Imagine this: January 20, 2025. Donald Trump has just been sworn in as president — again. He didn’t steal the election; no frivolous lawsuits in swing states. He won fair and square, buoyed by historic levels of support from Black and Latino voters.
And that’s not all: Trump’s gains aren’t limited to GOP-leaning states like Florida and Texas. They appear everywhere — a scary harbinger for Democrats of things to come: a generational realignment that sees Republicans building a multiracial working-class coalition that hands them control of the White House for years to come.
That’s one future envisioned by Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and strategist, in his book Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP.
The dream starts from a very real place: 2020 was (or at least should have been) a wake-up call for Democrats. Trump improved on his 2016 performance with a host of nonwhite voters, most dramatically cutting into the traditional advantage Democrats have had with Latino and Hispanic voters. Those gains were most obvious in Florida (which was called early on election night) and Texas — but they materialized across the US, irrespective of Latin American heritage, in swing states and safely blue states, and happened as Latino voter turnout surged to unprecedented levels.
Those gains generally stuck during the 2022 midterms: Republicans held about 39 percent of the national Latino vote, according to exit polls. And recent polling shows Biden is consistently struggling to keep the support of Black and Latino voters in theoretical match-ups against Trump and other GOP candidates.
These trends from the last few years are the basis for Ruffini’s optimistic case for Republicans and voters of color, that the gains Trump made in 2020 and Republicans kept in 2022 confirm a realignment in American politics. Democrats have not only lost their hold on working-class white voters, but are now also losing…
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