Because we have a loud, impulsive, attention-grabbing, power-hungry president named Donald Trump who sucks up all the oxygen wherever he goes, one of the epic political stories of our time has flown under the radar:
The stunning fall of the Democratic party.
Just 28% of Americans view the party favorably, according to a CNN poll conducted July 10-13 and released last week. That’s the lowest mark for Democrats in the entire history of CNN polling, going back over 30 years.
Of course, this hasn’t gone totally unnoticed. The party did get routed last November, which triggered endless handwringing and analyses from Democratic insiders desperate for a comeback. Most of those analyses, however, tiptoe on “what went wrong” and go full-throated on “what to do.”
And who can blame them? If the answer to “what went wrong?” challenges the very soul of your party, that can get pretty demoralizing, especially if the “fixes” are equally challenging.
So it came as a pleasant surprise this week when I came across a long essay in The New York Times that gave a smart and candid take on the historic fall of a historic party. The essay zeroes in on one crucial aspect of the fall– the loss of the Democrats’ multiracial coalition.
“It seemed that the multiracial coalition that elected Barack Obama would secure a Democratic future for this country for decades,” began the essay by Dr. Daniel Martinez HoSang, professor of American studies and political science at Yale University. “But instead, as America grows more diverse, it has become more conservative. Why?”
The question itself is stunning.
Imagine if you’re a diehard Democrat who thinks Trump is Hitler and you read that more and more Americans are becoming conservative and voting for him. What do you do with that information, besides put an ice pack on your forehead?
Slowly and deliberately, Dr. HoSang dissects what happened through the eyes of people who made it happen.
He opens with Joey Gibson, a Japanese American leader of a right-wing group in the Pacific Northwest that rallied for Donald Trump. But Mr. Gibson, HoSang writes, “also disavowed white supremacy and spoke candidly about harms against the Black community, building a movement that was at once multiracial and conservative. “
When HoSang and his colleague Joseph Lowndes began studying the movement of nonwhite voters to the right 15 years ago, people like Mr. Gibson “were often disdained by liberals as dupes of the right voting against their own interests, votes they would regret once they saw their conservative beliefs in action.”
He adds: “For decades, the dominant assumption has been that people of color in the United States would find their natural political home within the Democratic Party, with its commitment to racial liberalism.”
How times and assumptions have changed.
To show the shift, HoSang notes that from 2020 to 2024, Trump nearly doubled his support among Black voters, won some 40 percent of the Asian American vote, and took almost half of the Latino vote.
What’s noteworthy is that many of the people HoSang talked to — students, lawyers, mechanics, pastors and others — “sounded strikingly similar to Mr. Gibson. Angry at a system they contend is indifferent to their lives, they express ideas that were once seen only on the far-right fringe.”
HoSang notes that the rightward drift of minority voters is “a phenomenon years in the making, one that is reshaping the American political landscape. And to understand this movement, you must understand the transformations in the places they are happening.”
To capture that transformation, HoSang enters the worlds of three minority groups traditionally associated with Democrats— Blacks, Asians and Latinos.
What makes his essay come alive is its humanity. The voters he meets who have moved to the right are real people with real sentiments and real grievances. They’re neither wackos nor ideologues. They exhibit common sense, a motif that runs through the essay.
“I joined the Democratic party because I’m Black,” Orlando Owens of Milwaukee says. “When you get your food stamp review, you have to go give shot records, school records, blood type. You almost have to get absolutely naked to get a $50 increase. But you have people coming to this country who have no documentation who are staying in hotels for two years, for free? How is that right?”
Owens, HoSang notes, isn’t the only voter in Milwaukee who believes the Democratic Party is “indifferent to his needs.”
“A lot of Black people are not MAGA,” radio host and community advocate Tory Lowe says. “They’re rejecting the Democrat leadership because of how they’re running our communities. They need to take accountability for how they have mismanaged the Black communities.”
Lowe voted for Obama because, he says, “the energy was, let’s see if we can get a brother in. So we had eight years of Obama, and the communities didn’t change. Our communities probably got worse…They’re trying to continue to move forward fearmongering against the Trump administration, instead of saying, ‘OK, let’s redo and make it right.’”
