left’s 21st century project has failed and failed badly.
Consider:
It has failed to stop the rise of right populism.
It has failed to create durable electoral majorities.
It has failed to achieve broad social hegemony.
It has failed to retain its working-class base.
It has failed to promote social order.
It has failed to practice effective governance.
It has failed to jump-start rapid economic growth.
It has failed to generate optimism about the future.
Of course, the project hasn’t been a complete failure. Left parties, including the Democratic Party, have succeeded in building strong bases among the educated and professional classes and, if they have lacked broad social hegemony, they have generally controlled the commanding heights of cultural production. As a result they have mostly set the terms of “respectable” discourse in elite circles.
But that’s pretty weak beer compared to all those massive failures and the heady aspirations of those who presume to be on “the right side of history.” Most on the left would prefer to believe that the left’s 21st century project is basically sound and just needs a few tweaks. This is whistling past the graveyard. After a quarter century, it is time to face the facts: the project is simply not fit for purpose and needs to be jettisoned.
By that I don’t mean that parties of the left cannot win elections. They have, and they will! Already, Democrats look well-positioned to take back the House in 2026, and they even have an outside shot at taking the Senate. And if the unpopularity and poor results of the Trump administration continue into 2028, they’ll certainly have a solid chance of recapturing the presidency three years from now.
But a continuation of the electoral see-saw between Democrats and Republicans is not what the left should have in mind. It has been and would be little more than a holding action against right populism. Taking advantage of the thermostatic reactionagainst your opponents’ overreach and failure to manage the economy effectively is a very low bar—especially given how egregiously flawed that opponent is. It would hardly indicate a revival of the left and a new political project to replace the one that has limped along for a quarter of a century. Rebuilding the left’s base among the working class and forging a durable majority coalition will require a genuinely new project based on core principles that break with the failures of the past.
Those principles should be based on the fundamental fact that the left has lost touch with baseline realities of how to reach ordinary working-class voters, what policies could actually deliver what these voters want, and what kind of politics accords with these voters’ common sense rather than the biases of their own base. The left needs to course-correct toward realism to give themselves a serious chance of decisively defeating right populism and achieving the good society they claim they are committed to.
With that in mind, here are seven core principles a serious 21st century left must embrace for long-term success.
Energy realism. This is an important one. As I have noted, the left has spent the first quarter of the 21st century obsessed with the threat of climate change and the need to rapidly replace fossil fuels with renewables (wind and solar) to stave off the apocalypse. In their quest to meet arbitrary net zero targets, they have made this transition a central policy goal and structured much of their economic program around this.
A dubious crusade to begin with, albeit much beloved among their Brahmin left base, the wheels are now coming off the bus. A recent article by Tom Fairless and Max Colchester in the Wall Street Journalsummarized the European situation:
European politicians pitched the continent’s green transition to voters as a win-win: Citizens would benefit from green jobs and cheap, abundant solar and wind energy alongside a sharp reduction in carbon emissions.
Nearly two decades on, the promise has largely proved costly for consumers and damaging for the economy.
Europe has succeeded in slashing carbon emissions more than any other region—by 30 percent from 2005 levels, compared with a 17 percent drop for the U.S. But along the way, the rush to renewables has helped drive up electricity prices in much of the continent.
Germany now has the highest domestic electricity prices in the developed world, while the U.K. has the highest industrial electricity rates, according to a basket of 28 major economies analyzed by the International Energy Agency. Italy isn’t far behind. Average electricity prices for heavy industries in the European Union remain roughly twice those in the U.S. and 50 percent above China. Energy prices have also grown more volatile as the share of renewables increased.
It is crippling industry and hobbling Europe’s ability to attract key economic drivers like artificial intelligence, which requires cheap and abundant electricity. The shift is also adding to a cost-of-living shock for consumers that is fueling support for antiestablishment parties, which portray the green transition as an elite project that harms workers, most consumers and regions.
Such have been the wages of the green transition. No wonder countries around the world are increasingly reluctant to sign on to getting rid of fossil fuels, as shown by results of the recent COP30 deliberations. Projections from McKinsey, the International Energy Agency, and so on now see strong fossil fuel demand through 2050, with these energy sources not zeroed out but rather providing close to or an outright majority of the world’s primary energy consumption. Indeed, based on recent trends, these projections are, if anything, too optimistic about how fast the fossil fuel share will decline from its current 81 percent level.
