This Thanksgiving, it’s hard not to be thankful that Donald Trump won and won decisively. Despite the efforts of the media and most pollsters to present the election as a horserace without any clear favorite, Trump's victory proved to be something that could be bigger than just one election.
And the Democrats have known it for a long time.
Many of us here at PJ Media had been reporting on the signs of Trump’s seemingly inevitable victory for months — even if we weren’t willing to allow ourselves to get too excited about it, for fear of lulling Trump voters into complacency. But even if the toplines suggested a tight race, it was clear there was something going on beneath the surface: the Democrats were losing their base.
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It’s true. I can’t tell you how many times I reported on polls showing Trump making gains with black, Hispanic, and young voters — demographics that have traditionally favored Democrats by significant margins. We were observing this before Joe Biden dropped out, and Kamala’s entry into the race didn’t change it.
"It has long been clear that the rise of Donald J. Trump meant the end of the Republican Party as we once knew it," writes Nate Cohn at the New York Times. "It has belatedly become clear that his rise may have meant the end of the Democratic Party as we knew it as well."
After three Trump elections, almost every traditional Democratic constituency has swung to the right. In fact, Mr. Trump has made larger gains among Black, Hispanic, Asian American and young voters in his three campaigns since 2016 than he has among white voters without a college degree, according to New York Times estimates. In each case, Mr. Trump fared better than any Republican in decades.
The Democrats, once defined by a robust base of diverse, working-class, and young voters, were seeing huge cracks in their coalition, and nothing, not even switching out their candidate in the middle of an election, was going to change that.
And they knew it all along.
Internal polling consistently showed Harris trailing Trump. Her campaign’s billion-dollar boondogle was less about trying to win than it was about minimizing Democrats' losses — particularly down-ballot.
According to a report from HuffPost, even Kamala’s campaign staffers saw her defeat as inevitable.
“We were hopeful. I don’t know how optimistic we were, but we thought, okay, this is tied, and if a couple things break our way [we could win],” David Plouffe, a senior adviser to the campaign, said on Tuesday’s episode of the “Pod Save America” podcast.
He also revealed that the Harris-Walz campaign’s internal polling never showed Kamala beating Trump. “We didn’t get the breaks we needed on Election Day,” Plouffe said. “I think it surprised people, because there was these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw.”
Of course, the breakdown of the Democrats' base made such polls seem impossible. Heck, there were polls showing Kamala losing independents but still beating Trump, which made no sense.
We can be thankful that voters who traditionally vote Democrat realized they had to give Trump a chance. Now, the real test is whether Trump can take advantage of that goodwill and deliver on his promise of a return to prosperity and strength. Otherwise, they'll swing right back to the Democrats in 2028.
