Politics
A longstanding belief in Democratic circles has completely collapsed
Crucial to President-elect Donald Trump’s first victory in the popular vote were his gains with nonwhite voters. According to exit polls, Trump received 45% of the Latino vote — including a majority of Latino men — in what was a record high for a Republican presidential candidate. He doubled the share of young Black men he got in 2020. He made a 5-point gain with Asian Americans. In the heavily Arab American city of Dearborn, Michigan, where Democrats usually dominate, Trump easily won.
Exit poll numbers don’t tell the full story, and the details could change as more sophisticated voter data comes out in the coming months. But combined with pre-election polling and trends from earlier electionsthe emerging picture is clear: Trump’s coalition is becoming more racially diverse even as he leans into bigotedhateful rhetoric more than ever before.
Many liberals forget that those groups are never a monolith, and their members also have other identities that shape how they view the world.
Trump’s victory is shattering a common slogan and guiding principle in Democratic circles that “demographics is destiny.” There has long been a belief in the party that Democrats were destined to hold a long-term majority in the country as the nation became more diverse. That belief was predicated on the idea that the party won ethnic minorities because it presented itself as the multicultural and socially inclusive party, and because it treated minorities as interest groups to cater to based on priorities specific to their ethnicity. That belief has always been problematic, and now it is collapsing.
Trump’s playbook has thrown a grenade into the Democratic worldview, and the fallout among the left hasn’t been pretty. Where I expected to see introspection and sadness there have instead been expressions of spite. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania told Semafor“Dearborn delivered for Trump? OK, congratulations. You’re going to love the next Muslim ban.” Some progressive commentators have pitted ethnic minorities against each other and described the ones who appeared “loyal” to the party more favorably. “Black people did their job. Trump’s gains with Latinos were real. Trump is their guy,” declared one liberal commentator. There were even cruel viral jokes circulating on social media about how liberals now considered themselves indifferent to Trump’s promised “bloody” deportation operation because they felt betrayed by the Latino swing to the GOP.
This anger is reductive and retrograde — and it helps illuminate why the Democratic Party is in this predicament. Yes, people from the same ethnic group do often share common experiences and exhibit trends in their values and priorities. But many liberals forget that those groups are never a monolith, and their members also have other identities that shape how they view the world, including class, gender, age and the countless subcultures they choose to associate with. New York Times’ political correspondent Astead Herndon, who has long flagged Black men voters’ changing political attitudes, has rightly called it a “racist assumption” that people from racial minorities will automatically support the Democratic Party.
Setting aside the finger-pointing, I do understand why it is shocking for some that Trump could win over racial minorities even while saying or implying bigoted things about them. Some wonder how could Trump win over huge swaths of Latinos even as he demonizes Latino migrants with degrading, fascist language? How could Trump win over Muslim voters even after promising to re-institute a ban on migration from Muslim majority countries?
There are a lot of explanatory factors. First, people who are part of racial minorities are strategic voters just like white voters. Given the choice between only two options in an election, a voter of color can simultaneously object to Trump’s language, but still prefer the GOP’s right-wing policy positions on issues such as abortion. The economy is a particularly big example. Thomas Wood, a political scientist at Ohio State University, told The Atlantic that the breadth of the swing to the right across countless demographic groups since 2020 suggested a “really simple story … that secular dissatisfaction with Biden’s economic stewardship affected most demographic groups in a fairly homogeneous way.” The Austin American Statesman found a number of undocumented immigrants — arguably the most vulnerable demographic group in the country now — were “optimistic” about Trump’s victory because they thought it would be good for business and worth the increased risk of deportation.
In the case of the Dearborn switch, one big reason is obvious: Many Arab Americans switched sides out of disgust at the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s military operation in Gaza. These voters made a (misguided, in my opinion) bet that there is some chance that Trump will take a different course of action.
Of course, racial minorities can also share Trump’s worldview about race. People of color can and regularly do hold bigoted attitudes toward other minorities. What’s to say that conservative voters of color don’t just tune out or laugh off Trump’s remarks when they’re trained on their specific community, but nod along as he calls out every other marginalized group under the sun? Or what’s to say they don’t endorse his offensive language but agree with the policy outcomes they help support, such as being “tough” on immigration, crime, or China?
