2024 US presidential elections have enabled president-elect Donald Trump to realign the entire political map of the country. Democrats do not seem to have a plan or an easy path to fix it. Two years down the line, the democrats have to stage a comeback in the November mid-terms to make a comeback.
As Donald Trump gives a shot at his second attempt at the US presidency to clean up the Washington bureaucracy’s set mind on approaching domestic and overseas issues, the democrats are busy scrambling for answers for long-held narratives over who certain Americans will support.
Both parties are looking at a power vacuum down the line, though the Republicans still have four years to figure it out, but the democrats have to find an able leader to oppose Trump and make a shot that wins in 2029. The fight starts now.
Is that going to be Hakeem Jefferis, the black African American house minority leader or first lady Michelle Obama, candidates other than Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who has the charisma to woo people. In the republican party Nikki Haley is a promising star, but the defeat of a woman Harris in the elections of 2024 proves that America is not yet ready for a woman president while the rest of the world has succeeded in this experiment including UK, Israel, and India. Margaret Thacher who served three terms in UK, Israels Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi in India, who served two terms and had an abrupt ending to their third term with her brutal assassination by own Sikh guards.
If JD Vance proves his worth Trump could endorse him but who else is a heavier weight than him that the RNC might plumb for the coveted post. It might be too early to start this debate but this debate starting now will ensure either of the party taking control of the house of representatives in the November mid-term tm in 2027. 
Now let us focus on the present
President-elect Donald Trump raised eyebrows when he decided to hold a campaign rally in the Bronx in late May. The New York City borough has been one of the most Democratic-leaning counties in the country for years. Trump won just 15% of the vote there in 2020 and 9% in 2016. Democrats viewed it as a stunt amid his criminal trial in Manhattan. Some suggested the crowd was made up of supporters far from the borough’s borders.
In the end, the rally stood out not because of anything Trump said or did, but because of who showed up. It was one of the most diverse rallies of his entire political career. And as results started pouring in, it was clear Trump was on to something bigger, not just in the Bronx but throughout the country. His coalition had changed.
Results so far show Trump winning more than 27% of the vote in the Bronx, shrinking his margin of defeat there significantly. It was the best result for a Republican presidential candidate in the borough in 40 years. Back in May, one of the Democratic officials who expressed doubt over who exactly showed up to Trump’s rally was Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who represents the district where the rally took place.
“I despise Donald Trump,” Torres said. “I feel like he is a threat to the norms of liberal democracy, but he is a brilliant politician. He has brilliant intuitions, and he knew that he was making inroads into communities of colour.”
Torres said it would be unimaginable for a Democrat to win 30% of the vote in one of the reddest, most rural counties in America, and he said the results necessitate a serious reckoning in the Democratic Party. “Donald Trump’s greatest breakthrough lies not in cracking the blue wall in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin,” Torres said adding, “His greatest breakthrough lies in breaking the blue wall in the reliably Democratic urban centres of America, like the ultimate blue wall of the Bronx.”
The most dramatic and headline-grabbing shift of the 2024 election was among Latino men, who backed President Joe Biden by twenty-three points in 2020 and Trump by twelve points this year, according to the NBC News exit poll. It is a trend that showed up in pre-election polling and was clear in precinct results.
But the shifts in the 2024 election were even more wide-ranging than that. Working-class voters shifted more toward Trump. So too did women, Asian Americans, voters of colour at large, young voters, rural voters, independents, and voters with household incomes under $100,000, the exit poll showed. Most demographics that were already favourable to Trump became even more so. Most that were favourable to Democrats became less so.
The only places Vice President Kamala Harris made real gains on Trump were with white, educated, and wealthy voters. In short, Trump has been able to engineer a near-wholesale rightward shift in the electorate in ways that he could not in 2016 or 2020, when as though different constituencies were racing past each other in opposite directions. 
The trends have blown up long-held Democratic and Republican narratives about how Americans vote. It is leading Democrats far beyond Torres to sound the alarm about the party’s future as Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement grew to become the most diverse GOP coalition in generations and gave Trump the most decisive victory for a GOP presidential nominee in two decades.
“Insane, truly insane,” a Republican operative who described themselves as “shell-shocked” by the results said of his improvements with Democratic and Republican constituencies. Like others interviewed for this article, the operative would only speak anonymously to offer candid analysis of party strategy. “It was just everyone.”
