Good afternoon, Mr. Phelps. Our country just experienced a once-in-a-generation election in which new, independent, and crossover voters decided the election for Donald Trump. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: turn these low-propensity Trump voters into reliable Republican voters.
Trump didn't just upset the Establishment GOP when he began the first of his three presidential runs, riding down his golden escalator in 2015. He also — for good and for ill — upset established Republican voting patterns in ways that MAGA and more traditional Republicans alike are learning to deal with and improve upon.
Remember the Red Wave of 2022 that mostly failed to appear? Hardly anyone talks about this, but there was a big silver lining in that cloud, one that points the way forward to 2026 and beyond.
A mid-2023 Pew study found that when it came to mobilizing voters for the '22 midterms, "Republicans benefited more than Democrats did, with more of their 2018 voters turning out (i.e., casting a ballot) again in 2022." Also, "Republicans also won handily among 2022 voters who had not voted in 2018."
That's a big change from 2018 when Democrat turnout blew the GOP out of the water. Calling it "an extraordinary, almost historic year for midterm voter turnout," what Brookings found in its study was that "young adults, new minorities, and white college graduates" turned out in record numbers for that year's Blue Wave. What's peculiar about 2018 is that Democrats managed to turn out their most anti-Trump constituencies in an election when Trump wasn't even on the ballot.
Mostly what the Republicans suffered from in '22 was a combination of candidates who weren't up to snuff and a media landscape that had yet to be plowed under by Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter (now X) barely two weeks before the election.
With his usual pithiness, my PJ Media colleague Richard Fernandez described the sea change that Musk's X has helped wrought:
However you feel about the election results it seems obvious that:
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) November 12, 2024
1. the Internet has replaced TV as a source of information;
2. the Frontier is open as it has not been since Henry the Navigator;
3. innovation has become more important than legacy wealth.
Twitter was the country's digital public square before the progressives took it over like a homeless encampment. "Now that Twitter is X, it’s better run, and truly is serving as the world’s town square," Glenn Reynolds wrote this week to note his return to the platform.
Between Musk making X once again into the platform it was always meant to be — my friend Stephen Kruiser can tell you how the Tea Party was hatched in Twitter DMs — and the traditional news outlets having fully beclowned themselves, the media landscape has been fundamentally altered. (Non-traditional outlets like PJ Media play our part, too, with your support, particularly in keeping alive stories the mainstream media would like to bury and unsuited to X's short attention span.) It is impossible to overstate the importance of having a playing field that, if it isn't exactly level, at least sometimes wobbles our way like a rickety high-top restaurant table.
But the electorate has changed, too, and that's where the hard work of our Mission: Possible begins.
Pollsters rank voters by their propensity to vote. 3/3 voters marked their ballots in three of the last three elections and are considered shoo-ins to vote in the next election. Those are followed by 2/3, 1/3, and 0/3 voters, and I assumed you've already figured out what those mean.
Then there are new voters like the tens of thousands that Scott Presler helped get registered in Pennsylvania in time for last week's presidential election. The most recent figures I have go back to September, but Presler's group, Early Vote Action, fundamentally altered the electorate. According to my ChatGPT research assistant — don't worry, I double-checked its work — even before Presler was done, Democrats comprised 44% of registered voters, down from 51.2% in 2009, while Republicans increased to 40.2% from 36.9% in the same period.
Read those figures again. The GOP went from a nearly 15-point deficit among registered voters to near-parity. And all anybody had to do was reach out to zero-propensity voters and help them get registered.
In October, new GOP voter registrations continued to outpace Democrats, proving there's a deep well of disaffected Blue State MAGAs/conservatives/Republicans who never bothered to vote. Maybe they figured it was pointless; maybe nobody had ever reached out to them. Whatever the reason, it doesn't matter. What Presler did for the GOP in Pennsylvania, he (and others!) can do in upstate New York, central California, downstate Illinois, and in every other state that Republicans have written off since Ronald Reagan's 1984 once-in-a-lifetime near-sweep.
Lost in the post-election euphoria is something City Journal's Reihan Salam and Charles Fain Lehman took notice of in our big, blue cities. In a column headlined "America’s Cities Want to Be Great Again," Salam and Lehman wrote that "Trump most overperformed in large metro counties."
It wasn’t just a few cities, either. Trump improved on his 2020 performance in cities as diverse as Chicago, Detroit, and Dallas. He won Miami-Dade County outright. He got the closest margin for a Republican in New York City in 30 years. He won a precinct in lower Manhattan; one south Philadelphia neighborhood voted for him by almost three to one.