Democrats cling to their old “demographics are destiny” worldview at their own peril. Not only is anti-bigoted messaging inadequate to hold onto voters of color, it can sometimes put them at odds with their lived experience. A good example of this is how Democrats have controversially incorporated the term “Latinx” into some of their messaging to Latino voters, in an attempt to be gender inclusive. A recent study by scholars from Harvard University and Georgetown University found that the term actually drives Latino voters away. While that backlash effect is driven by conservative attitudes, according to the study, the broader takeaway is that Democrats should not assume maximizing the vocabulary of inclusivity is always in the party’s interest.
This is not an argument that the Democrats ought to mimic the GOP’s right-wing nationalism or discard its commitment to multiculturalism. Rather, the point is Democrats ought not to take racial minorities for granted as meek loyalists who have to choose them because the alternative is assumed to be worse, or see them as an interest group that can be pandered to based on a race-specific lens. They ought to treat voters of color the way they would white voters — as complicated, ideologically flexible people who care about kitchen table issues. And they need to excite them the same way too — by making a compelling case for the future.
So far, Trump’s dark vision for that future is winning. But there is one obvious way to keep anti-bigotry at the center of the Democratic Party — and the broader left — while staying laser focused on economic liberation: hammering home that prejudice and culture wars are used to divide us us distract us from the class war at the heart of American unfreedom.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for BLN Daily. Previously, he worked at Vox, HuffPost and Blue Light News, and he has also been published in, among other places, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Intercept. You can sign up for his free politics newsletter here.
Some top congressional Republicans have privately concluded that it is likely impossible for them to keep control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, and they are now focused on limiting the scale of the defeat and salvaging the party’s Senate majority.
Five senior Republican lawmakers, all granted anonymity to speak candidly about their party’s dire position, told Blue Light News the House had all but slipped away.
One senior House Republican said the GOP’s goal at this point was to “save as many Republican seats as we can.” The president, this person said, was not helping.
“President Trump has made this election all about himself,” the lawmaker said. “Now we have to survive that political storm.”
A second Republican member of Congress said the movement of campaign advertising made plain which side was in control of the midterms. This lawmaker predicted Democrats would pick up about 10 seats, more than enough to take control of the chamber.
Even in newly redistricted red states like Florida and Texas, this person said, Republican candidates were “hanging on with their fingernails.”
Republicans have already fallen back from several contested House districts that they feel are no longer winnable, including those held by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey. Trump carried their districts just two years ago. The party last week gave up on an Omaha-based district held by retiring Rep. Don Bacon.
Trump officials and other top GOP operatives say more candidates may be cut off in the coming days, in order to shift advertising money to races where it can make more of a difference. Republican groups have already given up on multiple races where they once hoped to unseat Democratic lawmakers.
The Republican Party is under extreme pressure across the Midwest, where it is now spending heavily to defend Senate seats in once-reliably MAGA states like Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas.
Bacon, a maverick often at odds with the White House, said there was no mystery in his party’s political tribulations.
“I’ve talked to some who are making these decisions: The biggest problem is the president’s polling numbers and unfavorables,” Bacon said.
White House officials insist they’re not giving up on either chamber of Congress. In a statement, White House spokeswoman Liz Huston said Trump remained “committed to maintaining Republican majorities in both the House and Senate.”
As he departed on Tuesday to campaign in Alaska for embattled GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan, Trump professed optimism about the midterms but acknowledged that sitting presidents typically see their party lose seats in the off year.
“But I’m doing a tour right now and I’m doing rallies,” Trump added. “The level of enthusiasm for the Republican Party is way up.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson went even further, flatly declaring during a campaign stop in deep-red Texas that “the polling is wrong” in showing his party on the brink of a broad defeat.
Yet at a tactical level, the Republican Party’s moves to shift money away from defending the House and toward saving the Senate are clear enough. In recent days, the Congressional Leadership Fund, the top super PAC for House Republicans, canceled advertising for key House candidates in Nebraska and Iowa and allowed the Senate Leadership Fund – a Republican group focused on the upper chamber – to swoop in and claim the airtime to support Nebraska Sen. Pete Ricketts and Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is running for Senate in Iowa.
“These are not the moves of a party that’s going to keep the House,” a third Republican lawmaker said.
