Jamel Bouie

It was a product of the New Deal.

It was a product of a set of policies, a set of

political approaches that didn't just win votes, but that, like, binded a number of different communities and different groups of Americans to a particular political order.

Trump was able to assemble an electoral coalition that put him over the top.

But the administration equated that, equated that...

with having bound those voters to the political project.

And that's not what happened.

It could have happened.

There was a path to do that.

But what happened instead was operating under the assumption that the battle had been won,

the Trump administration and the Republican allies in Congress just began to pursue every single ideological hobby horse and bugaboo that they have.

And the result has been

that this nascent coalition immediately began to fall apart, right?

Because a bunch of these voters weren't voting for snatching grabs of brown people off the streets.

They were voting for maybe another stimulus check.

I mean, and the polling shows this.

Among black voters, among Latino voters, among young voters, young men in particular, every gain Trump made in 2024 hasn't just reversed itself, but has gone basically fleeing in the other direction.

I mean, the other thing is that these voters weren't voting for the Republican Party.

They were voting for Donald Trump.

And so if Donald Trump is not on the ballot, the electoral problem the Republican Party has always had in the age of Trump is this.