How Did We Get Here?

How flatlining trust in the Democratic brand sealed America’s fate

The result of this election is a shock to the system. But, for the readers of the NewWorld Election Report, it might not have been a surprise.

In the eight days since the election there have been a non-stop parade of hot takes: it was Biden’s stubborn refusal to step down until way too late in the game. It was Harris’s tack to the center (or should that be to the top?) It was just a general anti-incumbency effect. It was the right wing co-optation of the media infrastructure that means “millions of Americans are engaging in politics awash in conspiracy.” It was Gaza. It was misogynoir. It was the overuse of words like ‘Latinx’ and ‘BIPOC’ and ‘misogynoir.’

The truth is probably some complex mix of all the factors above – and many more.

While we don’t have all the answers, there are clues in the data that might be helpful as we figure out: What happened? Where did it all go wrong? Who is accountable? What next?

Sliding Away from The Dems

Since we launched the NewWorld Election Report in August, our focus has been on voters of color without a college degree. We are in a world where the only way that Democratic candidates can win is with voters of color. Working class Black and Brown voters are the Democrats’ assumed base – and they make up 19% of the electorate¹. 

Like so many other demographics, they slid over to Trump’s side last Tuesday. They’ve been sliding for nearly two decades.

Note: Exit poll data for the 2012 Election did not disaggregate voters without a college degree by ethnicity.

But let’s be clear: the vast majority of Black voters were with Harris. Majorities of Latino and AAPI voters also supported the VP too. Remember that fact when people of color are scapegoated for the destruction that is surely awaiting us during the Trump 2.0 era.

Despite this support for Harris, winning the national election as a Democrat takes super majorities of voters of color that she just didn’t achieve. In September, we modeled how a small surge in Black votes could counter a slide in white support for Harris. Instead, the Democrats gained no ground with Black voters, and lost voters of other races to Trump’s brand of right wing populism fueled by racial resentment.

So, What Actually Happened with Working Class Voters of Color?

Our final full issue before the election introduced the NewWorld Trust Score that aggregated our respondents’ trust in Harris to unify the country, improve their life, do the job well and get things done in DC.

The story of the last three months was one of stagnation. The Trust Score started low for many voters and clearly wasn’t being moved by the campaign – at least not in the right direction. 

One might reasonably argue that VP Harris, as a candidate, was dealt an impossible hand: 107 days to rebuild trust with a community most at the mercy of relentless inflation, while being tethered to an unpopular Administration.

But part of the calculus of this loss was that Democratic Party operatives failed to listen to working class voters of color’s lived experiences, to excite them with a promise of a new economic reality, to take the argument to them – wherever they are online and offline – and to energize them to come out en masse on Nov 5. 

Low Trust Eroded Harris’s Support

In a lot of ways the reason for the election loss was staring us in the face the whole time. Our data showed how men of every ethnicity were behind their female counterparts in terms of trust in Harris.

White women with less than a college degree started with a low Trust Score and ended lower than 40. Trump won them by a whopping 28 points.

In the case of Latino men, their trust also started low and stayed there through the campaign. The NewWorld Trust Score for Latino men ended at 50 - and Trump won them by 12 points.

To put an end to lazy liberal assumptions about Latinos thinking and voting as a monolith, the most Hispanic County in America flipped red for the first time in over a century.

It’s little wonder that the Latino majority counties that flipped red are on the border. According to our poll, this was Harris’s worst issue with non-college BIPOC voters, particularly among those who care strongly about the issue. At the same time, it’s worth calling out in the chart below that Black women were +42 in favor of the candidate not promising mass deportations and internment camps—a 69 point gap with Latino men.

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Making Multiracial Democracy Great Again for the First Time

Despite much armchair analysis to the contrary this week, identity politics continue to powerfully shape how voters understand power in America and how they act in elections. 

A Good Authority study, using Pew data, found that Black and Latino voters who are now voting Republican tend to have conservative views on race and immigration. For example, Latinos who thought the country had “gone too far” in giving Black people equal rights with white people were far less likely to identify as Democrats by 2022. This article is a must read. As the authors point out, America is less polarized by race – but more polarized about race. Failing to grasp the nuance is a recipe for more political disaster.

Imagining identity politics are “over” is an absolute misreading of events. Obsessively cultivating and elevating powerful new political identities, fueled by expanded race, gender, and class resentments, was key to the breadth of Trump’s 2024 victory and what differentiated it from 2016 and 2020. 

If we ignore the elitist party operatives and mediocre messaging consultants who refused to accept that Trump’s support had no ceiling and led us astray, we can see that voters understand how power works and who it works for. We should know that they know. The Republican Party understands this and builds trust by relentlessly narrating their version of why power isn’t working and who is to blame: DEI hires, thugs crossing the border, China, trans people in bathrooms, the list goes on. And that grievance list is powerfully explanatory, even though the explanation is a lie predicated on prejudice. If Democrats can’t short circuit the zero-sum logic of Trumpism by offering an affirmative alternative view that explains how multiracial democracy can work, we are doomed to face an uphill battle with a party brand that has low and sinking trust.

To paraphrase Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party: we win elections to win the power to govern according to our values. A sophisticated take on identity politics is essential to diffuse Trumpism’s power to conflate economic populism, racial resentment and gender anxiety to build electoral majorities, even for candidates with deeply unpopular policies.

Stay Calm, Stay On

It’s important to remember that this is not a resounding victory for MAGA. This is not Reagan’s all-but-Minnesota sweep in the 1984 election. As things stand a week after the election, Trump has gained just over one million votes vs. 2020. But the voting-eligible population has grown by more than four million since the previous election.

This election was, in fact, a rejection of the Democrats. With over 95% of the ballots counted, Harris has attracted nearly 10m votes fewer than Biden did in 2020. Even as voter turnout looks to approach the historical high of 2020, that still leaves over one third of eligible voters choosing not to vote at all.

All that should actually give us a little hope, and a place to start, as we figure out how to bring multi-racial working class voters into a new political formation that realigns our politics away from MAGA extremism. 

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

1. Per the 2024 Exit Polls