An ‘anti-establishment’ election
Now, people on both sides of the fight are trying to nail down exactly what caused these shifts, and there are few explanations.
Primarily is anger over rising prices and a sense that Democrats did not do enough to curb them, even as inflation has slowed. Second is anger over a rise in undocumented immigration that Biden’s administration only started to combat years into his presidency, after opinions had hardened. Democrats felt there was a clear impact from Trump’s nonstop ad campaign targeting Harris for comments she made in 2019 about favouring taxpayer funding to provide gender transition care to prison inmates.
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., thought Trump’s gains with women — in addition to independents and minority voters — were particularly notable, given how much focus Democrats placed on abortion rights in the first presidential election after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling in 2022.
“Yes, abortion was on the ballot,” Mace said. “But so too was the kitchen table, so too was gasoline, so too was immigration.” Moreover, Trump clearly benefited in the closing weeks from being seen as the change agent and the anti-establishment figure, a sense that was boosted by his campaigning with onetime independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who represented Hawaii as a Democrat but is now a Republican; and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.
“They don’t like the traditional parties,” Mace said of these voters. “People hate both sides, quite frankly. And what Trump brings to the table is he is seen as a man of the people.” “The guy just won the popular vote, something nobody predicted this year,” she added. “And it’s this anti-establishment theme that he is tapped into that nobody has done in a really long time.”
Trump himself commented on these shifts during an interview with NBC News, saying: “I started to see realignment could happen because the Democrats are not in line with the thinking of the country.”
There’s also specific outreach Trump engaged in to reach minorities and young voters, particularly his efforts to campaign on popular (and not explicitly political) podcasts to reach young men, a demographic that has leaned Democratic in recent years. The NBC News exit poll showed Harris winning voters under 30 years old by eleven points this fall after Biden won them by seventeen points in 2020.
“Inflation hurt everyone regardless of their age, skin colour or where they live,” Mike Berg, a senior official at the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NBC News. “Trump’s strategy of going on apolitical podcasts to reach low-propensity voters was also a stroke of genius.”
Tim Murtaugh, a senior Trump campaign adviser, said the moment he realized the president-elect was going to have a large swing in his favour among voters who were not expected to be in the GOP coalition came when the Teamsters declined to endorse in the campaign, breaking decades of precedent. That came after Biden moved to shore up the union’s pensions.
Not only did the Teamsters decline to endorse, Murtaugh noted, but they also released polling in swing states, including Pennsylvania, which showed Trump winning over large numbers of their members.
To me this was a huge, clear sign that Donald Trump was remaking the party into something that prioritizes the concerns of working people,” he said. “It is the way he began MAGA in 2015, spotlighting our trade imbalances and the resulting destruction of jobs that went along with it. He has empathy for the situations and frustrations of the people, and their sense that the government and the elites do not care about them.”
NBC News exit polling showed Trump winning voters in households with incomes under $100,000 by four points, after Biden carried that demographic by seventeen points in 2020.
Voters who never attended college favoured Trump by twenty-eight points in the exit poll after backing him by eight points in 2020.
‘We have no easy path here.’
For one Democratic policy aide, the biggest concern was movement among younger voters. Feelings about masculinity were leading segments of Gen Z to break from the longtime trend of younger voters being more liberal, this person said.
“These kids are like, ‘Trump is cool. He is the man, he is great. He is cool. It is cool, bro. He is cool,’” the Democrat said. “Everyone is like, ‘Whoa, whoa, Latinos and African Americans like Republicans now.’ No, the men wanted a man. The men wanted a man’s man.”
“We have no easy path here,” this person continued. “We need to convince people that we’re the adults in the room, that we care about the economy, that we care about their pocketbook, that we’re cool dudes, which were not communists, that we’re not sexualizing their children, that we’re not going to ban Zyn.”
Democrats acknowledged Harris was facing a difficult environment and only had just over one hundred days to make her case to the country. They also pointed to her losses being much less substantial in battleground states where she invested time and resources than in places like New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, where the campaign was not messaging to voters.
But there was also a sense among Democrats that having a tightly controlled candidate and campaign, as they have in a string of recent presidential elections, might not be as beneficial as longtime party hands believe it to be. “People yearn for someone to tell them the goddamn truth,” a Pennsylvania Democrat said. “Regardless of whether we know that Trump is not speaking the truth, people believe that he is. And what happened was a Louisville Slugger baseball bat going upside the head of the Democratic Party for not telling people the truth. And the truth is, some of their lives suck. Acknowledge it. No one has the perfect solution to fix it but acknowledge it.”
