Democrats Have Lost National Voter Edge

by David Samuel McCalmont

Avowed Marxist Zohran Mamdani's unquestioned victory in last week's New York City Democrat Party mayoral primary has created a huge unwanted quandary for a party already playing rope-a-dope on issues closest to the hearts of American voters. According to newly released data from Pew Research Institute, the philosophical heart of America's oldest surviving party has been deemed unattractive by a majority of people.

Pew conducts a biennial poll known as the Validated Voter Survey. This is considered one of the best ways to understand what happened in the last national election, because its results are cross-indexed with each state's voter files. Only respondents who are shown to have actually voted are counted.

The official nationwide tallies are these: Electoral College - Trump 312; Harris 226. Popular vote: Trump 77,302,580; Harris 75,017,613. The headline results getting most of the media attention support unofficial findings from the 2024 exit polls and from Catalist, another post-election analysis firm.

Pew Research Institute offers proof that Democrats hemorrhaged historically reliable support from men, Latinos, and blacks, costing Kamala Harris the presidency. Democrats' loss of support among men is especially sharp among non-white men.

President Trump's victory margin among white men improved by three percentage points - from 17% to 20% - between 2020 and 2024. This is a very strong improvement but doesn't explain why Trump went from losing by 4.5% to Joe Biden to winning by 1.5% against Kamala Harris.

It was Trump's gains among non-white men that altered the political landscape, as he notched a 21-point improvement from his 75-point defeat in 2020.

He carried Latino men by 2 points, a 20-point improvement from his 18-point 2020 loss.

Trump gained 23 points among Asians and 29 points among voters of other races, gains that could not have occurred without huge increases in male voters.

Let me throw in some random but stunning numbers into the mix:

1. Among all blacks (male and female), Trump in 2024 garnered 15%, as opposed to 8% in 2020;

2. Biden won voters aged 18-49 by 17%; Harris won this group by 7%;

3. 8% of Biden's 2020 voters switched to Trump; 4% of Trump's voters switched to Harris;

4. 85% of 2020 Trump voters voted for him again; 79% of Biden voters cast ballots for Harris;

5. 15% of Biden voters didn't vote in 2024; (no figure for 2020 Trump voters not voting in 2024);

6. The only plus for Harris - Biden lost white women by 8 points; Harris lost them by 4 points.

The Democrat Dilemma

Zohran Mamdani's consultants argue that their guy in the NYC Democrat primary polled strongly in Spanish and Asian neighborhoods. They say that Mamdani's populist appeal will snag the same voters as did Donald Trump. But it should be noted that this was a low-turnout election dealing only with that sliver of Democrat Party voters that show up for a primary. Translated: these Spanish and Asian voters are far to the left of their neighbors.

Senator Bernie Sanders easily won those same neighborhoods in the Bronx and Queens in the 2020 Democrat Super Tuesday primary. Those percentages fell dramatically – shifting to the right – in the November general election.

These stark figures don't really explain the dilemma for Democrats in the Mid-Terms and beyond. The Pew Research results show that there was little change in voting by partisans between 2020 and 2024. Kamala Harris beat Donald Trump by 89 points among Democrats and their self-identifying allied independents – only 1 point less than Joe Biden's 90 points in 2020. Donald Trump won Republicans and their cohort independents by 86 points, 1 point less than the 87-point margin in 2020.

These four groups comprised 99% of the electorate in 2024 – 97% in 2020. Harris's campaign should have easily triumphed, no? The electorate's partisan composition mirrored 2020. But Harris shrunk among every demographic group except white women and lost the election without a wedge anywhere for a challenge.

Why?

Republicans and right-wing independents were 51% of the total electorate in 2024, up from 47% in 2020. Democrats and left-wing independents dropped from 50% in 2020 to 48% in 2024. That 6-point shift in the partisan balance precisely mirrors Trump's 6-point improvement in his popular vote margin. That explains how Trump was able to comfortably grab all seven swing states and just as importantly head off time-consuming and confidence-sapping challenges in the Electoral College.

Let's put this another way: Trump didn't win because he got disaffected Democrats and independents to vote for him. President Trump won because he got enough of those people to switch parties entirely.

This is an historic achievement. Exit polling has been around since Nixon/McGovern in 1972. No total electorate in 53 years has ever favored Republicans. Partisan identification polls have always showed Democrats with significant margins going into a general election. We can surmise in good conscience that 2024 was the first presidential election since Hoover/Roosevelt in 1932 where more voters were Republicans than Democrats.

Elephants Taking Up Ever More Room

Here's the conundrum for Democrats: They do not know how to campaign when the elephants are in the majority and the donkeys are in the minority. For most of the last century, all Democrats had to do to win was rally their base and split the independents. Kamala Harris did just that – and lost – because that time-tested simple formula no longer delivers to them the Electoral College. Trump proved that it doesn't even give them their vaunted popular vote.

The battlefield for Republicans was always unfriendly terrain. For my entire life, Republicans were running campaigns on Democrat turf. They had to prove they were no threat to the welfare state, or any other potently popular nostrum fronted by Democrats. The other side of the coin is that infuriated principled conservatives saw their party leaders as "meeting, eating, and retreating" in defeat and despair. The so-called "wiser heads" in the Republican camp opined that pushing back Democrat Party programs was folly and election-day suicide. The best they can do is manage the nation's decline.

The shoe's now on the other foot. Democrats must demonstrate that they support popular Trump Republican America First themes which polls say the general public backs. Kamala Harris used the old playbook and that got her nowhere. New era Democrats such as 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani are charging directly into Donald Trump's headwind by doubling down on policies that former Democrat Party voters have already rejected by jumping ship to the Republican Party.

The last time a national candidate campaigned directly into an oncoming political hurricane was Barry Goldwater in 1964. Sixty-one years later, I'm still picking the wreckage of that crash from my teeth.

For The Record:

Trump in Santa Barbara County in 2020 received 31.5% of the total vote. This jumped to nearly 34% in 2024. Statewide, Trump got 34% (thereabouts) in 2020 and 38% in 2024. These are significant moves.

On another subject, knowing what we know about the 2024 electorate, there is no reason other than fraud why Republicans lost congressional seats in CA. If these seats could be won back in 2026, it would be near impossible for Democrats to take the House. "Open seats" give 3-to-5 percentage points to the opposition party. Even if Democrats maintain most of these seats, they'll probably lose a few of them, and force the party to spend gobs of money protecting "safe" seats.

So far, I like what I see.

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