A rising 10-year-old coalition came apart. Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and others had slapped its platform together based on what got cheers at the rallies of 2016. They made it up as they went along. But it takes a kind of genius to spy, imagine and build a coalition and make it hold for a decade, and it means plenty that it collapsed.
Mr. Trump was the author of the ruin. He picked the candidates to back, made the decisions on strategy, decided what to say and when to spend the money in his war chest. (Late in the election, according to the New York Times, when the price of ads had been jacked up; he considered it “my money.”)
He is fuming and casting blame—it was Fox News’s polls; if he’d been on the ballot it would have been “a landslide”; Greg Abbott is “a RINO.” Please. It was you, Fredo.
Yuval Levin at AEI:
The American electorate has been repudiating the status quo again and again, but our political leaders have refused to offer something different. Trump’s election in 2016 was a rebuke of the increasingly culturally radical Democratic Party of Barack Obama’s final years. Joe Biden’s election in 2020 was a rebuke of Trump and his ridiculous approach to governing. But in its place, Biden offered a return to exactly what voters had rejected by electing Trump to begin with. So in 2024, voters rejected that cultural progressivism yet again, but all they were offered in its place was literally the return of Donald Trump. Now they’re rejecting that again, and presumably the next two years will only make them more eager to put it behind them.
In each case, the public rendered a negative verdict on the loser, not a positive verdict on the winner. We have been living through what you might call a politics without winners.
As I wrote two years ago, in the immediate wake of Trump’s win, which his supporters hailed as ushering in a grand new Republican coalition for the ages:
This is the trap that our 21st-century presidents have tended to fall into. They win elections because their opponents were unpopular, and then—imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda—they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular.
This election should teach both parties that lesson again, but it will still be hard to learn.
Voters between the ages 18-29 supported Democrats this cycle 70% to 28% — an overwhelming margin of more than 40 points and a 32-point shift from 2024, per NYT data. That trend was even more pronounced among young men, whom President Donald Trump targeted in 2024 and won with 56% of support. In Tuesday’s elections, the figures flipped: 58% of young men supported a Democratic House candidate, according to an analysis by Tufts’ CIRCLE.
The results represent a homecoming for Democrats of a group the party once considered among its most reliable voting blocs. But activists and analysts who spoke with Playbook today gave their party what’s becoming a familiar warning: they ought not take the shift for granted.
For all that, there was a ray of hope for the Republicans on Tuesday night, should they choose to perceive it. Two New England moderates, Phil Scott and Kelly Ayotte, won re-election as governors of Vermont and New Hampshire, respectively. Their victories point the party in a more sensible direction.