These realities, plus awareness of the importance of development to poor countries, have led even erstwhile climate warrior Bill Gates to remark:
[C]limate change…will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will…thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future….[F]or the vast majority of [poor people in the world] it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare. The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.
When Bill Gates starts sounding like Bjorn Lomborg, you know things are really changing!
Here in the United States the relative strength and copious energy resources of our economy, plus somewhat more modest policies, have spared us from the worst that has befallen Europe. But the direction of change is clear. Even during the green-oriented Biden administration, domestic oil and gas production hit record levels. It is unlikely with AI data centers juicing energy demand that this upward trend will be reversed.
Meanwhile, Trump has gotten rid of subsidies for renewable energy and electric vehicles, which were never popular, and a pragmatic public simply does not care. They have always favored an all-of-the-above energy policy, very much including fossil fuels, and do not see climate change as the existential, overriding issue that has preoccupied the activist left.
What they do care about is cheap, abundant, reliable energy, and the same could be said about American industry. The recent vogue for “affordability” rather than strenuous climate change rhetoric among Democrats indicates that the left is starting to wake up on this issue. But name-checking affordability falls far short of fully embracing energy realism and all that would entail.
Donald Trump and the Republicans are losing their newest voters at alarmingly fast rates, leading to the rapid emergence of one of the worst political environments Republicans have seen in years.
It’s well-documented that Trump’s winning coalitions were powered by record gains among all types of historically Democratic voters. Among Black, Hispanic, and noncollege voters, Trump made double-digit improvements on the historic Republican margins.
But there’s one major underexamined source of discontent: working-class voters.
Despite Donald Trump putting up record GOP numbers with low-income voters, his standing with them is now abysmal, and it is here that he has suffered his biggest losses.
Though Trump is now unpopular with every income bracket, the slippage is especially striking when it comes to the poorest voters. For example, in our dataset, Trump outright won voters who made less than $25,000 in the last presidential election. But his approval with them is now 20 percentage points underwater.
In the 2025 Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, Democratic gubernatorial candidates flipped working-class support that had leaned Republican in the 2021 gubernatorial elections and in the 2024 presidential election, according to new analysis from the Center for American Progress. These small but significant overall shifts among working-class voters—defined as voters without college degrees—were driven by relatively large shifts in nonwhite working-class voters. In contrast, white working-class voting behavior remained relatively unchanged, though small shifts toward Democrats in 2025 occurred among white working-class women in Virginia and white working-class men in New Jersey.
In exit polls, the economy was ranked as the top issue by Virginian voters and the second-highest issue by voters in New Jersey. Both Democratic gubernatorial candidates ran economy-focused campaigns and were able to both win large majorities of voters who cited the economy as their top issue and flip working-class support that previously leaned Republican. This outcome suggests that at least some working-class voters remain highly responsive to economic issues and that their candidate preferences can change as they reassess which candidates they perceive as better positioned to address those concerns. At the same time, the results, especially the differences between white and nonwhite voters and between women and men, suggest that other issues also remain critical in shaping working-class voting behavior. These results highlight the diversity of working-class voters and emphasize the importance of a strong economic message as well as the value of addressing noneconomic concerns—echoing previous Center for American Progress Action Fund research about the working class.
Working-class support in both states leaned heavily toward Republican candidates in the previous two election cycles, the 2021 gubernatorial and the 2024 presidential, with noncollege voters backing Republicans at both the state and national levels. The 2025 gubernatorial elections, however, marked a shift as working-class voters moved toward Democratic candidates, driven primarily by nonwhite noncollege voters.
In Virginia, exit polls show that noncollege working-class voters in 2025 narrowly split their support, with then-Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger receiving 50 percent of the vote compared with 49 percent for the Republican candidate, then-Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. Although Spanberger’s victory among these voters was modest, the results represent a departure from outcomes in the 2021 governor’s race and the 2024 presidential election, when Virginia voters without college degrees favored the Republican candidates by 13 and 5 percentage points, respectively.
