The Free Press
There is a deep irony to Donald Trump’s second inauguration coinciding with the day on which we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. For decades, the Democratic Party has been the political home for minority voters, who rightly credit Democrats like President Lyndon Johnson with delivering landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Now, roughly half a century since the civil rights revolution, the role of race in American politics is changing: We as Democrats are struggling to maintain the loyalty of minority voters—and Donald Trump, of all people, is forcing us to confront an uncomfortable reality.
As Democrats, we have long believed that the country’s changing demographics would inexorably lead to a lasting majority for our party, rooted in voters of color, reducing the Republican Party to a white, rural relic of a reactionary past. This prediction of permanent Democratic control—built on the permanent loyalty of black and brown voters—was debunked definitively on November 5, 2024.
Trump’s most impressive breakthrough lies not in breaking the Rust Belt “blue wall” and connecting with working-class whites in those areas. His most improbable and formidable feat lies in chipping away at the blue wall in urban America. Few places saw a more impressive swing toward Trump in 2024 than my own deeply Democratic congressional district in the Bronx.
In 2012, President Barack Obama won a staggering 96 percent of the vote in the general election in my district. By 2024, the Democratic share of the presidential vote had fallen by 22 percent, with Harris garnering only 74 percent.
The loss of so many votes so quickly left me wondering: If Democratic support in the Bronx has fallen so dramatically in the last decade, then where will we stand in the next decade if we can’t stop the hemorrhaging? And crucially, what went wrong?
I represent a heavily African American and Latino district with a substantial Jewish community in Riverdale. Vice President Kamala Harris lost more ground among Dominicans in the South Bronx than she did among Orthodox Jews in Riverdale—an outcome few would have expected given the narratives leading up to the election.
As Democrats, we no longer live in a world where black and brown voters can be seen as a monolith. We have to hustle for every vote and every voting bloc and take no one and nothing for granted.
Democrats must recognize that class—especially in the sense of educational attainment—is increasingly replacing race as the most powerful predictor of voting behavior.
In recent political history, Trump came as close as anyone to uniting the white working class of rural America with much of the black and brown working class of urban America, creating the kind of multiracial working-class coalition that Democrats like me dream of building. Even though Trump won the popular vote by a vanishingly small margin, the manner in which he won is a sobering reality that we as Democrats deny or downplay at our own peril.
Just as Democrats should not underinterpret the results of the 2024 election, Republicans should not overinterpret them either. Trump’s appeal is a unique phenomenon in modern American history, and it remains to be seen whether it’s broadly transferable to the Republican Party.
Still, Democrats must acknowledge that the 2024 election was not the beginning of a trend but the continuation of one. Trump had already made inroads among communities of color in the 2020 presidential election—amid the public backlash against the #DefundThePolice movement—and then he decisively built on those gains in the 2024 election.
Several years ago, I had a conversation with a self-proclaimed “police abolitionist,” a white socialist who saw himself as a warrior for working-class people of color. Despite living nowhere near working-class black and brown people, this do-gooder somehow knew he spoke for them.
I presented him with a simple question meant to dislodge him from his high horse: “What happens if your social experiment of abolishing the police ends badly? What happens if it causes an outbreak of gun violence, gang violence, and youth violence?” I then ended with a polemic: “You lead an ivory-towered existence in a wealthy white neighborhood whereas my constituents, poor people of color, will be forced to live with the consequences of your social engineering. Is that truly progressive—to have white progressive luxury beliefs whose costs are primarily borne by people of color?”
The original sin of the new left is that it speaks for people of color without actually speaking to them—and listening. For if the new left actually spoke to people of color, it would never embrace movements like #DefundThePolice, it would never use terms like Latinx or Latine, and it would never have kept the Biden administration from acting decisively to secure the border in the face of an overwhelming migrant crisis that, in the end, cost us the election.
Listening to working-class people of color means unshackling ourselves from self-anointed socialist saviors who speak falsely in their name.
There is a difference between the beliefs of communities of color and the beliefs projected onto those communities by elites. The pattern of mistaking the latter for the former is what has made the Democratic Party lose touch with working-class voters of all backgrounds.
Regaining their trust requires a return to the basics: an affordable cost of living, safe streets, secure borders—in short, a government that works for the people rather than the interest groups.
If we stop obsessively dividing people by identity and start obsessively solving practical problems that affect all of us, the sky’s the limit for the Democratic Party. Confronting our common challenges and uniting America around our common humanity—in the spirit of MLK—is not only good policy. It’s good politics.
Sometimes the news moves so fast, you have to look closely to recognize if you’ve seen it before. Check out Eli Lake’s new podcast, Breaking History, where he breaks down the news by breaking down history. Premiering January 22 on all podcasting platforms.