Donald Trump cruised to victory on Tuesday by destroying groups of voters that Democrats once believed would help them win the White House for a generation.

After Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, many triumphantly argued that the liberal voting coalition that had elected the first black president was growing stronger as the makeup of America changed.

Older white conservatives were disappearing, and non-white Americans were projected to be in the majority by 2044. College-educated professionals, young people, blacks, Latinos and other ethnic minorities, and blue-collar workers were among the a “coalition”. of the ascendant”.

These voters leaned left on cultural issues and supported an active federal government and a strong social safety net. And they constituted a majority in enough states to ensure a democratic blockade of the Electoral College — and the presidency.

“Demography,” these left-wing optimists liked to say, “is destiny.” Sixteen years later, however, that destiny appears to have turned to dust.

Cracks began to form when non-college-educated voters drifted away from Democrats in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections. Then they broke en masse to Trump in 2016. While Joe Biden, with his favorable reputation working class he built over half a century won enough back to take the White House in 2020, his success turned out to be only a temporary reprieve.

This year, Trump has padded his gains with blue-collar workers, while also shrinking Democratic margins among young, Latino and black voters. He cut the ascendant coalition.

According to exit polls, Trump won:

– 13% of the black vote in 2024 compared to Republican John McCain’s 4 percent against Obama

– 46% of the Latino vote this time, while McCain got 31% in 2008

– 43% of voters under 30 years old compared to 32% for McCain

– 56% of those without a college degree – in 2008, it was Obama who won the majority

Speaking Thursday after his comeback victory, Trump celebrated his own diverse coalition of voters.

“I’m starting to see that realignment can happen because the Democrats are not in line with the thinking of the country,” the president-elect told NBC News.

Trump did so with a tough message on immigration that included border enforcement and mass deportations — policies that Biden and the Democrats abandoned when they took over from Trump in 2021 so as not to anger activists for immigrant rights from their liberal base.

Illegal border crossings have reached record levels under the Biden administrationwith more than eight million encounters with migrants at the Mexican border.

“If you watch a video of Hillary Clinton in 2008 in the primaries, she talks about making sure there are walls, making sure immigrants who break the law are deported, making sure everyone learns English,” said Kevin Marino Cabrera. a Republican commissioner in Miami-Dade County. “It’s funny how far the left (Democrats) have gone.”

This week, Trump became the first Republican since 1988 to win that heavily Latino Florida county. He also won Starr County in South Texas, 97 percent Latino, with 57 percent of the vote. In 2008, only 15 percent of the county voted for McCain, the Republican.

Mike Madrid, a Republican anti-Trump strategist who specializes in Latino voting trends, told the BBC that the problem with “demographics is destiny” is that it risks treating all non-white Americans as a “victimized racial minority “. “But that is not and never was how Latinos saw themselves,” he added.

“I hate that if you’re black you have to be a Democrat or you hate black people and you hate your community,” Kenard Holmes, a 20-year-old student from South Carolina, told the BBC during the presidential campaign. primaries at the beginning of this year. He said he agreed with Republicans on some things and felt Democratic politicians were taking black voters for granted.

While some states are still reporting their results, Trump has currently improved his electoral margins in at least 2,367 US counties, while losing in just 240.

It wasn’t just the number of counties Trump won that made the difference. Kamala Harris needed to post significant margins in cities to offset Republican strength in rural areas. She consistently fell short.

In Detroit’s Wayne County, for example, which the latest U.S. Census reports is 38 percent black, Harris won 63 percent of the vote — significantly lower than Joe Biden’s 68 percent in 2020 and his 74 percent Obama in 2008.

Polls consistently suggested the economy, along with immigration, were the two issues most important to voters — and where polls indicated Trump had an edge over Harris.

His economic message cuts across racial divides.

“We’re tired of hearing about identity politics,” said Nicole Williams, a white bartender with a black husband and biracial children in Las Vegas, Nevada — one of the main battleground states Trump flipped this year.

