Sea Change

 Yglesias' contrarianism can be tiresome. However, sometimes it allows him to see things others won't look at, and today that is the important shift in voting patterns.

For decades, Democratic voters tended to be low propensity voters. They were part of the working classes that suffered under Republican plutocratic policies. Higher educated voters tended to vote for lower taxes and fewer regulations. It requited preternaturally charismatic candidates like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to mobilize those voters.

Today, Trump has upended that dynamic. His rampant destruction of American governmental institutions tends to be noticed by highly informed voters who think more abstractly about things like liberty or rights. The social changes of the last quarter century have been embraced by more educated and informed voters. 

Yglesias feels this means that Democrats need to target their voter registration drives, and that's likely true. However, I think it also means that we can't predict what will happen to the Trump coalition, absent Trump. How much are these infrequent voters going to vote without him on the ballot? We are already seeing it in the elections of 2018, 2022 and 2023. In 2020, the election was closer than polls predicted and then obviously he overperformed in 2024 again. 

It remains to be seen whether the new Trump voter will vote without Trump on the ballot. It also remains to be seen whether a Trumpist candidate could win against a male Democrat, since at least some of Trump's overperformance has to stem from this latent misogyny.

The 2026 elections will determine whether America remains a democracy. The people most likely to vote on that issue are the new Democratic coalition. If Trump's policies are the disaster that they certainly seem to be, then at best many of his voters will stay home. Some of the marginally engaged will shift to Democrats just to check his powers. 

It's incumbent that Democrats realize that this is their new base and work to only increase their margins among demographics that they know will show up at the polls for them. It's OK to bargain away some things like voter ID in return for other things