The Permanent Democratic Majority Has Arrived
In our increasingly diverse country, elections are a racial headcount.
You’ve probably heard that Donald Trump assembled a “multiracial coalition” in 2024, inaugurating a historic “realignment” of American politics that will enable the GOP to continue winning elections in our increasingly diverse nation.
It’s a deeply misguided reading of that election. It’s also a dangerous delusion for Republicans.
Racial diversity has made Democratic strongholds out of once-winnable cities like New York and states like California. It threatens to do the same in Texas and Georgia, both of which are now majority nonwhite. Just look at the latest polling for this year’s midterms: White Texans and Georgians strongly prefer the Republican candidate for Senate, yet in each state, the Democrat is projected to win. The Texas race is admittedly close, but in Georgia, once a deep-red state, the incumbent Democratic senator could win by double digits.
Many conservatives misperceive the unfolding political catastrophe because of the widespread impression that America remains split right down the middle between the two parties. They scoff at the well-worn idea that Democrats are on the verge of securing a permanent majority via demographic transformation.
To be sure, several important factors have kept conservatives in the game up to now:
Countermajoritarian institutions—gerrymandering in the House, malapportionment in the Senate, the electoral college—have overwhelmingly benefited Republicans. The Democratic Party’s brand is in the toilet, and the GOP has managed to woo working-class whites in recent decades, offsetting increases in the nonwhite population over the same period. Hispanics occasionally flirt with the GOP, as do Asians, to a lesser extent. Among age cohorts, only the under-25 crowd is majority nonwhite, and most of them can’t yet vote. Nor can the millions of illegals who streamed across the southern border under Joe Biden.
But you can’t get away from two basic facts: 1) Most nonwhite voters favor the Democrats, and 2) the country will be mostly nonwhite in a couple decades. A few years after that, America’s electorate will be mostly nonwhite. And since whites are politically more divided than nonwhites—with white liberals voting Democratic—doomsday will come even sooner for the Republicans.
In my view, it’s already here. Just consider presidential elections from the past few decades to appreciate the seismic changes underfoot and the political earthquakes that both the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election could bring.
The current political alignment began around the time of the Civil Rights movement, when the Republican Party adopted the “southern strategy” to gain support among white voters. The GOP has been the white party ever since, and Republican presidential candidates, at first, dominated in this racial dispensation. Richard Nixon won a landslide victory in 1972, as did Ronald Reagan in 1984. The electoral maps for those elections are stark, with both Nixon and Reagan taking 49 out of 50 states.
By contrast, Trump’s winning maps from 2016 and 2024 show a mix of reds and blues. Like Nixon and Reagan, Trump won white voters but lost nonwhite voters, yet his margin in the electoral college was much slimmer, and in neither election did he crack 50 percent of the popular vote, despite running against deeply flawed candidates in races featuring no significant third-party spoilers. The most important underlying variable accounting for these wildly different outcomes: The electorate had become less white.
But didn’t Trump make inroads with minority voters, proving that the GOP can thrive in a majority nonwhite America? Not really. Around 84 percent of Trump’s voters were white in 2024, only modestly more diverse than Mitt Romney’s 88 percent in 2012, despite the pool of eligible voters becoming less white in between. Yet Romney was panned for appealing only to white voters, whereas Trump was praised for “broadening the Republican coalition.”
People see what they want to see, I guess. Republicans were exuberant, and no one seemed receptive to my warning that Trump’s multiracial coalition was a mirage and the GOP was in big trouble. Republican donors, advisors, journalists, and think-tankers all told me different versions of the same thing: Trump won Hispanic men, we’ll get those minority voters—many are “natural Republicans,” after all!
Well, anything is possible. But no Republican presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover has won a majority of any nonwhite racial group. And remember those mitigating factors that I mentioned earlier, the factors that have kept Republicans in the game up to now? Many are eroding. Nonwhite Americans too young to vote are only getting older. Trump has bled support among Hispanics, Asians, and even working-class whites. And while the millions of illegal aliens in our country can’t vote, their children, if born on American soil, will be able to.
In the upcoming midterms, gerrymandering may prevent a massive blue-shift in the House of Representatives, and this year’s Senate map happens to be a fairly tough one for Democrats. But if you want to see the political future toward which America is hurtling, don’t turn to the wishcasting fantasies of myopic Republican strategists. Just look at New York City, which was 90 percent white in 1950 and is just 30 percent white today.
As the Big Apple has turned brown, its politics have turned blue. The last Republican mayor was Michael Bloomberg, a lifelong Democrat who, in 2001, switched parties to open a less obstructed path to Gracie Mansion. (In the “Republican” primary that year, Bloomberg defeated a former Democratic congressman.) Following the Bloomberg era, the Republican candidates in Gotham’s mayoral elections have mostly served as something even more pitiful than Democrats in red ties: comic relief.
In the 21st century, the actual choice facing New Yorkers is between the progressive and establishment wings of the Democratic Party. So last year, after Zohran Mamdani—a democratic socialist born in Uganda—secured the Democratic primary, he easily won the general election, though white voters preferred the independent candidate Andrew Cuomo (another lifelong Democrat). Across New York City, Mamdani enjoys high approval ratings in the nonwhite parts of the city and poor ratings in white areas.
That’s what’s in store for the country, and soon. Recent polling shows that 58 percent of Democrats see socialism in a positive light, 26 points higher than the number for capitalism, so a progressive lefty certainly could win the Dems’ presidential primary in 2028. And unless I’m missing something about the racial character of American politics, the Republican candidate will discover that compelling arguments and slick campaign ads no longer counteract demographic headwinds. The permanent Democratic majority has arrived.
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