The following article, “Democrats and the Siren Call of Culture Denialism”by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:
Just about a year ago, right before the beginning of Trump’s second term, I published a piece on “The Democrats’ Culture Denialism.” At that point, I observed that Democrats were resisting—strenuously resisting—coming to terms with the role of cultural issues in their stunning 2024 election loss. Indeed, they were desperately clutching at any possible interpretation that would downgrade the importance of these issues and obviate the need to change their associated positions and priorities. I wondered whether this delusional attitude could possibly persist as Trump’s second term unfolded; surely they would come to their senses as they lived through the real world consequences of their defeat.
Well, I’m not wondering any more. Democrats, it turns out, just cannot resist the siren call of culture denialism. The last year has shown over and over again that culture denialism just makes too many things too easy for too many in the party and avoids too many fights that too many Democrats don’t want to have. In short, they have chickened out. It’s the victory of coalition management over coalition expansion.
The liberal commentator Noah Smith is one of the few Democrats willing to clearly call out how little Democrats have changed since their epic 2024 loss.
I have seen zero evidence that progressives have reckoned with their immigration failures of 2021-23. I have not seen any progressive or prominent Democrat articulate a firm set of principles on the issue of who should be allowed into the country and who should be kicked out.
This was not always the case. Bill Clinton had no problem differentiating between legal and illegal immigration in 1995, and declaring that America had a right to kick out people who come illegally.
I have seen no equivalent expression of principle during the second Trump presidency. Every Democrat and progressive thinker can articulate a principled opposition to the brutality and excesses of ICE and to the racism that animates Trump’s immigration policy. But when it comes to the question of whether illegal immigration itself should be punished with deportation, Democrats and progressives alike lapse into an uncomfortable silence.
Every Democratic policy proposal I’ve seen calls to refocus immigration enforcement on those who commit crimes other than crossing the border illegally. But what about those who commit no such crime? If someone who crosses illegally and then lives peacefully and otherwise lawfully in America should be protected from deportation, how is the right-wing charge of “open borders” a false one?
More generally, I have seen no attempt to reckon with why Americans were so mad about immigration under Biden. I have seen no acknowledgement that Americans dislike the violation of the U.S. law that says “You may not cross the border unless explicitly admitted under our immigration system.” I have seen zero recognition of the anger over quasi-legal immigrants’ use of city social services and state and local welfare benefits.
I have not seen any Democrat or progressive even discuss the concern that too rapid of a flood of immigrants could change American culture in ways that the nation’s existing citizenry don’t want. Nor have American progressives looked overseas and wondered why the people of Canada and (to a lesser degree) Europehave forced their own governments to decrease immigration numbers dramatically in recent years…
Nor have I seen much attempt to grapple with many other issues that hobble the progressive movement—the unfairness of DEI, the blatant permissiveness toward crime and disorder in blue cities, the dependence of progressive governance on useless or corrupt nonprofits, the unpopular stands on certain trans issues, and so on. Those issues aren’t as important as immigration and inflation, but they contribute to a general perception of the progressive movement and the Democratic party as being out of touch with the masses and unserious about governing.
Of course, the occasional Democrat has at least poked gingerly at some of these issues. But as a general assessment of Democratic movement on cultural issues, Smith is correct. By and large, the party has not budged.
Consider the trans issue which loomed so large in the 2024 election and where Democrats are indisputably on the wrong side of public opinion. Axios recently asked 20 Democrats viewed as possible contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination the following questions: “Should transgender girls be able to participate in girls’ sports? Do you believe transgender youths under age 18 should be able to be placed on puberty blockers and hormones? [W]hat is your response to the question: ‘Can a man become a woman?’”
Of the 20 contenders, 17 (!) declined to provide answers. Of the three that did (Josh Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, and Rahm Emanuel) only Emanuel provided unhedged answers and even here to only two of the questions: Can a man become a woman (no) and should transgender girls be able to participate in girls’ sports (no).
MECHANICSBURG, Pennsylvania —Pennsylvania is arguably the swingiest of swing states.
The Keystone State has voted for the winner in each of the last five presidential elections, and it has been a tipping point in each of the past three elections.
It is one of only four states with one Democrat and one Republican in the Senate. In the state government, Republicans and Democrats have split power for the past decade. The state House of Representatives is divided 102 to 101.
But this will not last.