"Compared with his run against Joe Biden," they continued, "Trump ran 9 points closer to Kamala Harris in such areas—a bigger gain than he saw in suburbs, college towns, or military posts."
Emphasis added.
"These swings are partly a byproduct of the surprising diversity of the Trump coalition, which exit polling suggests may have included a fifth of black men and a majority of Latino men," the authors noted. Even in New York City, "Trump ran up votes not just on Staten Island, but in hyper-diverse Queens and South Brooklyn."
Vox founder and über-lefty Ezra Klein laid it on the line for Democrats:
The people @EzraKlein spoke to in big cities before the election were furious.
— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) November 14, 2024
Listen to more Pod Save America wherever you get your podcasts. pic.twitter.com/4BFpQAE4rY
Ever dreamed of seeing a Brooklyn hipster wearing a MAGA hat? Well, with or without the hat — they're out there.
One of the most influential Trump voters, no doubt, is Joe Rogan. The three-hour podcast the two men recorded on Oct. 26 has been viewed a bare minimum of 41 million times and likely played at least some part in Trump's big win with young, male voters. While Biden-Harris won 59% of under-30 men in 2020, they broke 56% for Trump-Vance in 2024 — a yuge 15-point swing.
This point is somewhat tangential but bears mentioning. Young men — even adolescent boys — have been vilified for 20 years as "toxic." Male movie role models in my teen years were Harrison Ford, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Today's young men are supposed to look up to Tim Walz, have their junk cut off if they like the color pink, and meekly submit to over-credentialed Feminazi Mean Girls. Worse, in his most recent adventure, Indiana Jones got his clock cleaned by a smug Girl Boss actress with arms like reeds who had clearly never thrown a punch in her life.
I'd also remind you that this...
Gonna Miss THIS Dancing QUEEN (Best of Tim Walz Gesticulating and Waving and Shit) pic.twitter.com/ka4yD3SRcz
— Serf (@TheRoyalSerf) November 9, 2024
...was Harris's idea of male outreach.
I'd also remind you that Harris was a gobsmackingly bad candidate and that the Democrats won't stay stupid forever.
Compare all that to a no-bull***t man's-man podcaster like Rogan. Or Trump, for that matter. Or Musk. Trump and Musk spent their lives building things before a sense of duty called them into public service. That's something young men can and should look up to and strive for.
Here's some advice that the Trump White House probably won't need: keep JD Vance front and center.
Of the four contenders on the two major party tickets, only Vance ended the campaign with a net positive favorability rating. And he began the campaign with the worst favorable rating. People like JD Vance. He's one of those politicians who doesn't come across as a political hack but as the kind of man whom men respect and women swoon over.
I'll be totally honest and remind you that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is still my personal favorite for 2028, in no small part because "RDS garnered almost 60% of the vote for re-election. Made possible by 1st term results, guts, and savvy. All without Susie Wiles." That's from VIP member Cato, as he put it in the comments to Scott Pinsker's latest column. RDS has a proactive record of executive experience that Vance doesn't. But more than any individual candidate, I believe in the primary process — and that Republican primary voters will choose a nominee we can all support.
Young women, too. ABORTION! ABORTION! ABORTION! didn't send them flying into Kamala Harris's arms, and Trump even won suburban white women by four points. The Dobbs decision returned the abortion issue to the states where it belongs. If Republicans are smart, they'll keep it there. The trans issues were important to them, too. Americans of all stripes are generally accommodating of people who are different, but Democrats thought they could turn mental issues into a winning civil rights issue.
What they forgot was this: most people are normal. That's why it's called that.
That was a lot of details I threw at you, so let's step back once more and look at the big picture.
From first-time voters in Pennsylvania to young men of all races to urban voters sick of crime and failed schools, it's safe to conclude that these are not rabid ideological conservatives that Trump brought on board.
The 2024 Trump coalition includes first-time voters, dispirited young voters, and angry urban voters. They are not Republicans... but maybe they could be.
The first thing they'll want to see is results. Some of those results Trump can deliver but, looking past 2026, 2028, and beyond, the GOP's Mission: Possible is to continue the work that Trump has begun. That means running Republicans in "impossible" local school board races in places like Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Chicago. That means taking Scott Presler's voter registration drive nationwide. That means canvassing in neighborhoods that haven't seen a Republican in decades. For you and me personally, it means extending branches to people who are only barely aware of what conservatism means.
As always, should you or any of your Possible Mission Force be caught or killed, Secretary Rubio will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This column will self-destruct in ten seconds. Good luck.
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