Eye-popping analysis of Trump’s win shows Democrats are in serious trouble

Democrats are right to be worried about the party’s shift to the left that Zohran Mamdani’s surprise victory in New York City’s mayoral primary implies.

That’s because the party was already on the outs with a majority of American voters, according to newly released data from the Pew Research Institute.

Pew conducts a biennial poll known as the Validated Voter Survey — considered one of the best ways to understand what happened in the prior election, because its survey results are cross-indexed with each state’s voter files.

Only respondents who are shown to have actually voted are counted.

The headline results getting most of the media attention largely support prior findings from the 2024 exit polls and from Catalist, another gold-standard post-election analysis.

Pew, like the other sources, finds Democrats hemorrhaged voter support among men, Hispanics and other non-white voters, costing Kamala Harris the presidency.

The party’s loss of support among men is especially sharp among non-white men, according to Pew.

President Trump’s victory margin among white men improved by 3 percentage points, from 17% to 20%, between 2020 and 2024.

That is a strong improvement, but far from enough to explain why he went from losing by 4.5% in 2020 to winning by 1.5% in 2024.

Rather, it was Trump’s gains among non-white men that were truly game-changing.

He lost black men by only 54 points, a 21-point improvement from his 75-point defeat in 2020.

He carried Hispanic men by 2 points, a 20-point improvement from his 18-point 2020 loss.

He also gained 23 points among Asians and 29 points among voters of other races, gains that could not have occurred without huge increases with male voters.

Progressives might point to Mamdani’s strong showing in Hispanic and Asian neighborhoods and argue that it shows his economic populism can win many of those voters back.

But it’s worth noting that this showing comes among Democratic primary voters, a group well to the left of most Americans.

We should recall that progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders easily won among Hispanics, according to exit polls in the 2020 Democratic Super Tuesday primaries.

That didn’t prevent Hispanics overall from shifting significantly to the right in that November’s general election.

But even these stark figures understate the Democrats’ challenge.

The Pew results show that there was little change in voting by partisans between 2020 and 2024.

Harris beat Trump by 89 points among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, just one point less than Biden’s 90-point win in 2020.

Trump won Republicans and GOP-leaning indies by 86 points, a point less than his 87-point advantage four years ago.

These groups comprised 99% of the electorate in 2024 and 97% in 2020.

Thus, Harris should have easily won — if the electorate’s partisan composition mirrored 2020’s.

It did not, however.

Republicans and GOP-leaning independents were 51% of the total electorate in 2024, up from 47% in 2020.

Democrats and their affiliated indies dropped from 50% in 2020 to 48% in 2024.

That 6-point shift in the partisan balance precisely mirrors Trump’s 6-point improvement in his popular vote margin.

In other words, Trump didn’t win because he got disaffected Democrats and independents to vote for him; he won because he got those people to switch parties entirely.

That is an historic achievement.

No electorate in the 50-plus-year history of exit polling has ever favored the GOP.

Going back by extension to the 1930s, partisan identification polls always showed Democrats with significant margins going into a general election.

It’s likely, then, that 2024 was the first presidential election since at least 1932 where more voters were Republicans than Democrats.

Democrats simply do not know how to campaign in this type of environment.

For nearly 100 years, all they had to do to win was rally the base and split independents.

Harris did that, and lost anyway — because that equation no longer produces an electoral majority.

In previous elections, Republicans adapted to their unfavorable terrain by running campaigns on Democratic turf.

They had to prove they were no threat to the welfare state or to the other popular Democratic achievements.

That infuriated hardline conservatives who want to roll back those big government expansions, but wiser heads knew it would be a fatal error.

Democrats now face the challenge of showing they support Republican themes, like race-neutral policies and prioritizing economic growth over the Green New Deal.

Harris couldn’t pull it off, and Democrats like Mamdani will essentially charge right into that headwind by doubling down on policies that former Democratic voters reject.

Presidential success or failure always matters, and perhaps Trump’s term will end up going badly.

That could save Democrats.

Without that, however, they should understand that the political environment is moving sharply away from what their base wants.

Viewed through that lens, the leftward lurch Mamdani’s win implies shouldn’t just scare Democrats: It should terrify them.

Henry Olsen, a political analyst and commentator, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.