This person had a stark warning for Democrats over the voters who drifted from the party this cycle, particularly younger voters. “One cycle, OK. Two cycles, if they vote that way, you are starting to teeter on the edge, and if an individual votes for a party three straight cycles in a row, you are never getting them back,” this person said. “And so, you better go and listen to these people tomorrow, or you’re going to lose them, and it will be generational.”
State and national polling previewed these shifts: In a pre-election handbook, the progressive Working Families Party found a lot of moderate, working-class voters who straddle the line between the two parties fit into a demographic they dubbed the “anti-woke traditionalists” — largely agreeing with Democrats on economic policy and with Republicans on social norms.
A progressive strategist said that while Harris did have good messaging around fighting price gouging and making housing more affordable, the vice president did not make clear that voters were right to be upset with their economic conditions.
“They had good solutions that I think would have fit well,” this person said. “You cannot tell people that something they are feeling is not right. And I think that is where they messed up.”
Back in the Bronx, an overwhelmingly Black and Latino County, Torres said m Americans felt the country was headed in the wrong direction, were concerned with rising prices, and were frustrated by “an unprecedented wave of migration,” particularly in places like New York, which strained local governments.
“We were hoping that Donald Trump was so radioactive that we could overcome that challenge, but we were wrong,” he said. He said part of the problem was the Biden administration worrying too much about upsetting the party’s left flank, particularly on immigration, which he said slowed its response to dealing with the crisis. Backlash over immigration and inflation led to a “complete collapse of Latino support” for Democrats, he added.
“We have to expunge from our vocabulary the words ‘we have a messaging problem,’” Torres said. “If 70% of the country thinks we headed in the wrong direction, we do not have a messaging problem. We have a reality problem. Inflation and immigration are not messaging problems. These are reality problems.”
White Trump saw the opportunity here to seize the democratic strongholds to swing for him especially first-time voters, democrats were uncoordinated with people’s real problems, and their messaging on middle east, inflation, immigration were out of line. Most voters are more concerned with how I bring bread on the table for the family at prices affordable to me. How do I treat my elders with affordable health care? How do I run my automobile by putting fuel that is more affordable to me? How do I stock up groceries for the family that comes at an affordable price.
Threat to Democracy was not an issue for them, they did not care if their rights were being eroded but were more concerned about problems in their neighbourhood, crime, security, prices, employment.
The democrat campaign of 2024 was highly skewered with Biden with his failing cognitive functions wanting a second term much against the wishes of the people, particularly his own supporters that translated into the lowest rating for a sitting president at 41%. Trump too is old and would be82 years old like Bidens age when he lays down office in 2029, but he had demonstrated that he had the will, the masculinity, the power, the fire in the belly, to fight against odds and convinced the people that he had it in him to restore Americas greatness and fix the immediate problems facing the citizens. 
In summary, while democrats were messaging on macro issues, Trump was not only messaging on micro issues but also virtually MASSAGING the voters to see the difference between him and his rival, who fought really hard but lost the traditional voting blocks, I don’t blame her, she had just 107 days to campaign since DNC endorsement in Chicago, but failed to see that the African men, Latinos, and South Asians including Indians and first time voters were turning not against her but her being part of the Biden-Harris combine that failed to restore the economy riddled with inflation and unemployment and high prices.
The democrats paid a remarkably high price for taking into concern of the Arab voters on the middle east situation, applied no mid-course corrections before the elections, but poured billions into a country which taking revenge for an October event disproportionate killing 50,000 innocent civilians in the strip .
It is still not too late for the Democratic party to choose a powerful candidate who becomes a younger voice who truly represents the interests of all Americans. Otherwise, they are going to lose the November midterms in 2027 election cycle, if they lose that, they will lose the next house and presidential cycle in 2029 when people like JD Vance, with no political experience, who Trump would sponsor, would be ruling America.
Contributor, IANS - Washington DC/New York
Executive Editor, Corporate Tycoons - Pune, India
Executive Editor, The Flag Post - Bengaluru, India
Contributor, The Statesman, Hindu Business Line, Sarkaritel.com, Diplomacyindia.com
Former Economics Editor, PTI - New Delhi, India
Former Communications Advisor,
Alstom Group of Companies, SA - France/Belgium
