All of us folks who love to look at election data are busy doing our respective deep dives, trying to figure out why this massive win happened, and what it means for 2028. The most important thing we need to do is to look at the Democratic coalition we won in 2026, and focus on which voters we are in most danger of losing if we don’t get the next two years right.
The first thing we need to understand is that Republican enthusiasm for voting was significantly down this year. That is unlikely to be the case in a presidential election in 2028. We can still win with a higher Republican turnout, but it will not be as easy: we will have to match a higher Republican turnout by keeping our base voters engaged and excited. We can do that by passing progressive legislation, investigating Republican and corporate corruption, and having a presidential candidate with a compelling message and an energetic field and social media operation.
My main focus today, though, is to talk about which key groups moved our way in this election, and what we have to do to keep them in the fold. Before I talk about the people I think we should focus on, I’m going to start with who I think we shouldn’t, because this will be one of the big debates in the Democratic Party over the next two years.
The Big Debate Inside the Democratic Party
I am deeply bored with the DC insider obsession over progressive vs moderate. What 2026 proved conclusively is that both progressives and moderates can win, as long as the party and progressive movement work together to put wind in everyone’s sails.
So to my friends at Third Way who are arguing that progressive Senate candidates did worse than moderate governor candidates in Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota, please put a sock in it. The fact that Troy Jackson, after being nominated late because of a huge controversy over Graham Platner, with no money in the bank to start that late breaking campaign, could solidly beat a senator no other Democrat had ever been able to beat; the fact that Native American Peggy Flanagan, after a tough primary where she was vastly outspent, solidly won in spite of a local scandal that had forced Tim Walz to retire; the fact that a Muslim man named Abdul El-Sayed won by 7 points in a state that Trump won by 7 points after a vicious primary, the last minute Hayley Stevens betrayal, Islamophobic attacks, and more than $70 million spent attacking him by AIPAC alone: all this makes clear that progressive Democrats can win tough races just fine, thank you.
This moment, as James Talarico said in his beautiful acceptance speech, is not about Left vs Right (or Center); it is about top vs bottom.
So here’s the real question: which political coalition and which voters do Democrats need to be most focused on over the next two years?
There has been a long term debate inside the Democratic Party over whether Democrats can better build a majority electoral coalition by focusing on upper middle income big city suburbanites who have leaned Republican in the past, or by focusing on more economically stressed and populist working-class folks, many of whom live in small and medium-sized towns hit hard by deindustrialization and the opioid crisis.
The former strategy was pushed hard by Mark Penn in the 1990s and oughts, describing his favorite target voters with terms like “soccer moms” and “office park dads”. They have also been the obsession of Chuck Schumer, whose famous quote prior to the 2016 election “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio & Illinois & Wisconsin” turned out to be so profoundly wrong. Schumer has even invented a quintessential suburban Republican-leaning, swing voting couple he calls “The Baileys,” who he has been talking about for years.
Another big fan of this strategic theory is Rahm Emanuel. I heard a talk by him a few weeks back that the key to this election and to 2028 was the Romney Republicans — by whom I am assuming he meant better educated, higher income suburbanites — who were going to cross over and vote for us because they didn’t like Trump.
This political strategy was also embraced by the Harris campaign, who campaigned in purple state suburbs with Liz Cheney, and spent much of her closing message emphasizing how she wanted to have Republicans in her cabinet. This strategy didn’t work in 2024, but maybe it was a new wave of Republican support that created this tsunami for us. Let’s take a look.
Whither Republican voters?
You can’t win Senate seats in Kansas, South Carolina, and other heavily Republican states without winning some Republican voters, and I think it is safe to say that some of those voters fit the Romney Republican description. Many of our campaigns were effective in reaching out to these kinds of people and winning some of them. And there was a lot of talk in general leading up to this election about how Democrats were going to get a lot of Republican votes.
But let’s be clear: nationwide, Romney Republicans were not the reason for this tsunami, and they aren’t the key to winning in 2028. In 2024, we got 5% of Republicans to vote for Harris. In 2026, we got 7% to vote for Democrats according to the exit polls. Over the last 20 years, the usual range of Republicans who cross over to vote for us is exactly that: in the 5-7% range. Nice to have that 7% of Republicans, assuming that number turns out to be accurate, but I don’t think it explains the difference between losing the popular vote by 1.5% in 2024 and winning it by 13% this year.
The bigger story by far is that more Republicans didn’t show up. In 2024 Republicans were 35% of the electorate; this year they were only 32%. Democrats were only 31% of the electorate in 2024; this year they were 35%. Who does and doesn’t vote is a huge part of the story of this election.
In case you were wondering: Independents were about the same part of the electorate as 2024 (34% last time, 33% this time), but last time voted for Harris and Trump close to evenly, 49-46 D. This time we won them 58-38, a big swing.
Were some of those Independents formerly Romney Republicans? Probably a few: Independents are a broad mishmash of all different kinds of voters. A lot of them are younger people, who have for more than a generation registered as Independents in far higher numbers than their parents, because they are cynical about both parties. Many of them are working-class folks who walked away from the Democratic Party years ago, but sometimes still vote with us. So it’s a real mix, but like many other swingable groups, they tend to move against incumbents when times are bad. That sure happened this year.
