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Don’t believe every claim you read. A post-election survey by the Associated Press shows that Trump won 55% of the white vote in 2020 versus 56% in 2024. He improved with Latinos (35% in 2020 to 43% in 2024) and blacks (8% in 2020 to 16% in 2024), but these remain small segments of the voting population compared to whites. Do the numbers suggest a racial reckoning for Democrats? Hardly—they just failed to turn out the non-white vote. In 2020, whites were 74% of the voting population; in 2024 whites increased to 75%. This in a country where the white population is declining in both percentage and real terms.
Trump won in 2024 for the same reason he won in 2016: the Democrats picked a terrible candidate who failed to inspire non-white voter turnout. The Democrats have a long-term formula for electoral success, they just have to get their heads out of their asses and pick someone personally likable. I am amazed at how hard this has been for them.
This more than "suggests" a reckoning this "is" the reckoning. The Democrats' electoral strategy for the last 30+ years has depended on keeping Blacks and Latinos on the Democrats plantation and this is why the people pushing Identity politic the hardest are all woke PMCs from Democrat controlled cities and/or Canada.
The nature of FPTP elections means that even a small shift in the effectiveness of a tactic can have big effects on the end result and these are not small shifts.
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This is a racial reckoning for Democrats. A racial reckoning isn't when the racial block converts in-majority to the other side, but when it can no longer be counted upon as a racial block.
Due to the structure of the Democratic coalition and its distribution across various electoral units, Democratic victory across the national electoral landscape requires not just a preponderance of 'minority' voters, but a consistently high preponderance. Those voters are what make 'favorable' gerrymanders favorable in the first place by having narrow coalition majorities in as many districts as possible. Due to how a First Past the Post system works, if a coalition goes from a hypothetical 52% to 49% output- a swing of just 1% protest voting and 1% switching sides- a coalition goes from winning the electoral contest 100% of the time to 0% of the time.
This is why Harris 'only' getting around 80% of the black vote, and Trump doubling from 8 to 16% of the black vote was such a disaster for the Democrats' nation-wide results. The Democratic coalition in the modern urban-based PMC-centered format is/was dependent on 90%-ish alignment to maintain the degree of reach they did have outside urban centers. Worse than a nearly 10% drop from African American support levels earlier in the century, the crossover of voters is double the impact in a binary first-past-the-pos setup. Every drop below that is a 1% equivalent needed from elsewhere, and every crossover is 2% equivalent needed from elsewhere to make up for not only the lost vote, but the additional vote to the other party.
Moreover, voter consistency of a block hinges on the block never voting otherwise. The biggest predictors of how someone will vote is how their parents and family vote, and the biggest predictor of how that someone votes is how many times they've crossed party lines before. The first cross-over is both the hardest and the most significant, as the voter who has crossed over even one time before is far more likely to do so again, and the voters who are known to cross over are among the biggest influencers to get their families to cross over as well, until you have a critical mass of people who are no longer 'reliable' voters for the party. This is how voting blocks / electoral walls crumble.
The issue for the Democrats, going back to the coalition structure, is that the urban-based PMC-core model was the development of the Obama-era party, and the party coalition expectations were based off of his coalition. Except Obama's black and minority support was the exception, being exceptionally high, not the norm, or the level of expected support to baseline from. And as the normalization of Black voters defecting continues, the future reliability of the ethnic blocks is going to decrease, not increase.
As long as the Democratic party coalition continues to baseline off the expectation of Obama-era levels of support- and dismiss failure to meet it as a failure of turn-out as opposed to a transition in the degree of party loyalty of the ethnic voting blocks- they are going to continue to face the racial reckoning as the racial groups they reckon will overwhelmingly support them, won't.
I think it’s less a racial reckoning and more about them being pretty much outed as caring mostly about the concerns of the laptop class and their pet causes than actually running the country.
They don’t care that crime and drug use in cities is horrible. They care that nobody mentions it, and that they don’t put too many minorities in prison. This hurts poor blacks quite a bit because they don’t have the wealth to leave and go to lower crime areas. Working class jobs are a bit harder to come by because we’re importing millions of working class Mexicans and Hispanics willing to work for McDonald’s wages doing construction and restaurants and trash pickup. If you’re in that class, especially for blacks who have less education and fewer opportunities, this is a bad thing. But saying that is racist. And when people can’t get legit jobs and earn their money, crime looks attractive, especially if the authorities have outright stated they don’t want to prosecute crimes.
Environmental stuff, in abstract, I think is okay. The problem is that it’s basically being done on the backs of poor people. Costs are higher because we refuse to dig up the oil and coal reserves we have. We put huge roadblocks to development and manufacturing, often in the form of regulations. This might be okay for the elites who don’t care how much anything costs, but if you’re counting pennies, yeah the fact that your gas costs $5 a gallon matters. Tge fact that regulations have doubled tge cost of food matters.
People know that pattern by now. They watch Americans suffer, especially poorer ones, knowing that help is not on the way. At least not for natives. And that’s what hurts democrats. If you’re not needing something that the elites see as important, or you’re in the wrong social class, you aren’t getting help. Poor people in North Carolina are still sleeping in tents hoping to not lose their land. Immigrants in New York get fully funded EBT cards and free housing. And it’s not super surprising that people are turning away from the party of neoliberalism and lazy identity politics is losing support.
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