In statements to Blue Light News, both CLF and the National Republican Congressional Committee said they had no intention of giving up on the fight for control of the House.
NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella said districts are won “one by one,” and that the GOP has “the financial firepower and ground game needed to win.”
Chris Winkelman, president of CLF, said his group would keep moving money around to maximize the impact nationally.
The goal, he said, was to “keep the pressure on the most vulnerable Democrats and preserve a path to 218 seats.”
Former Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican who lost his swing seat in Trump’s first midterm election eight years ago, said his former colleagues were clear-eyed about where the election seemed to be headed.
“The environment is about as tough as one could expect,” Curbelo said. “There is no one who has privately stated that they believe Republicans can hold the House — not in recent weeks, anyway.”
Megan Messerly, Lauren Fedor, Lisa Kashinsky and Myah Ward contributed to this report.
Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff said Tuesday he will not run for president in 2028 and committed to serving a full six-year Senate term if reelected.
“I have zero interest in running for president. I’m not running for president. I’m running for reelection to the Senate,” Ossoff said during a Georgia Senate debate against Republican Rep. Mike Collins.
Asked by Greg Bluestein of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution whether he would serve his full term if he wins in November, Ossoff replied: “Yes, I will.”
The remarks are Ossoff’s most forceful rejection yet of a potential 2028 presidential bid even as his name has repeatedly surfaced in national Democrats’ conversations about possible contenders for the party’s nomination. His public commitment to a full Senate term on Tuesday is the latest of his campaign’s many efforts to tamp down that speculation.
Ossoff gained national attention this year given his strong fundraising numbers, his consistent lead in public polling against Collins and his ability to generate viral moments on the campaign trail, particularly through his attacks on President Donald Trump. Democrats are bullish about Ossoff’s ability to hold onto his Senate seat — so much so that the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC said Tuesday it was removing its ad spending in Georgia for the week.
He’s also taken steps to boost the state Democratic party in Georgia, a perennial battleground that has been and will be key to winning the presidency. If November brings historic wins up and down the ballot, Ossoff will get some of the credit — and he’ll have confirmed his status as a leader in the swing state.
Democrats may be discovering the political power of calling something rigged.
They’re leaning hard into anti-corruption messaging in the final weeks of the campaign as new research suggests that linking corruption to Americans’ economic struggles can boost Democrats into the home stretch.
Messaging from Democrats that tied corruption to housing, health care and the cost of living increased voter support for Democratic congressional candidates by about 3 percentage points, according to a national survey last month conducted by Blue Rose Research and Democratic-aligned Winning Jobs Narrative Action, which was obtained by POLITICO.
The findings align with a shift in how Democrats are talking about corruption — and help explain why that message has exploded on the campaign trail. From Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia to James Talarico in Texas and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Democrats have zeroed in on a common argument: Washington is rigged to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyday Americans.
“We have a corruption crisis in this country, and it is leading to an affordability crisis,” Iowa Democratic state Rep. Josh Turek said during his Senate debate against Rep. Ashley Hinson last week.
It’s a message that is reverberating across campaigns. In a recent presentation delivered to Democratic groups on Capitol Hill, longtime Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson offered a succinct playbook: “Corruption is why your costs are high,” according to the presentation viewed by Blue Light News.
His presentation also encouraged Democrats to lead with the acknowledgement that costs are high and then go into corruption, acknowledge that it happens across parties and avoid making President Donald Trump the sole focus of their attacks. “Trump works as an example of corruption that raises costs, not as the whole case,” the presentation said.
Since April, Democratic candidates and outside groups in House and Senate races have spent roughly $104 million on advertising mentioning corruption, according to ad tracking firm AdImpact. Republicans, meanwhile, have spent $36 million across House and Senate campaigns over the same period.
“It’s not just like, ‘oh, look at what’s happening with the ballroom,’ or ‘boy, Donald Trump’s made a lot of money on crypto,’” Democratic strategist Chris Meagher said. “You have to be able to tie it to the impact on people’s lives.”
“The narrative works best when it’s an outsider candidate who is linking a rigged economy to a rigged political system,” longtime Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said of the anti-corruption messaging.
Running against corruption is not new. But as Democrats looked for a way out of the political wilderness after 2024, they began turning a familiar attack — anti-corruption — into a broader message tied to voters’ economic pain. What once was an attack largely focused on Trump has become a more expansive argument for candidates trying to connect it to why Americans are struggling financially, potentially providing a blueprint for the party beyond November.
