In 2004, Democrats believed they were hot on the heels of defeating George W. Bush. They looked at his polls and the country's state and thought they could oust him in the fall. That belief was buoyed by political scientists John B. Judis and Roy Teixeira, who predicted an "Emerging Democratic Majority." That prediction did not pan out in 2004, but they believed they got it four years later in 2008 with Barack Obama.

There's just one problem with this theory: it ended up running smack into the walls of reality in the 2010 midterms when Obama got shellacked by Republicans. And while Obama won re-election in 2012, his presidency was followed up withthe election of Donald Trump, who re-won his seat after Biden's term.

In the wake of the 2024 election results, Ruy Teixeira penned "The Shattering of the Democratic Coalition." He wrote, "Democrats cannot decisively beat their opponents as this election has shown once again. The party is uncompetitive among white working-class voters and among voters in exurban, small town, and rural America. ... To add to the problem, Democrats are now hemorrhaging nonwhite working-class voters across the country."

The Democratic Majority, as predicted by Judis and Teixeira, described the Obama coalition, which hasn't attached itself to another Democrat. Joe Biden's victory in 2020 looks more like a fluke from the COVID-19 pandemic than it does a serious reversion to the Obama coalition - he barely won with less than 75,000 votes across a handful of states deciding the race.

While there were signs of this trend in the 2016 and 2020 elections, Donald Trump's sweeping of the battleground states and the popular vote was wildly unexpected by the left. But as if that wasn't enough, new data shows that Trump and Republicans swept the working-class vote on every major issue in the race.

In a PPI/YouGov survey, which heavily sampled swing states after the election, "working-class Americans favored Republicans over Democrats on every contested issue in the 2024 campaign. The GOP margin over Democrats in terms of party trust on the issues ranged from +2 on healthcare to +28 on immigration. Working-class independents trusted the GOP by even greater margins than working-class voters overall across all the issues with advantages ranging from +14 to +38."

The survey examined twelve major topics and found that working-class voters sided with Republicans on all of them. The list included immigration, the Israel-Hamas war, foreign threats, crime, Ukraine, the economy, patriotism, fighting for you, fighting for working people, promoting ordinary people, making housing affordable, and healthcare.

In short, Republicans took away every bread-and-butter issue that Democrats claimed to lead on. The only conclusion John Halpin at the Liberal Patriot reached when examining the data was, "If Democrats want to be honest with themselves, they will admit that their party is no longer the historic voice for blue-collar, working-class Americans. The Democrats' national party brand is sadly a pathetic shell of its former self."

It is difficult to nail down one reason why Donald Trump won because he was ahead on every critical measure. In the same survey, Trump's lead exploded if you looked at working-class independents. On the usually pro-Democratic Party issue of healthcare, Trump and Republicans led this issue by 14 points. On more Trump-friendly topics like immigration, his lead among independent working-class voters exploded to 38 points.

When you see this kind of data, Trump's sweep of the battlegrounds and popular vote starts making more sense. Kamala Harris failed on every topic and struggled to provide voters with any reason to pull the lever for her and the Democrats.

The lesson here isn't that one party is ascendant, and the other is stuck in purgatory forever. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were theories like the emerging Republican majority. That theory ended up getting more legs between the landslides of Nixon and Reagan, with George W. Bush signaling the end of that era of politics. Everything happens with ebbs and flows and is highly dependent on good governance.

If your party sucks at governing, the voting public will punish you. Barack Obama took office in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis. Americans wanted him to solve that, and instead, we got Obamacare. Joe Biden claimed the adults were back in charge and systematically ran the country into the ground through inflation and a growing list of foreign policy crises.

Donald Trump's task is to govern well. If he can do that, he'll lock in a new core of Republican voters. If he doesn't, Republicans will face issues with voters in a few short years. But for now, working-class voters have declared they are leaving the Democratic Party in droves. And they're siding with Trump and Republicans on every issue.