Nate Cohn

I think that some of them probably lean Republican.

The sort of political damage that was done to the Democrats during the Biden years will prove to be lasting to some extent or another.

That's usually what happens in politics.

When groups swing, they rarely go all the way back.

There's some someone in this process was won over.

to the Republicans for good or alternately, if you prefer, has been alienated from the Democrats for life.

That said, a lot of them are likely dissatisfied now with both sides.

I would guess that many could return to the sidelines of politics, that they may not vote in the next election, while others will be more genuinely persuadable voters who, if Democrats introduce a new set of ideas, a new message, a new candidate, and things continue to stay this bad, the Democrats will have a chance to win many of them back.

I mean, I think that stepping back for a second, you can see the signs of these issues beginning to weigh on the parties for a long time.

I mean, beginning in the 2015 campaign, whether it was Bernie on the left or Donald Trump on the right or the emergence of Mamdani in the New York mayoral race this year.

What all these things have in common is that there's a growing share of the electorate, relatively young, relatively low income people.

It seems relatively nonwhite as well.

That is so dissatisfied with the country and with their prospects and with the opportunities that they have in life that they're open to very nontraditional political candidacies that we wouldn't have imagined in 1997.

And I think we have reason to believe that those pressures are still building.

We've been in an era of change elections now for at least a decade and perhaps going all the way back to 2008.

The mainstream of both parties has sort of been discredited by failures in government, whether it was the failures of Bush or the failures of Obama and Biden or now the failures of Trump.

Those failures by mainstream politicians creates openings for new ideas, outsiders.

Now, as we've seen from these same efforts, including Donald Trump himself, if those change candidates win and then fail to address the problems that they campaigned on, we just start the cycle all over again where voters then will go back to the drawing board looking for change.

So that may mean the next change candidate looks nothing like the last one.

But as long as these deep simmering problems continue to exist in American society, we're going to keep having voters looking for something very different from what they've had before.