View / Trump’s politics meet reality - Semafor
Late on Tuesday night, after he left the victory party for Senator-Elect Annie Andrews, former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison called to reflect on what just happened.
Harrison ran against Sen. Lindsey Graham in 2020, and raised more money than any Democrat in the state’s history. He lost by 10 points. Joe Biden tapped him to run the Democratic National Committee, for what both men hoped would be the presidency that ended the MAGA era. Trump returned, stronger than ever, and Harrison went home.
Two years later, Harrison watched Graham’s sister fumble away a Senate seat that had been safely Republican since Strom Thurmond left the Democratic Party. Harrison recalled what he told the late senator in 2020: “You better be grateful Donald Trump was on this ballot, because you would have lost.”
This was how Democrats thought about Donald Trump for the better part of a decade. The president convinced Democrats that pre-2016 political rules do not apply to him, that he could lead his voters anywhere. When he said he was “on the ballot,” maybe they’d see him there.
On Tuesday night, voters revealed that his roughhouse politics don’t work without the perception of a good economy and a world at peace. Trump did nationalize the election, hold his rallies, and summon the party to Dallas for a midterm convention to juice turnout and get the coalition on book. But it wasn’t a majority coalition anymore.
In Trump’s first term, his humiliation of the old Republican Party and its mega-donors showed them that there was a new electoral coalition – tough on immigration, ready to use tariffs to bring jobs back to America, and about as socially conservative as the median voter. At the start of his second term, Trump seemed to have found a synthesis between his new coalition and the donors. He could turn out his base with money from people who didn’t understand that base.
That didn’t last two years. Trump notched some significant wins, like the end of the old asylum system and a suite of progressive tax cuts, which Democrats are afraid to run against. But the Trump who destroyed ancestral Democrats in the Rust Belt and rural South is gone. He’s built a nationalist project that his opponents feared — right up until sunset yesterday, when the first early votes were counted in the Indianapolis suburbs.
Trump hadn’t convinced supporters to pretend he was “on the ballot.” Or perhaps they just didn’t want to.
Democrats made a bet that gravity was real, and Trump couldn’t defy it anymore. Their own angst was helpful. They ran many candidates who distanced themselves from “woke” left-wing ideas, now aware of how Trump could exploit them and how his ultra-aggressive GOP — no more John McCains, ripping the mic away from a woman babbling about Barack Obama’s DNA — would amplify whatever he said.
Their strategy was much more compelling to voters than to people who write about politics. There probably won’t be baseball caps with the official House Democratic slogan (“Fighting for an Affordable America”) in embossed letters.
With the votes mostly counted, the attempts to copy what worked for Trump in good times look downright pathetic. Republicans who believed they could inherit the Trump coalition mostly tried what had worked for him in 2024.
Like Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran for governor in Ohio, went after his Democratic opponent’s personal weaknesses, suggesting she’s a drunk and the mother who abandoned her knew she was a “liar.” In Texas, Ken Paxton tried Trump’s nickname game (“James Talafreako”) and suggested that his opponent harbored a secret sexual desire for transgender children. Both men lost.
Vice President JD Vance ran the same plays, just as ineffectively. In Texas, he’d joke about whether Talarico’s “browser history” would reveal a proclivity for child pornography. In Ohio, he said that he wanted to meet Amy Acton at a bar — “I understand that she’s into that sort of thing!” In Kansas, he said that Methodist minister Adam Hamilton wore Christianity like a “skin suit,” and in Michigan, he accused Abdul El-Sayed of harboring hatred toward white people and Western civilization.
In two months, Vance will walk to the old Senate Chamber, smile for the cameras, and swear in Talarico, Hamilton, and El-Sayed for their six-year terms.
Republicans are already looking at a post-Trump GOP, and the most panicky among them are wondering if there’s some way to avoid it being led by Vance. Democrats have not suddenly found the message or candidate that can win them a new governing coalition.
But Republicans simply don’t know what to do. Republicans who built their identity around Trump, believing that he had a magic with working class voters that could be transferred to them on Truth Social, were wrong.