The bottom line: we should not count on Romney Republicans to save us.
Hispanics and young voters: swing or base?
The two biggest demographic groups that moved our way were Hispanics and young people, both 18-29 year olds (who we won by an incredible 73-25) and 30-44 year olds (62-36). With both groups, their turnout was high. (Black men also moved back to us, but their percentage of the overall electorate is lower.)
Hispanics are mostly working-class voters and small business owners. Their biggest concern by far is on economic issues, and Latino men especially moved hard away from Democrats in 2024. Both Latinos and Latinas swung way back, mostly because the Trump economy sucked, but also because the stories about ICE had gotten so awful.
Young people are an eclectic mix. Young working-class men of all races especially went to the Republican Party last time, but came back toward Democrats in 2026. College kids were more Democratic in 2024, but even stronger for us in 2026. Young people of color came back to us in a very big way.
Here’s the thing with both Hispanics and young voters: they were open to Trump because they remembered his first term as being better economically, and because they thought Biden was insane when he bragged that the U.S. economy was the envy of the world. But when the economy turned even worse, and a lot of their friends were living in fear of ICE, they turned on Republicans in a heartbeat.
The key for Democrats going forward is that our campaigns can’t be taking these voters for granted, thinking of them as base voters who just went to Trump that one time and are now back for good in their natural Democratic home. These voters are not loyal to either party; they are diverse in their attitudes and life situations; they are cynical and unhappy with both politicians and big corporations for not giving a damn about their lives and wellbeing.
The skeptical voters broke our way.
Speaking of skeptical voters…
I remain convinced that the so-called double haters (voters who don’t like either party), the voters most skeptical about both political parties, are among the ultimate difference makers in American politics. In 2016 and 2024 they went for Trump; in 2020, they went for Biden. This year they broke hard our way.
Voters who approve of neither party voted Democratic 61-33. On top of that, when voters were asked which party would better handle an issue, while Democrats had the overall edge, where they had a bigger edge was with the voters who didn’t think either party could be trusted on a given issue:
For the 32% of voters who said neither party could be trusted to clean up corruption, they voted Democratic 56-40
For the 43% who said they trusted neither party on AI, we won them 58-38
For the 22% who trusted neither party on taxes, we won them 63-33
For the 19% who trusted neither party on the economy, we won them 56-39
Apologies for being obvious here, but just to be clear: people who don’t like either party, and don’t trust either party on their handling of important issues, are the ultimate swing voters.
These folks come from all racial groups and are heavily working class. They are deeply angry at the establishment, both political and corporate. They don’t have the kind of conventional issue positioning that pundits in DC would recognize: They have a strong libertarian streak because they have little faith in government, but think big business and billionaires are getting away with murder and should be held to account. People in DC are stunned to hear that anyone could ever have voted for Trump in 2024 and Mamdani in 2025, but more than 10% of New Yorkers did.
Democrats need to build a huge part of their electoral strategy around the anti-establishment, economically populist “double haters.”
Why This Strategy Debate Is Central to Our Chances in 2028
So, look, there are caveats to the above. One is that exit polls are not always reliable, and there is so much more data to look at. Another is that every voter and every kind of voter, however you break them down, are important for Democrats to try and reach. And because of the diversity of attitudes and backgrounds in these different voter groups, a one-size-fits-all strategy isn’t always the best.
However, this broad debate is central to the future of the Democratic Party and our ability to build a truly sustainable governing majority, one that follows the 2026 victory with a strong 2028 showing, but then doesn’t lose all our gains in 2030 the way we did in 1994 and 2010 and 2016 and 2024.
Our party’s lack of success at sustaining a governing majority is tied directly to the fact that we haven’t delivered for working and middle-class families buffeted by the economic tides that delivered extraordinary wealth and power to billionaires and big business. The wages of working families have soured, while the prices of essential goods have soared. Those who have tried to start small businesses have been squeezed by the monopoly power of massive conglomerates. It’s harder and harder to send their kids to college, and harder for the kids who do get there to make a good living after they graduate with mountains of debt.
No wonder so many voters are so cynical. And if our electoral strategies are built on the idea that Romney Republicans – comfortable upper middle-class people offended by the worst aspects of MAGA, but not wanting too much populism in their economics – are the voters we should be mainly targeting, we will be lost. Even if we win in 2028 with an economy still hurting from Trumpism, we will be crushed in 2030 because all those double haters and young folks haven’t seen their wages go up or their health care, housing, energy, and food costs go down.
I have seen this movie before, folks, and really don’t want to see it again. In 1994, the Clinton White House was so proud of passing NAFTA and gave up on health care reform; we lost control of both houses of Congress in a blowout election. In 2010, we had bailed out Wall Street, but not people who had lost their jobs and/or homes. A Republican tsunami way more than wiped out all our gains from 2006 and 2008, and elected enough Republican state legislators to allow them to control redistricting for a decade.
Those movies were horror shows, more monstrous by far than The Exorcist and The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby combined. Time instead to tell stories like Grapes of Wrath and It’s a Wonderful Life, where good people come together to win against greedy elites trying to bring us down.