The Emerging Democratic Majority, Dead at 22

At approximately 19:55 hours (7:55 p.m.) Eastern Standard Time on Election Night, Loudoun County—a growing, diverse, highly educated Virginia bedroom suburb of Washington, DC—dropped nearly all its election results. The results showed the Democratic lead in the county slipping by 9 points. The Emerging Democratic Majority, the thesis that drove American politics crazy for over two decades, had breathed its last.

Further election results showed that places as different as New York City, the Rio Grande Valley, Miami, Wisconsin’s rural-populist Driftless Region, and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance’s ancestral homeland in the Ohio River valley had swung hard to the Republican ticket. The cause of the thesis’s death was most improbable: the political rise and resurgence of President-elect Donald Trump.

Demographic Destiny

In The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), liberal scholars John Judis and Ruy Teixeira proposed that Democrats could set the course of the political future by pursuing a populist, center-left agenda. This was at the post-9/11 apogee of the George W. Bush-era “neoconservative” Republican Party. They theorized that the entrepreneurial industrial economy with residual Protestant social values and identity debates along the historical Black-white and suburban-urban axes of the 20th century would be succeeded in the 21st century by an economy powered by post-industrial ideopolises like Loudoun County, secular-progressive social values, and identity debates that would diversify with the country.

Most provocatively, The Emerging Democratic Majority proposed that as the numbers of single women, immigrants, and professionals—the groups that voted for the hapless liberal Sen. George McGovern (D-SD) in the 1972 presidential election—grew, they would join the old working-class white, Black, and union-member bases of the Democratic Party to gain an advantage for the Left in the decade and perhaps beyond.

At 10 years, the thesis looked undeniably true. President Barack Obama was reelected on the back of what an Open Society Foundations operative called “the demography, stupid”—a play on Democratic political consultant James Carville’s famous quip about how President Bill Clinton campaigned on “the economy, stupid.” The thesis had become a prophecy or an ontology, unwrapping itself on behalf of triumphant demography-powered progressives at the expense of hapless and flailing Republicans.

The Disruptor

But the thesis has been in ill health since 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected president despite doing everything the thesis suggested not to do in a diversifying country. Obama’s coalition had already lost one element of the “emerging majority,” the ancestrally Democratic white working class, who came out strongly for Trump’s first campaign.

In 2020, Trump lost, but Republicans made inroads into the Latino and Asian American communities expected to power the growth of the new Democratic majority. The rise of radical-identitarian wokeness and outright socialist economics over the populist, center-left agenda prescribed in The Emerging Democratic Majority drove Teixeira out of institutional liberalism with warnings about a “progressive organization problem.”

Death of the Thesis

The election results in 2024 finally killed the “emerging democratic majority” thesis. In his third election campaign, President-elect Trump nearly split Hispanics evenly, breaking the Republican Party record for Hispanic support in exit polls set in 2004 by President George W. Bush on a very different platform. Young people, especially young men, appeared to have swung to the right, away from their presumed Democratic home. Indeed, Trump in some ways adopted the center ground on economic issues highlighted by Judis and Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority, repudiating the entitlement-reform proposals of former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) and favoring a restrictive trade policy more aligned with the late AFL-CIO leader Lane Kirkland than laissez-faire doctrines.

The Emerging Democratic Majority is survived by a liberal nonprofit get-out-the-vote infrastructure based on “a New American Majority” of minorities, unmarried women, and the youth; its authors and their latest book Where Have All the Democrats Gone?; far-right fears of a “Great Replacement” that may abate as more election returns show minorities and youth voting for President-elect Trump; and the second Trump Administration.