Gabe Fleisher, a Post Opinions contributor, is the author of the Wake Up To Politics newsletter.
Some Democrats, optimistic about their midterm prospects, are already daydreaming about building a political supermajority. A new book by a prominent party operative purports to offer advice on achieving “lasting power.” If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is: Only two years ago, Republicans were saying the same thing. Therein lies a lesson.
Donald Trump narrowly won the White House in 2024, but he did so in a way that seemed to preview a formidable Republican coalition. By marrying his typical success with White non-college-educated voters to a new increase in support from Black men, Hispanics and young voters, Trump seemed to push the GOP toward becoming a party of working-class Americans of all races and ages. That placed it within reach of capturing what has long been a white whale of modern American politics.
Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, a senator from New York, was said to have built a “black-blue” — or “have-not” — coalition in his 1968 presidential bid. Before being felled by an assassin’s bullet, he united blue-collar workers and minorities by emphasizing civil rights and law and order, mixed with a heavy dose of economic populism that appealed to both contingents. Two decades later, in 1988, Jesse Jackson spoke frequently about uniting the working class in his multiracial “rainbow coalition,” although the results never matched up to the rhetoric. Like many of today’s progressives, the bulk of his White support came from more affluent corners.
Eight years later, Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole selected Jack Kemp as his running mate in part because of his appeal to working-class voters of all racial backgrounds. The gambit failed because it was never clear if Kemp’s “opportunity society” agenda was part of the party’s official platform. Two liberal GOP mayors of New York City — Fiorello La Guardia, in the 1930s and ’40s, and John Lindsay, in the 1960s and ’70s — had used the same strategy successfully albeit on a smaller scale.
Yet after Trump won his second term, such a multiracial working-class coalition seemed to finally be gelling on the national level. The GOP is now struggling because the president has spent the subsequent two years making decisions almost perfectly engineered to disillusion each component of this coalition.
To young voters, who are disproportionately isolationist, Trump promised “no more wars,” and then launched one in Iran. A majority of Hispanic adults, regardless of their own legal status, report being worried that “they, a family member or a close friend” could be deported. Working-class voters of all ages and races were drawn to promises of lower prices only to see tariffs and the war drive up costs and inflation outpace wages.
The latter are also the voters most likely to be disaffected by the political system and suspicious of corruption. Yet far from “draining the swamp,” Trump has openly stewed in it, offering pardons to campaign donors and ritzy dinners to investors in his meme coin. He also seems to have forsaken the economic program that had attracted the working class. It’s hard to call a president who is building a gilded ballroom and siding with tech billionaires on artificial-intelligence policy a paragon of populism.
Recent polling lays bare the consequences. Pew Research Center’s validated voter study found the president winning 64 percent of White non-college-educated voters in 2024. Its most recent polling shows that only 49 percent of that constituency, long a cornerstone of Trump’s base, now plans to vote Republican in this year’s midterms. Congressional Republicans have run behind Trump before, but those hoping his 2024 victory would translate into long-term dominance downballot will be disappointed to find that the party’s increases among key groups haven’t even lasted one cycle.
The aforementioned 15-point drop is exceeded by the decline in GOP support among 18-to-29-year-olds (39 percent to 23 percent) and Hispanics (48 percent to 24 percent). Support from Black men has dropped off a cliff, too, from 21 percent to 11 percent.
Midterm losses by the president’s party are considered an “iron law” of politics, proof of political gravity working its will. But what’s striking about these declines is how avoidable they were. According to the New York Federal Reserve, without the president’s tariffs, consumer prices would have “fallen slightly.” In an alternate universe in which the administration deployed more targeted tariffs, used a less aggressive deportation campaign and stayed out of the Middle East, it’s difficult to imagine Republicans struggling to keep control of the Senate.
The president may have still seen slippage — incumbents always do — but there was no need for the all-out collapse that polls now project Republicans will face among the groups that placed Trump in the White House. The work of building a political supermajority will thus be left to others.
For Republicans, that would take governing, not merely campaigning, as populists. Perhaps JD Vance, who reportedly supported raising taxes on the wealthy as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, could achieve this synthesis. After four years as Trump’s vice president, however, his credibility as both a populist and an isolationist may be in question.
For Democrats, it would require dropping some long-held views on social policy, something candidates such as James Talarico in Texas and Mary Peltola in Alaska are trying. But if they win power, the temptation not to govern that way — to abandon the platform that built their coalition, much as Trump has done — will be strong, as pressure rises from their left flank.
Whatever the case, Trump’s two-year-long missed opportunity means the white whale remains at large. Both parties know how to catch it if they want to try.
The post The great and unnecessary unraveling of Trump’s working-class coalition appeared first on Washington Post.