“Democrats used to talk about corruption as a crime. Now corruption is the explanation for costs,” Ferguson, the Democratic strategist, said.
The issue — and messaging around it — is also coming to the fore in a cycle when anger over the suppression of Epstein files hit a fever pitch and public pressure to ban Congress from trading stocks continues to mount.
And it’s not just the research by Blue Rose that shows the potential potency of that message.
In another recent survey from the Democratic group Navigator Research, obtained by Blue Light News, the vast majority of Americans — both Democrats and Republicans — say corruption is driving up their costs. That same survey of registered voters, conducted in August, found majorities, including roughly a quarter of Republicans, say Trump is bringing more corruption to Washington than fixing it.
And new results from the nonpartisan Center Square’s Voter Voice Poll, conducted this month by Noble Predictive Insights and shared first with Blue Light News, show 10% of voters ranking government corruption as the second most important issue facing Americans, tied with the economy and jobs, and only behind inflation and price increases.
In some instances, Democrats have wrested the word “rigged” away from Trump who has used it in the context of unproven election fraud and turned it into a mobilizing political talking point. That’s a departure from March 2024 when Democrats criticized then Rep. Katie Porter for accusing special interests of spending money to “rig” the California Senate race after she lost in the state’s primary. But now some Democrats are embracing that language as a way to rail against what they see as a corrupt system.
“They’re rigging the rules to benefit their wealthy donors and corporate special interests,” former Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown said in a message to supporters announcing the launch of his campaign to return to office.
But the corruption resonates across parties. Republicans who spoke with Blue Light News said Democrats do not own the issue — voters everywhere are animated by it. While polling shows that voters in both major parties believe the government is corrupt, Republicans accuse Democrats of lacking credibility on the issue.
“Americans have been disgusted by the level of self-serving corruption that spread like herpes through the slimy politicians who run the Democrat Party, and now they’re suddenly changing their tune because it’s an election year,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement. “Voters see through the facade, and they know Republicans are cleaning up the rot left behind by Democrat leaders.”
On the Senate side, National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson Bernadette Breslin pointed Blue Light News to a poll in Minnesota — a rare offensive opportunity for Senate Republicans this cycle — that shows there are just about as many voters who blame Democratic Gov. Tim Walz for widespread fraud of federally-funded government programs in the state as there are who blame the criminals. Walz’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, is running for Senate against Republican Michele Tafoya, and corruption under Democratic rule is a key theme for Republicans in the race.
“The overwhelming majority of Minnesotans blame the Walz-Flanagan administration — and the criminals it aided and abetted — for plundering their hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” Breslin said. “They’ll vote for Michele Tafoya to right the ship this November.”
Steve Pierce, executive director at Winning Jobs Narrative Action, said one of the biggest shifts for Democrats this cycle on corruption has been a move away from a message largely rooted in concerns over democratic norms, which have struggled to break through in a way that moves voters in past cycles.
“You’ve seen Democrats, rather than connecting corruption to democracy, connecting it to affordability, connecting it to the top concern that voters have,” said Pierce. “It’s connecting it in a way that’s meaningful to voters around the things that they are thinking about every day.”
The anti-corruption message has played out across the country, and as an explanation for frustration against different economic pain points, including rising electric bills and local data center projects.
A recent memo on data centers from House Majority PAC, the main super PAC working to elect House Democrats, noted the “message environment in the 2026 election cycle has been dominated by costs, with an important secondary theme around corruption that began to emerge last year.” The group’s spokesperson, CJ Warnke, told Blue Light News that “every single poll and every single focus group shows affordability to be voters’ number one issue, and they specifically point to corrupt politicians as being responsible for driving up prices.”
Next month’s midterms will offer the clearest test yet of whether Democrats can turn this message into votes. But Democratic operatives increasingly see anti-corruption messaging as more than just a short-term political weapon — as long as they try to do something about it if they win control next year.
“I think the thing for Democrats, if they do want to keep it on the radar heading into 2028, and I think they should because I think it is a really potent issue for them, they are going to have to also deliver on it,” said Pierce.
“They have to be able to show up to get caught trying,” he said.
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