REEXAMINING THE REALIGNMENT

CAN FREE MARKETS WIN VOTES IN THE NEW GOP?

- STEPHANIE SLADE

"HOLY MIAMI-DADE, BATMAN," tweeted then-Politico reporter Tim Alberta on election night in 2020. Early returns had started rolling in, and the numbers from South Florida were not what people were expecting. President Donald Trump was dramatically exceeding his 2016 totals in the county's majority-Hispanic precincts.

Hillary Clinton had carried Miami-Dade by almost 30 percentage points four years earlier; Joe Biden took it by a mere seven percentage points en route to losing the state. “It was a bloodbath,” one former Democratic Party official would tell The Washington Post.

Trump’s strong showing in Miami-Dade was an indication that something strange was happening with partisan affiliations. Like most ethnic minorities, Hispanic Americans have long been viewed as a loyal Democratic constituency. But in recent years, that trend has begun to abate.

Back in 2002, journalist John B. Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority, a book that “forecast the dawn of a new progressive era” powered by the organic growth of left-leaning demographic groups, including college-educated professionals and immigrants.

Now the pair have a new book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (Henry Holt and Co.), that sounds the alarm about “the cultural insularity and arrogance” driving blue-collar voters away from their party.

“We didn’t anticipate the extent to which cultural liberalism might segue into cultural radicalism,” Teixeira told The Wall Street Journal in 2022, “and the extent to which that view, particularly as driven by younger cohorts, would wind up imprinting itself on the entire infrastructure in and around the Democratic Party.”