From retired property manager Cindy Werner: “My dad passed when I was much younger and my mother raised us. It was the responsibility of those of us who were older than our younger siblings to take care of them. So the policies that the Republican Party supports —pulling yourself up by your bootstraps — were in our household already.
“My mom being a single mom, there were times when we got the government cheese, we got the government milk. But I could see the change within the Black community where there was more dependency on the government and that became just like voting Democrat became. It just became a habit.”
I’m being generous with quotes because HoSang’s essay is full of lively statements from people that cut through the political jargon and illustrate his academic research.
From Erik Ngutse, a community engagement director and an immigrant from Rwanda: “I worked on Obama’s campaign, knocked on a few doors for him and organized students. It was something about when Hillary Clinton ran for office that I think I started realizing that a lot of the values that I truly believed in were more on the conservative side. I absolutely despised her idea that she already owned the Black vote, that she didn’t really have to do anything.
“I’ve always been fairly patriotic. When we were coming here, America was a far-fetched dream. I feel like I owe America quite a bit. I care very little for the social aspect of things. I am not particularly anti-gay marriage or anything. It just isn’t what I see bringing down my community.”
From café owner Shana Gray: “For many, many years we have voted Democratic, but we have nothing to show for that other than the continued fight for civil rights. I am tired of fighting. At this point, individuals like myself and others in my community were like, what do we have to lose? Because we feel like we’re losing, and we have nothing to lose to try something different.”
“‘Oh, just give us your vote.’ That’s all we heard,” Gray added. “There was no action behind that. Maybe they were speaking the language of reform for themselves, but the people who had mattered were not feeling that.”
HoSang notes that “In many ways, the story of Milwaukee’s disillusioned Black voters encapsulates the tectonic shifts in American society that voters of color have faced in recent years. Like many other distressed cities, Milwaukee continues to reel from the foreclosure crisis, the opioid epidemic and chronic funding shortfalls. Together, these problems have created cracks in the bedrock of Democratic support in these communities.”
What I found remarkable about HoSang’s observations of the three groups is how unremarkable their concerns were, how common and obvious they came across.
In California, he notes, “the Asian American community stands as a microcosm of the collapsing support for Democrats…In the Bay Area, Asian American voters are moving rightward out of anger with state and local Democratic policies. Frustrated with homelessness and crime, Nancy Yu Law asked if Democrats were making San Francisco less safe.”
Homelessness. Crime. Concern for safety. Those issues kept coming up.
“My opinion started turning when I used to work for 7-Eleven,” California business manager Tammi Li says. “I became a franchisee, and that’s when I started to feel there’s something going on. In 2014, there was a law passed called Proposition 47: If people steal less than $950, you can’t really prosecute them as felons. We got impacted almost right away. The crime goes up; we got shoplifted left and right. When we try to call the police, a lot of times we’re told, ‘Well, there’s not much to do.’”
A key theme of HoSang’s analyses is that America changed, but the Democrats did not change with it.
“The Democratic-championed civil rights protections and social welfare programs that have defined the party’s appeal to nonwhite voters have proven inadequate in the face of the interconnected crises that define America now,” he writes. “Policies to address residential segregation some 70 years ago can do little to ease the housing shortages plaguing many communities today. The 1965 Immigration Act was not designed to manage the migration driven by economic downturns, military strife and climate catastrophes unfolding around the globe.”
The shift to the right among minority voters may have been a long-term trend, but the unique appeal and charisma of President Obama masked the underlying problems and made it more difficult to notice.
“On the heels of Mr. Obama’s sweeping victory in 2008, the Democratic Party saw the multiracial coalition that elected him as a virtual electoral guarantee,” HoSang writes. “Indeed, an estimated 80 percent of voters of color cast their ballots for Mr. Obama in 2012, as the share of white eligible voters declined in all 50 states from 2000 to 2018.”
But behind the grand pronouncements and the faith in “demography as destiny,” HoSang and his colleague were seeing a different reality coming into view.
They were researching “the ways the 2008 financial meltdown and the myriad housing and other crises it caused were sowing discontent in the Democrats’ multiracial coalition. Already in our research we noticed how conservatives were directing the frustrations of those suffering these crises at institutions and public workers instead of corporations and Wall Street.”