A blue wave is likely to hit Pennsylvania this year, easily carrying Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) to reelection, and very possibly handing the state Senate, and thus a governing trifecta, to Democrats. In fact, the blue wave already began two months ago as Democrats dominated in local elections and statewide judicial races in 2025.
It’s true that President Donald Trump has revived Republican fortunes in this state. Not only did he win twice, but he also had large coattails, helping Republicans win the Senate races in 2016 and 2024.
But Trump will never be on a ballot here again, and that ought to make Republicans even more worried about today’s political currents. This may not be a mere tidal wave. Tidal waves eventually recede. The 2025-2026 Pennsylvania blue wave looks to instead be a sea change, in which the Keystone State becomes solidly Democratic for a decade or more.
Pennsylvania After Trump
The key dynamic in Pennsylvania politics is the political realignment in which the working class is becoming solidly Republican, while upper-middle-class suburbanites are becoming more Democratic.
This realignment isn’t limited to Pennsylvania, and it didn’t start with Trump. Still, Trump put the realignment into overdrive, and Pennsylvania is where it’s most visible.
When Trump ran in 2016, no Republican had won the state since 1988, and former President Barack Obama had won it pretty easily. Then Trump came by and made massive gains in the coal country of central Pennsylvania and in steel country around Pittsburgh.
You can explain Trump’s 2016 outperformance of 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney just by counting four adjacent counties running from former steel country south of Pittsburgh, Fayette County, to Blair County in central Pennsylvania, with Cambria and Somerset in the middle. These counties have far lower incomes and educational attainment than the rest of the state, and they handed Trump his victory: Trump’s excess margin of victory across the four counties, compared to Romney, more than covers Trump’s statewide margin of 44,292 votes in that election. This is Trump country.
Look at Philadelphia’s collar counties, and you see the opposite trend: The upper-middle-class suburbs, especially Chester and Montgomery counties, tacked hard toward the Democrats.
In “Hell Cats vs. Hegseth: Meet the military women who are fighting to win purple districts for the Democrats and put the defense secretary on notice,” Joan Walsh writes at The Nation: “In 2018, they called themselves “the Badasses”—a cadre of female national-security and military veterans running for Congress as Democrats, in what turned out to be a wave of anti–Donald Trump victories and a landslide for women candidates. All five—Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, both ex–CIA officers; New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill and Virginia’s Elaine Luria, both ex–Navy officers; and Pennsylvania’s Chrissy Houlahan, an Air Force veteran—won their contests in purple districts that year. They emerged as an effective force of center-leaning liberals that challenged Trump and then helped President Joe Biden enact his social-welfare and infrastructure agenda. In 2024, Slotkin was elected to the Senate, and in 2025, Spanberger and Sherrill won landslide victories to become the governors of their states. Only Luria lost her seat, in 2022; she’s running again this year and has a good chance to take it back…In 2026, their counterparts are the “Hell Cats,” four female Democratic military veterans seeking to follow the Badasses’ battle plan to win congressional seats in purple districts. They are Arizona’s JoAnna Mendoza, a retired Marine challenging Representative Juan Ciscomani; New Jersey’s Rebecca Bennett, a Navy pilot officer taking on Representative Thomas Kean; and Maura Sullivan, a New Hampshire Marine looking to replace Representative Chris Pappas, who is running for an open Senate seat. There’s also Cait Conley, a West Point graduate, former National Security Council official, and Army veteran with six tours overseas and three Bronze Stars, who is up against New York’s Hudson Valley Representative Mike Lawler in one of the only three districts won by Kamala Harris in 2024 that is still held by a Republican. They could be key to the Democratic Party assuming control of the House in 2027, since it will need just three seats to flip the chamber.” More here.
Don’t look now, but it’s already time for the DNC and the states to figure out the 2028 Democratic presidential primary calendar, so I wrote an overview at New York:
The first 2028 presidential primaries are just two years away. And for the first time since 2016, both parties are expected to have serious competition for their nominations. While Vice-President J.D. Vance is likely to enter the cycle as a formidable front-runner for the GOP nod, recent history suggests there will be lots of other candidates. After all, Donald Trump drew 12 challengers in 2024. On the Democratic side, there is no one like Vance (or Hillary Clinton going into 2016 or Joe Biden going into 2020) who is likely to become the solid front-runner from the get-go, though Californians Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris lead all of the way too early polls.
