The 2024 election should end the ‘demographics are destiny’ era of politics
The News
If there's one takeaway from the latest election results for both parties, it's that it should explode the "demographics" conversation that's been dominating American politics this century. By "demographics" I mean an ongoing — often intensely racialized and divisive — debate about which party is positioning itself toward a durable long-term majority.
Instead, the political imagination is a little bigger today than it was on Monday. Donald Trump's victory featured shifts to the right in counties, precincts, and groups across the country, almost all largely attributed to the same grievances with the status quo. In a world where New York and New Jersey can swing by double digits in a single election, neither party can take any voter for granted, nor treat them as impossibly out of reach.
Benjy's view
Looking back on the debates about political strategy from President Obama's 2008 landslide until today, perhaps the biggest theme was parties preparing themselves for a future in which the country is majority-nonwhite and recalibrating their thinking towards that horizon in response to every loss and victory.
The unifying political buzzword of the period was "demographics" — a debate that started among political elites about which growing and shrinking slices of the electorate could be mixed and matched for optimal performance, but that soon spilled over into popular discourse as well, sometimes in naive or ugly ways.
After Obama romped in 2012 with Latino voters, Republicans debated whether to pursue them with immigration reform or focus on running up the score with white voters with red meat conservatism. Donald Trump answered that debate in 2016 with a none-of-the-above option, moving to the right on immigration, while pivoting away from the tea party's small government approach and drawing in new droves of blue-collar white voters. Democrats, sensing an opportunity to run up the score with Black and Latino voters even further in response, moved left on immigration and racial justice issues. They instead won in 2020 with incremental improvement with white voters, while ceding some ground to Trump with nonwhite voters. Then in 2024, the dam broke and Trump made sweeping gains in Latino communities that had until recently voted strongly Democratic — all while making immigration crackdowns central to his message. As Jon Stewart noted in a viral segment , almost none of it unfolded as pundits predicted after each election.
But even as the strategic debate unfolded unpredictably, the constant "demographics" discussion spawned poor thinking and sometimes led to very dark places.
Democrats looked at Obama's decisive 2012 win, which was largely fought with populist Rust Belt ads aimed at white working class voters that attacked his opponent for being rich and out of touch, and left fired up about an inevitable coalition of young, urban, and nonwhite voters instead. They often wrongly assumed that the economy-focused message that helped them with those decisive voters was not the primary reason they won with voters of all stripes, instead looking to more siloed messages and niche issues. Activist groups claiming to speak for individual planks of their rising coalition soared in influence, but often proved more in line with educated donors and elites than the rank-and-file voters they purported to represent.
On the right, the "demographics" talk fed a toxic mix of paranoia, despair, and xenophobia. Figures like Rush Limbaugh made the case that Latino voters and other immigrants were irredeemably left-wing , and that adding more would soon make Republican victories impossible. Even the more polite Mitt Romney's private lament that "47%" of the country was too dependent on the government to vote GOP riffed off then-popular theories on the right about a demographic tipping point toward socialism. Renewed pushes for voting restrictions were steeped in Republican pessimism about ever winning Black voters. Over time, and especially in the Trump era, more Republicans embraced the far right's dark "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory that the left was "importing" voters for nefarious purposes.
Amidst this divide, some independent analysts speculated in the 2010s that the country might be headed towards the kinds of extreme racially polarized politics seen in parts of the Deep South — with white voters and nonwhite voters almost uniformly voting against each other's favored candidates by blowout margins. Trump's more overtly bigoted appeals in 2016, from a Muslim ban to baiting a Mexican American judge to sharing fake statistics about Black-on-white crime , and his success with white Rust Belt voters, further raised these fears.
The concerns about Trump and race never left, but assumptions about the underlying politics changed dramatically. After decades of fear-mongering about immigrants and their descendants dragging the country to the left and failing to assimilate, Republicans discovered they could speak to — and win — voters of all races and religions with the same messages they used elsewhere, including in the diverse and rising Gen Z electorate. Even Muslim voters, the subject of years of unhinged "Sharia law" panics that Trump eagerly stoked , were welcomed into the tent — including by Trump . Exit polls will take some time to sort out, but one of Democrats' best relative performances may have been with seniors, an older and whiter cohort that were once stereotyped as dead enders whose passing would herald the new progressive age. Elon Musk might not see it now, but it's just as possible that recent arrivals and their children, like asylum seekers fleeing Venezuela's socialist government, end up "replacing" older Democratic voters if Republicans can win them over.
It's ice cold comfort for Democrats today, but a world in which Republicans grow confident they can win a majority of voters in a majority-minority country — even in ways that horrify progressives and shift the demagoguery to new groups instead — may be a healthier place than the alternative in the long run.
