A Realignment

We are a week out from the U.S. presidential election. No, it was not a notably large victory for Trump. The popular vote count is not complete, and once it is, Trump will likely have gotten the most votes for a Republican candidate ever and won about 51% of the popular vote. That is not a particularly large margin of victory, though it feels larger given the expectation that he would lose the popular vote even if he won the Electoral College. The country remains evenly divided.

But underneath that thin margin, this election did feel like, and look like, a realignment. And it’s a realignment that shouldn’t be dismissed, decried or ignored. It should be acknowledged, and maybe even celebrated. For the past few decades, the Republican Party had relied increasingly on white, non-urban voters. While that remains a core constituency, what’s most notable in 2024 is how much that base broadened to include Hispanic and Asian voters, and to a lesser extent, African American men. The gender gap is also significant, with 53% of women voting for Harris by a margin of nearly +8%, while 55% of men supported Trump with a +10% margin. These numbers aren’t yet final, and you will find some variations here, but the trends are largely the same. 

What also changed dramatically is that those with a college degree overwhelmingly voted for Harris and the Democrats and those with only some college or no college overwhelmingly voted for Trump and the Republicans. This so-called “diploma divide” is a relatively new phenomenon. In 1996, Bill Clinton won non-college-educated voters by a 14-point margin, and Obama won that group as well. This year, Trump captured the same group by a 14-point margin—just as Clinton did decades ago.

That is a stunning gap. Along with the highly unusual shift of Hispanic men who supported Trump by a 12-point margin (and Asian Americans who voted 65% for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and only 54% for Harris in 2024), this election saw a serious fragmenting of what had been a reliable Democratic coalition. Whether it augurs the beginning of a new Republican coalition, centered on non-college-educated men across the racial spectrum, remains to be seen. But in this election, it was decidedly just that.

The easy and facile explanation that Trump coasted to victory on a wave of angry white men does not really hold up. Yes, if the election had been decided purely by gender, Harris would have won a landslide if only women voted, and Trump would have won if only men voted. But that world doesn’t exist, and in reality, Trump performed notably better with women overall than Harris did with men.

However, in three states that Trump won – Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin – female Democratic senate candidates defeated their male Republican opponents. The margins were razor thin, but in those states, the story gets more muddled in terms of what gender wins what and why.

The educational divide combined with the multiracial nature of both the Republicans and the Democrats can be viewed a positive in at least one way: as my friend Robert Wright put it in our upcoming What Could Go Right podcast, it is almost certainly better for the country that the election did not divide on ethnic and racial lines. If you want a recipe for real civil unrest, start with a country racially at odds. We may not be on the verge of a civil war, but the only one we’ve fought has been on the issue of racial slavery. And while the battle of the sexes may be ancient, there has yet to be a society that violently fractured because of it (though there are dictatorships such as the Afghan Taliban that are built on repression of women).

Another example of Edgy Optimism. Read The Bright Side of 2022: Despite a pervasive gloom about the present and future, far more went right in the past year than most of us recognize

Oddly, given the election’s outcome, it also serves as a vindication of much of what the left has argued for years: that the core issues in the United States—and much of the world—are more about class and economic security than race and gender. Yes, the United States is a stunningly affluent society, but that also means fewer citizens are willing to tolerate economic insecurity anymore. Many voters basically said, “If we’re so rich collectively, how come I feel so precarious individually?” Their answer was a resounding rejection of a status quo that promises, “Work hard, do your best, and you will be rewarded.” Instead, they said something like, “We want some assurance that if we work hard and do our best, we won’t be screwed and won’t be one step away from financial catastrophe and we want to be the ones who benefit from some safety net first.”

Many Democrats felt much the same way, trusting the Democrat Party to deliver on those promises. That sentiment was widespread, across gender, race and age. But those who have been most negatively impacted by the technologies and trade of the past decade plus are overwhelmingly non-college educated. The workers of the knowledge economy have thrived, not without insecurity but thrived nonetheless. The workers of the 20^th century industrial economy have seen massive dislocations, hence the success of J.D. Vance first as an author of Hillbilly Elegy and then as a senator and now vice president elect.

You can look at the results of this election as a white male cry of rage. That would be a mistake, and one that is too easily invoked. Yes, that’s in there. But without the diploma divide and the shift of many other ethnic groups to the Republicans and the apathy of many Democrat voters, that white male vote would not have propelled Trump to the White House.

Instead, we might view the election as a loud affirmation from tens of millions of citizens, who feel left out of the bright future promised by the information economy. They expect more; they are not content to die deaths of despair or quietly fade away. They expect a rich society to be a rich society, which doesn’t mean equality of income or even total equality of opportunity, but it does mean that there should be far more beneficiaries of our collective success.

How that demand gets met is, of course, the next challenge. Government can easily just spend more money, given that we are nowhere near our borrowing limit no matter how big the national debt. But that doesn’t solve a long-term problem, and it seems highly unlikely that the current coalition of Republicans is about to make hard choices about who pays for what. For now, however, we would do better to reframe our understanding of this election not as a victory for Trump per se but as a resounding demand by a majority of voters that the voices be heard and their needs respected if not completely met. Many voted for Harris for the same reasons. And that is the opposite of a society heading toward autocracy and control. It is a society roiling with vibrant democratic energy. That’s a good thing, a very good thing. Now we get to see where it goes.