But 2028 horse-race speculation really starts with the track itself, as the calendar for state contests still isn’t set. What some observers call the presidential-nominating “system” isn’t something the national parties control. In the case of primaries utilizing state-financed election machinery, state laws govern the timing and procedures. Caucuses (still abundant on the Republican side and rarer among Democrats) are usually run by state parties. National parties can vitally influence the calendar via carrots (bonus delegates at the national convention) or sticks (loss of delegates) and try to create “windows” for different kinds of states to hold their nominating contests to space things out and make the initial contests competitive and representative. But it’s sometimes hit or miss.
Until quite recently, the two parties tended to move in sync on such calendar and map decisions. But Democrats have exhibited a lot more interest in ensuring that the “early states” — the ones that kick off the nominating process and often determine the outcome — are representative of the party and the country as a whole and give candidates something like a level playing field. Prior to 2008, both parties agreed to do away with the traditional duopoly, in which the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary came first, by allowing early contests representing other regions (Nevada and South Carolina). And both parties tolerated the consolidation of other states seeking influence into a somewhat later “Super Tuesday” cluster of contests. But in 2024 Democrats tossed Iowa out of the early-state window altogether and placed South Carolina first (widely interpreted as Joe Biden’s thank-you to the Palmetto State for its crucial role in saving his campaign in 2020 after poor performances in other early states), with Nevada and New Hampshire voting the same day soon thereafter. Republicans stuck with the same old calendar with Trump more or less nailing down the nomination after Iowa and New Hampshire.
For 2028, Republicans will likely stand pat while Democrats reshuffle the deck (the 2024 calendar was explicitly a one-time-only proposition). The Democratic National Committee has set a January 16 deadline for states to apply for early-state status. And as the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher explains, there is uncertainty about the identity of the early states and particularly their order:
“The debate has only just begun. But early whisper campaigns about the weaknesses of the various options already offer a revealing window into some of the party’s racial, regional and rural-urban divides, according to interviews with more than a dozen state party chairs, D.N.C. members and others involved in the selection process.
“Nevada is too far to travel. New Hampshire is too entitled and too white. South Carolina is too Republican. Iowa is also too white — and its time has passed.
“Why not a top battleground? Michigan entered the early window in 2024, but critics see it as too likely to bring attention to the party’s fractures over Israel. North Carolina or Georgia would need Republicans to change their election laws.”
Nevada and New Hampshire have been most aggressive about demanding a spot at the beginning of the calendar, and both will likely remain in the early-state window, representing their regions. The DNC could push South Carolina aside in favor of regional rivals Georgia or North Carolina. Michigan is close to a lock for an early midwestern primary, but its size, cost, and sizable Muslim population (which will press candidates on their attitude towards Israel’s recent conduct) would probably make it a dubious choice to go first. Recently excluded Iowa (already suspect because it’s very white and trending Republican, then bounced decisively after its caucus reporting system melted down in 2020) could stage a “beauty contest” that will attract candidates and media even if it doesn’t award delegates.
Even as the early-state drama unwinds, the rest of the Democratic nomination calendar is morphing as well. As many as 14 states are currently scheduled to hold contests on Super Tuesday, March 7. And a 15th state, New York, may soon join the parade. Before it’s all nailed down (likely just after the 2026 midterms), decisions on the calendar will begin to influence candidate strategies and vice versa. Some western candidates (e.g., Gavin Newsom or Ruben Gallego) could be heavily invested in Nevada, while Black proto-candidates like Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Wes Moore might pursue a southern primary. Progressive favorites like AOC or Ro Khanna may have their own favorite launching pads, while self-identified centrists like Josh Shapiro or Pete Buttigieg might have others. Having a home state in the early going is at best a mixed blessing: Losing your home-state primary is a candidate-killer, and winning it doesn’t prove a lot. And it’s also worth remembering that self-financed candidates like J.B. Pritzker may need less of a runway to stage a nationally viable campaign.
So sketching out the tracks for all those 2028 horses, particularly among Democrats, is a bit of a game of three-dimensional chess. We won’t know how well they’ll run here or there until it’s all over.