“We’re just Americans and we just want what’s best for Americans,” she said.

Democrats are already engaged in considerable soul-searching as they face an election defeat that has brought the White House, the Senate and possibly the House of Representatives under Republican control.

Various elements within the party offer their own, often conflicting, advice on the best path from the wilderness back to power.

Left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders, a two-time candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, also criticized identity politics and accused the party of abandoning working-class voters.

Some centrist Democrats, meanwhile, have argued that the struggle to connect with voters goes beyond the economy and immigration. They point out how the Trump campaign was also able to use a cultural message as a wedge to fracture the Democratic coalition.

Among the positions Republicans have targeted in this year’s election have been calls to defund law enforcement, decriminalize undocumented border crossing and petty crimes like shoplifting, and provide greater protection for transgender Americans.

Many have emerged since the 2020 killing of George Floyd and the resulting rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as other efforts to promote social justice and acknowledge the darker parts of American history.

Within a few years, however, some of these positions proved to be a liability for Democrats as they tried to win over persuasive voters and prevent their coalition from falling apart. Harris, for example, stepped down from some positions he had held when he first ran for president in 2019.

In the final month of the presidential campaign, the Trump team has made the vice president’s past support for taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for federal prisoners and immigrant detainees a focal point.

One ad ended with the line: “Kamala is for them/them. President Trump is for you.”

The Trump campaign spent more than $21 million on transgender ads in the first half of October — about a third of its total ad spending and nearly double what it spent on spots on immigration and inflation, according to data compiled by AdImpact .

It’s the kind of investment a campaign makes if it has solid data showing that an ad is moving public opinion.

After Trump’s landslide victory, Congressman Seth Moulton, a moderate from Massachusetts, said his party needed to rethink its approach to cultural issues.

“Democrats spend far too much time trying not to offend anyone, rather than being brutally honest about the challenges facing many Americans.” Moulton told the New York Times. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them to be hit on a playing field by a male athlete or an ex-male athlete, but as a Democrat I should be afraid to say that.”

The Progressive Democrats, meanwhile, reject this characterization and argue that defending minority rights has always been a core value of the party. Congressman John Moran wrote X in response: “You should find another job if you want to use an election loss as an opportunity to pick on the most vulnerable of us.”

Mike Madrid, the political strategist, has a brutal assessment of where the Democratic coalition stands today.

“The Democratic Party was built on what is really an unholy alliance between working-class people of color and wealthier white progressives driven and animated by cultural issues,” Madrid said. “The only glue that held that coalition together was anti-Republicanism.”

Once the glue came off, he said, the party was set for defeat.

The upcoming election will certainly take place in a more Democrat-friendly political environment. And Trump, who has demonstrated a unique ability to attract new and low-propensity voters to the polls, ran his latest campaign.

But the 2024 results will provide plenty of fuel for Democratic angst in the coming days.

The Harris campaign itself believes it lost to Trump because it faced an agitated public angry about the economic and social turmoil following the Covid pandemic.

“You’ve been staring down unprecedented headwinds and obstacles that were largely beyond our control,” campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a letter to her staff. “The whole country moved to the right, but compared to the rest of the country, the battleground states saw the least movement in his direction. It was the closest I’ve ever raced.”

Moses Santana, a Puerto Rican living in Philadelphia, comes from a demographic that seemed reliably Democratic about a decade ago. But when he spoke to the BBC this week, he wasn’t so convinced the Democrats delivered when they were in power – or that their message today resonated with Americans like him.

“You know, Joe Biden has promised a lot of progressive things, like canceling student debt, that he’s going to help people get citizenship,” he said. “And none of that happened. Donald Trump brings (the people) something new.”

Additional reporting by Bernd Debusmann Jr and Brandon Drenon

North America Correspondent Anthony Zurcher makes sense of the race for the White House in his twice-weekly newsletter, US Election Unspun. UK readers can sign up here. Those outside the UK can sign up here.