{"id":1794,"date":"2026-08-03T22:13:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T22:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1794"},"modified":"2026-08-03T22:13:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T22:13:08","slug":"2024-was-not-what-it-seemed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1794","title":{"rendered":"2024 Was Not What It Seemed"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is an edition of The<\/i> Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. <\/i>Sign up for it here.<\/i><\/small><\/p>\n

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Fundamental realignments in the way Americans vote are rare, but predictions that they have occurred are not. Nearly as soon as Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential race in November 2024, people started saying the election represented a new era. \u201cTrump just realigned the entire political map. Democrats have \u2018no easy path\u2019 to fix it,\u201d announced NBC News.<\/p>\n

The election had been very close. Trump won slightly more electoral votes than Joe Biden had in 2020 (312 to 306), but he also won fewer total popular votes and a smaller percentage of the vote. This was still significant because it was the first time in three tries that Trump had captured a plurality of the electorate, but the case for realignment hinged less on raw numbers than on demographic breakdowns. The Republican Party had strengthened its grip on the white working class and had done historically well with young voters\u2014young men in particular\u2014and Hispanic voters.<\/p>\n

Writing in The Atlantic <\/i>in May 2025, the pollster Patrick Ruffini argued that a new era of politics had dawned, in which Trump had broken Democrats\u2019 solid grip on minority voters. \u201cThe realignment of the working class, which helped Trump win in 2016, would not stop with white voters. In 2020 and 2024, the realignment came for nonwhite voters,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIn an era of nationalized politics and growing polarization, the social basis for Democratic majorities is looking more and more tenuous.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Democratic Party\u2019s problems remain very real, but for the moment, Trump and the GOP have more serious ones. The most glaring one is Trump\u2019s deep personal unpopularity. In the current polarized and dyspeptic political environment, all presidents seem to be unpopular, but Trump is in a different league. A CNN poll released last week measured Trump at 34 percent support, matching the low he reached in that poll following the January 6 insurrection. Still, that was better than his showing in the, which found his approval at 33 percent, just one point above a 2017 low. Quinnipiac University found Trump at 32 percent, the lowest ever in that poll.<\/p>\n

These broad strokes are ugly enough, but digging into polling results shows particular deterioration with the particular groups that were supposed to be at the center of the Trump 2024 realignment.<\/p>\n

Consider young voters. Kamala Harris won a slim majority of them in 2024, a huge drop from the 25 percent margin that Biden enjoyed four years earlier. The Yale Youth Poll found in May that 68 percent of voters ages 18 to 22 and 72 percent of voters ages 23 to 29 disapproved of Trump. Echelon Insights also found that younger voters disapprove of Trump more than the general population\u2014the number has fallen 37 percent since the start of this administration. Polling from the Harvard Institute of Politics found that young voters are especially skeptical of expanded presidential power and claims of \u201cnational emergency\u201d\u2014two staples of Trump\u2019s approach to governance.<\/p>\n

One reason Trump\u2019s numbers have sunk so much among young people is his poor performance among young men. A popular explanation was that a feminized, woke Democratic Party had driven them away and into the arms of Trump and a growing manosphere of influencers. To the extent that that was true, it was ephemeral. These voters are still wary of the Democrats, but they\u2019ve soured on Trump as well. The Yale Youth Poll found that men under 30 were one of the two groups that had turned the most against Trump since last fall.<\/p>\n

Trump is also bleeding support among Black and Hispanic voters, and especially men, as Bloomberg Government reports. In 2024, Trump won almost half of Hispanic voters, but polls show Republicans drawing 27 to 35 percent support in the midterms, which would be their worst performance with the group since the Democratic-wave year of 2018. Equis, a pollster focused on the demographic, finds Latino approval of Trump is lower than that of non-Latino voters. A May poll found that a quarter of Hispanics who voted for Trump in 2024 wouldn\u2019t do so again.<\/p>\n

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The decay has even reached Trump\u2019s core supporters. A New York Times <\/i>review of polling datafound in June that white working-class voters\u2019 views of the president\u2019s handling of the economy were tanking. During the first two years of his first term, these voters rated him higher than the overall population; now they rate him much worse. In February 2016, Trump boasted about his backing among the least-educated voters, saying, \u201cI love the poorly educated.\u201d They don\u2019t love him back: Echelon finds his approval down to 41 percent among those with a high-school education or less. Polling from the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism finds a shrinking Trump base and less personal connection to Trump, which is a particular problem for a personalist leader and movement. Republican strategists are now worried that even consistent GOP voters might not turn out in November, according to The Washington Post<\/i>.<\/p>\n

As the poll analyst G. Elliott Morris has written, several convincing explanations existed for Trump\u2019s 2024 victory that didn\u2019t involve realignment, including the lingering effects of the pandemic, global anti-incumbent sentiment, and the peculiar dynamics of Biden\u2019s ill-advised decision to run and his late exit from the race. But the foremost was inflation. Americans were angry at the Democratic Party because of persistently higher prices. Now Trump is losing support for the same reason. Not only has Trump not ended inflation, as he promised\u2014in June, it ran at 3.5 percent\u2014but his decisions, especially the Iran war, have driven prices higher. Voters were willing to give Trump a chance because of their disgust with Biden. Now they\u2019re seeing the results, and they don\u2019t like them.<\/p>\n

This was perhaps foreseeable. Although some observers believed a sea change had occurred, the Brookings Institution scholar (and Atlantic <\/i>contributor) Jonathan Rauch concluded on November 9, 2024, that the result did not represent \u201ca pro-MAGA realignment or a sweeping repudiation of Democrats. Rather, this was an ordinary election.\u201d He added, prophetically, \u201cWhile the Republicans undoubtedly scored a clear victory, they may be tempted to claim a stronger mandate than the voters intended to deliver\u2014and they may respond with policies that are more extreme and disruptive than the public wants or expects.\u201d Now the realignment looks nearly as moribund as GOP chances in the midterms.<\/p>\n

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