The far-left Financial Times ran a soul-searching story yesterday headlined, “Trump broke the Democrats’ thermostat.” The headline was slightly deceiving; the article painted a picture of progressives separating from moderates and Republicans starting around 2012. So it might be more accurate to say Obama broke the Democrats’ thermostat. But there’s more to the story.
“Whether or not progressives are ready to accept it,” the article concluded, “the evidence all points in one direction: America’s moderate voters have not deserted the Democrats; the party has pushed them away.”
The Financial Times admitted that it was just like that cute cartoon showing the center-left liberal being politically stranded next to the gross Republican, with the ‘American left’ sprinting ever leftwards. You’ve seen it; this one:
Despite being widely mocked by the sneering left, the cartoon wasn’t wrong. Despite all Obama’s “racial healing,” we got the George Floyd riots and the Defund Police movement. But beginning around Trump’s first administration, a counter-movement began. Sane people of all races and colors in the center started stumbling rightwards.
The astonishing result was, the more conservative were minority voters’ views, the more likely it was they’d identify as Republicans. This graph tells the story:
Just as Obama’s terms caused progressives to flee leftwards, so Trump’s term caused conservative minorities to surge toward the GOP. It really caught on in 2016, and the last leap, the jump between 2020 and 2024, was particularly acute. Take a moment to truly understand what that chart above shows.
The most subversive implication of this data is that Trump —the Charlottesville “fine people” loving white supremacist racist fascist— somehow caused an historic and astonishing realignment of the Democrats’ core minority constituency. That’s why the headline claimed Trump “broke” the Democrats. He’s broken the Democrats’ hypnotic hold on people who naturally should be GOP voters.
This development is incredibly awkward for the Democrat political argument. They did everything they could to paint Trump as anti-minority; but it spectacularly backfired. Minorities flocked to Trump.
The Financial Times observed the now-undeniable fact that, in every election between 1948 and 2012, voters always recognized the Democrat brand as “the party that stood up for the working class and the poor.”
But in 2016, the Times explained, “that flipped.”
Since Trump’s first term in 2016, voters began identifying Republicans with working-class issues. And now, in 2024, Democrats are now “seen primarily as the party of minority advocacy.” And, as the chart above suggests, even that narrow brand is crumbling.
☕️ UNCONDITIONAL ☙ Saturday, November 16, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Elon Musk enjoys a well-deserved Trump Effect, and the Democrats' problems might be even worse than they think. Plus more!
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