This is a crucial point, because an essential part of the Democrats’ downfall is that they represented government and public institutions at a time when trust in those institutions was tanking. As HoSang notes, “the Democratic message that hope and possibility were limitless and the country’s best days were ahead was crashing on the shoals of grim economic conditions and a growing sense of isolation, loneliness and despair. A rift was forming, one that only grew wider as the years wore on.”
If the Democrats represented government and all the baggage that came with it, Trump, for all his blowhard and vulgar ways, represented America and all the possibilities that came with it. In the battle between a sclerotic and bloated government people didn’t trust and the America of the American Dream people aspired to, it was no contest.
At a time of collapsing trust among its multiethnic voter base, HoSang writes, “the [Democratic] party’s commitment to progressive causes like L.G.B.T. rights and racial equality have become the target of attacks from the right. Voters like Tammy Li in San Francisco, whose frustrations with the Democrats stem from the break-ins and shopliftings at the 7-Eleven franchise she owned there, began engaging with the right-wing social critique once she found herself in Republican circles.”
“I’m a minority myself,” she said, “but just because you’re L.G.B.T.Q., you have more rights over my rights?”
The Latino community’s experience speaks to the shift on social views. In 1960, HoSang writes, “there were an estimated six million Latinos in the United States… but by 2022, the Latino population had exceeded 63 million. Latinos had built longstanding communities in most states, and a large majority had been born in this country. Under 45 percent identified as Catholic, while 15 percent described themselves as evangelical Protestants, in churches that make conservative views on abortion, same-sex marriage and other social issues central to their beliefs. How they vote could change the trajectory of America’s political landscape.”
In the Rio Grande Valley, HoSang notes that “years of rightward shift in the Latino community culminated in the region flipping Republican in 2024.”
From restaurant owner Yolanda Gonzalez: “I was brought up as a Democrat. My mother was a strong Democrat. A lot of us have relatives across the border. But those that are here have come in legally. It’s cost them. They saw all the benefits they were giving those who had come illegally. I have employees where they do get benefits, and they were getting cut because of the illegals that were coming in. That was hurting everybody. I was not a big Trump supporter back in 2020. The man grew on me. He talks to us like he’s talking to us directly.”
HoSang quotes Sam Gonzales, a gay and Latino, who, like many in South Texas, has “grown tired of identity politics.”
“They always told us the Democrats are for the people, for the little guy, for the Mexicans, for Blacks, for poor people,” Gonzales says. “They were going to take care of us, they were going to make things better for us. Then it was the constant support of abortion, the constant need to talk about race, the need to identify yourself as a gay Hispanic or gay Mexican American. No, I am an American. I happen to be gay. I happened to believe in God. I don’t fit the norm.
“And when I finally realized that I’m not a cookie-cutter type person, I let my freak flag fly. I just turned my back towards them because I felt the Democrats turned their back towards me.”
In the soul searching that the Democratic party has begun, that is perhaps the point that stings the most: a sense that they “turned their back” on their multiracial base and took them for granted, not to mention turning their back on the white working class who shared many of the same grievances.
Turning your back on voters is not something that‘s easy to admit, especially for a political party. It’s a spear to the soul. How does a party come back from that?
HoSang’s essay, by following the truth wherever it leads, is a good start. It forces the party to look in the mirror and confront an uncomfortable reality. As tempting as it is for Democrats to settle for “bashing Trump” as a strategy, that won’t deal with those uncomfortable truths.
As Kimberley Strassel writes in The Wall Street Journal, Democrats cannot afford to avoid “the voters who last year decisively rejected the progressive agenda that defines today’s Democratic Party. A real autopsy would focus almost entirely on the unpopularity of the ideas that animate the political left… It would note not just the polls showing this rejection, but the proof in the form of recent, extraordinary demographic shifts that show a left losing its grip on whole categories of once reliable voter groups.”
Strassel doesn’t believe this will happen, for a simple reason: “The progressive left remains a minority in the liberal movement, but its true believers nonetheless occupy all the positions of power, including the leadership of the DNC (and most Beltway press jobs). They won’t criticize their basic world view. If change is to come to the Democratic Party—and it will—expect it to come in the form of a charismatic outsider who shows a new way, not via a pro forma autopsy by an insular claque that has no real regrets over the course that actually lost them an election.”
How ironic that the only thing that can revitalize the Democratic party is a “charismatic outsider who shows a new way.” That sounds awfully familiar.
