WASHINGTON (TNND) — President-elect Donald Trump resounding Electoral College victory has forced Democrats to recalibrate their policy positions and governing platform as the party tries to determine what led them to lose all seven swing states after Joe Biden’s 2020 election.
Trump won each of the seven battleground states in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, as well as the popular vote as Republican-leaning states turned redder and he closed Vice President Kamala Harris’ margins in Democratic-leaning states.
Each of the swing states was decided by relatively narrow margins, but the loss of these states, along with a handful of Senate seats, has highlighted the potential problems for the Democratic Party as attention shifts to the midterms in two years and a new presidential race in the future. four years in which Trump will not be at the top of the list.
While it is typical for party battlegrounds to shift back and forth during new election cycles, it has been rare in recent history for either party win a complete sweep. In 2020, Biden lost North Carolina to Trump and Democrats had won every election in Nevada for two decades.
Trump’s success in the 2024 election has raised questions about the state of the country’s electorate and whether it made a lasting shift to the right, or whether the election results were a temporary shift due to a historically unpopular incumbent president and the high level of frustration with inflation and inflation. economy.
“Americans just feel like the country is not on the right track,” said David McLennan, a political science professor and director of the Meredith Poll. “Thirty-eight percent approval rating historically causes people to change their voting preferences. And I think we’ve seen both fundamental factors working against Democrats in 2024. The question is: are these one-off elections, or is it a real realignment?
With all states called, Trump has secured 312 Electoral College votes, the most any Republican candidate has won since 1988. He is also on track to win the popular vote, a feat he failed to achieve in 2016 and as the first Republican president. -I have chosen to do this since George W. Bush in 2004.
The results have buoyed Republicans who see the election as a mandate from the public to implement their agenda on the economy, immigration and foreign policy. Democrats wonder what went wrong and what they need to do going forward to win back the voters it lost to Trump and other Republican candidates in 2024.
Trump has made significant progress with several groups that are traditionally Democratic strongholds, gaining more support from working-class voters, young people and Latinos. Those gains helped him sweep the Electoral College and turned some of the most Democratic-leaning states, such as New York and New Jersey, less blue.
“Time to rebuild the left. We are out of touch with the crisis of meaning/purpose that fuels MAGA. We refuse to provoke big fights. Our tent is too small,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in a message on listening to people and not understanding the root causes of what makes them feel that way.
Americans had made it clear for months in the run-up to the elections that they were deeply dissatisfied with the price increases they had to absorb over the past two years and that they did not like the state of the economy. President Joe Biden is also a deeply unpopular president whose approval ratings are struggling to surpass 40%, adding to the Democratic struggle as they connected with the president and found no message on charting a path to change the president’s direction to turn. The country that according to most voters in opinion polls is on the wrong track.
Several high-profile Democrats have publicly questioned whether the party should realign its positions priorities moving forward and questioned whether Harris’ campaign was doing enough to address the concerns of the voters they were trying to court.
Exit polls have provided evidence of the shift in each party’s changing support, with Democrats becoming the party supported by college-educated people who earn more money, while Republicans gained support from Americans without college degrees or those in the lower and middle class economically.
“If Democrats appeal primarily to college-educated voters, and Republicans get an increasing share of people with less than a college education, it’s just a numbers game. There just aren’t enough college-educated people in the country for Democrats to win, so they’re going to have to figure out something to win back working-class voters,” McLennan said.
Leave a Reply