The Briefing, Vol. XIII, Issue 21
This week:
- What’s wrong with the Democrats
- NYT shows that only one party looks like America
- Can Paul LePage come back?
Outlook
Democrats: “Toxic,” “weak,” and “woke.” These are the words former U.S. Rep. and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) uses to describe the Democratic Party’s brand today. The former DCCC chairman and architect of the party’s 2006 takeover of the U.S. House sees the problem in a way most current Democratic officeholders do not. A liberal himself, he understood the need to appeal to more than just the far left of his party.
Here’s the Democrats’ real problem: By decrying as “racist,” “fascistic,” or “white supremacist” every normal thing in American life — including physical fitness, liking pretty girls, eating red meat, not wanting pornography in school libraries, protecting children from gender-transitioning, accepting basic differences between men and women, race-neutrality in college admissions and hiring, et cetera — the Left in the U.S. has ceded nearly every semblance of normality to the other side just by not showing up in the world of the real.
To put it another way: The Left — without any resistance from Democratic officialdom and often with its active encouragement — tried much too hard during the Woke Era to move the Overton Window. And they tried to pull it so far leftward that they themselves lost their grip and fell right out of it. Even now, having been stripped of power and rejected by voters, they cannot bring themselves to abandon the illusion of social and political progress that they thought they had made between 2015 and 2024 in changing the way the public generally perceives the world.
This stance puts Democrats out of touch with people’s normal, everyday concerns, such as raising children and paying bills. And this is reflected in the Democrats’ loss of ground with traditional constituencies, such as lower-income Americans and racial minorities.
Party evolution and strength: These two phenomena are reflected in the newly published New York Times analysis of the Republican Party’s electoral performance during Donald Trump’s tenure as its de facto leader. This is a must-read, if only for the graphics.
As the political side of the phenomenon described above, it bears noting that this is all happening with Trump, arguably the most divisive figure in modern American political history, leading the Republican Party. It just goes to show how far Democrats have fallen.
Most of the Times analysis focuses only on counties that shifted toward one party or the other in all three of the presidential elections in which President Trump appeared on the ballot — 2016, 2020, and 2024.
Fully 1,433 counties — nearly half of the nation’s counties — shifted toward Republicans in all three of those elections. This includes a striking number of counties in key states of the future, such as Minnesota, New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Texas, and North Carolina. And this includes many large-population counties — home to such cities as New York, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Miami, Cleveland, and Flint, Mich., among many others.
How many U.S. counties shifted toward Democrats in each of those three races? Only 57, it turns out. And very few of them are in the states that Democrats are hoping to “turn Blue” in the long run — zero in Idaho, Montana or Utah, two in Texas (but only one worth mentioning), and none in Arizona.
To be sure, there is some bad news here for Republicans. The entire Atlanta area is definitely slipping away from them. So are Asheville, N.C., Richmond, Va., and every principal city in Colorado.
But overall, the news for Republicans in this analysis is very positive. Not only did 2,678 of America’s 3,100-plus counties shifted in their favor between 2012 and 2024, but a large majority have moved in their direction with each vote.
One graphic in the Times analysis really stands out in illustrating the demography of the counties that have consistently shifted Republican in all three of the last presidential elections, versus those consistently shifting leftward in all three. Each dot represents a county and each dot’s size represents the size of its population:
There is a way to describe this disparity that Democrats might either appreciate or resent, given that it comes from them originally: One of these parties looks like America, and the other one is a privileged one percent that does not.
This sort of demographic and social contrast raises the question of how much longer Democrats can keep up the pretense of concern over “tax cuts for billionaires,” or any of their other old-fashioned political tropes about class consciousness. This version of American leftism is dying. A massive swath of working-class America has evidently gotten over the idea that Democratic class-based politics has any sincerity or meaning to offer them.
Non-white Republicanism on the rise: And in many cases, this is also becoming true of race and ethnicity, as the analysis further shows.
Note that many of the overwhelmingly Hispanic South Texas counties fall within that big Red blob on the right above. In fact, some of them have completely inverted their partisan leanings over the course of a decade.
To quantify it a bit better, the Times report points out that 66 of the nation’s 67 Hispanic-majority counties became more Republican in their presidential election results between 2012 and 2024, and by an astounding average of 23 percentage points. In many cases, this is tied to the Democrats’ new embrace of completely unvetted and uncontrolled immigration — something that has roiled many border communities and outraged Hispanic voters even more than most other Americans.
Another important point is worth mentioning here: The lightning-fast shift of Hispanics to the Republican side under Trump is demonstrating the poverty of both right-wing and left-wing attempts to racialize politics during and since the Woke Era. On the one side, Hispanic voters are rapidly abandoning the American political Left, clearly not impressed with their commitment to DEI, as if this were a main concern of non-white voters. On the other, all that talk of a “Great Replacement” of white Americans through immigration, if it ever was an actual plan someone had, is apparently backfiring on Democrats badly enough that conservatives should be open to keeping it going.
Wokeness, it turns out, is almost an exclusively white-people thing that deals with what the young jokingly refer to nowadays as “First-World problems.”
Black voters: A number (albeit a smaller number) of black voters are getting wise to this as well, unconvinced by the events of the George Floyd era that the white-guilt groveling by Democrats is any benefit to them more than lip service. This was already clear from exit polling months ago, but now it shows up dramatically in the Times analysis of counties where black voters live.
Republicans, the analysis noted, “gained ground in 193 of the country’s 200 most predominantly black counties” between 2012 and 2024. It is not yet on the horizon for black voters to shift as swiftly as Hispanics are doing right now, but it will be revolutionary when it happens.
Of course, Trump’s legacy will be judged more on the 2026 and 2028 election than anything else, and on what sort of Republican Party is left when he is no longer on the political scene. But if you weren’t a believer in his staying power before, the trends in this analysis are quite positive and worth studying in depth.
Trump agenda: The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill Act” advanced through the House without incident — another impressive feat for President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), given the narrow margin there. This virtually guarantees that Trump’s 2017 tax reform package will indeed be extended.
It is worth pointing out that this narrow Republican majority has held together extremely well — albeit thanks in part to three older Democratic House members passing away recently. Last week’s death of Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) to cancer means that all three seats are empty for now, and Republicans have an effective eight-seat House majority for the moment (220 to 212).
The question now is whether Senate Republicans will pass this bill, or at least something the narrow House majority is willing to pass.
You may recall that one of the greatest humiliations of the first Trump term, and a clear sign that his presidency was in danger, was Trump’s inability to move a repeal of Obamacare through Congress. This term, Trump seems to be wielding a much stronger and smarter influence over GOP legislators.
House 2026
Maine-2: Although Rep. Jared Golden (D) chose to run for re-election rather than governor, that won’t necessarily save his seat for Democrats. Indeed, he might have had a much easier race for governor than in Maine’s northern and more conservative congressional district.
A new survey illustrates how Maine’s northern and Downeast regions are red-shifting, showing a nine-point preference for a Republican on the generic ballot (47 to 38 percent). As for Golden’s specific opponent, former Gov. Paul LePage (R) leads him 48 to 43 percent in this Republican SuperPAC poll. The result should therefore be taken with a grain of salt — and indeed, Golden had a lot of mockery for it. But it is very much in consonance with the general direction of northern Maine as illustrated in the Times analysis noted above.
A win here could be very important to Republicans keeping their majority in the U.S. House next year.
