Why Democratic optimism is really unwarranted

The reality is that the Republicans have cemented a solid coalition that is far more durable than many liberals and never Trump pundits care to admit. Folks, shit's really fucking bad.

(This will probably see a lot of my readers cancel. Too bad, they should read this and internalize it)

Yesterday, Trump made the trek to West Point to give the commencement address to the graduating cohort of cadets. And it was a typical Trumpian rambling gambol of dog droppings.

Yesterday evening, my notes feed and email was rife with ridicule and riffing on Trumps verbal logorrhea.

But Lucian Truscott IV had the correct take, that it wasn’t a good idea to just ridicule Trump. His whole post is worth a read, and the comments are full of people who are naysaying Lucian’s take, but that is a mistake.

I watched Trump’s West Point commencement speech so you don’t have to

From his writing:

Number one, it wasn’t a “political rally” speech. It was a commencement speech – a Donald Trump commencement speech, to be sure, but it fit within the norms of the kind of speech given to graduates of a college on their commencement day. Number two, other than his wearing one of his ridiculous “Make America Great Again” hats, it wasn’t a MAGA rally of any kind. Number three, he didn’t get what CNN called his “usual response” because the parents and families were there to watch their sons and daughters graduate, and they couldn’t wait for him to get off the stage so their kids’ names could be called, and they could find their new lieutenants on the football field and celebrate. He got some applause for his usual punch lines – the biggest one when he said, “we won’t have men playing women’s sports anymore,” but the applause was brief and quickly died down as Trump stood there waiting with obvious disappointment for more, for cheering that didn’t come.

This rings true. There is a lot of mockery in my feed today, from Tiedrich to JoJo from Jerz, and it is like cotton candy, a delightful treat that is completely without any nutritive values.

Lucian then goes for the jugular:

The point I’m making is that, he is who he is, and he figured out a way to sell himself as who he is to a broad swath of the American public – broad enough to get elected to the presidency twice, and coming very close the third time. He did it with the kind of self-referential stories he told at West Point. They worked politically in his campaigns, and they worked today at West Point because, God help us, he’s good at it.

We don’t like his grievance-heavy self-promoting and his golf stories – he managed to work one of those in, too, in a section referring to West Point sports teams – but he made the golf story work, too.

This is what us liberals and left leaning folks get horribly wrong about the Trump phenomenon.

And now, let’s get to what I really wanted to talk about, the waning chances for Democrats to take back control of the levers of government. Last week, a huge tranche of election data was released, and there are some sobering lessons to extract from the data.

The Main Event

The NY Times has published an in-depth analysis of the data, and it is telling us a terrifying story.

The story: The Democrats’ problems run deep, nearly everywhere (gifted link) is a dive through the data.

It leads off thusly:

Donald J. Trump’s victory in 2024 was not an outlier.

It was the culmination of continuous gains by Republicans in much of the country each time he has run for president, a sea of red that amounts to a flashing warning sign for a Democratic Party out of power and hoping for a comeback.

The steady march to the right at the county level reveals not just the extent of the nation’s transformation in the Trump era but also the degree to which the United States now resembles two countries charging in opposite directions.

This is cold hard reality. And it paints a fucking bleak picture. Trump has accelerated a trend that has been long in progress. The visualization of this trend is stark:

This is the visualization of counties that shifted towards Republicans. It is sobering. Of course, some counties moved leftward, so it balances out right? RIGHT? RIGHT?

Yikes. That is fucking bleak.

What about other dividing lines? How about by Education?

Clearly the sorting by educational attainment is accelerating. I bet you are seeing the problem here. The Democrats are capturing an ever larger portion of college graduates, leaving the cohorts of less attainment to the Republicans.

The problem? There are a fuckton more non-college educated people in our country¹.

And, as much as you hate the NY Times, this should chill the fuck out of you:

All told, Mr. Trump has increased the Republican Party’s share of the presidential vote in each election he’s been on the ballot in close to half the counties in America — 1,433 in all — according to an analysis by The New York Times.

It is a staggering political achievement, especially considering that Mr. Trump was defeated in the second of those three races, in 2020.

Let that sink in. Trump has increased the Republican share of the vote in all of his elections.

I am old enough to remember in the early aughts when Ruy Texiera was reliably liberal and writing about how Demographics were Destiny, and it was coming that Democrats would be unstoppable.

How fucking quaint (and now Texiera is at best an anti-Dem who prostitutes himself as a reasonable liberal to the likes of The Bulwark).

The work by Rove, by REDMAP, and the ecosystem of right wing media and think tanks has halted that “inevitable” demographic shift.

And today’s resistance seems increasingly cocky that 2026 will be a wave election, washing out the Republicans.

I fear that they are fooling themselves.

Democrats have steadily expanded their vote share in those three elections in only 57 of the nation’s 3,100-plus counties.

These counties, which we are calling “triple-trending,” offer a unique and invaluable window into how America has realigned — and still is realigning — in the Trump era. They vividly show, in red and blue, the stark changes in the political coalitions of the two parties.

This is bleak². What’s next is more chilling:

Even more ominous for the Democrats are the demographic and economic characteristics of these counties: The party’s sparse areas of growth are concentrated almost exclusively in America’s wealthiest and most educated pockets.

Yet Mr. Trump has steadily gained steam across a broad swath of the nation, with swelling support not just in white working-class communities but also in counties with sizable Black and Hispanic populations.

This is a dagger to the heart of the resistance. But, it does get worse:

Counties that have become steadily more Republican exist in some of the country’s bluest strongholds, including New York City, Philadelphia and Honolulu. Mr. Trump’s party is still losing in those places, but by significantly less. At the same time, Mr. Trump has driven Republican margins to dizzying new heights in the nation’s reddest bastions.

The fucking Republicans are taking share in deeply Blue areas. Not enough to go Republican, but enough to shift the state balance, and lead to an almost permanent Red country.

The last bit of bad news:

Taken together, the findings represent a blaring alarm for a Democratic Party that long saw itself as championing the working class and that staked its future on the belief that the nation would become steadily more diverse and better educated.

This should be a red alert, all hands on deck situation for Democrats, but they seem content with making fun of Trump’s verbal tics and inanities, assuring themselves that the general electorate will see the light and swing back to the Democrats.

That is going to be a long cold exile while MAGA and Trump will run rampant over our civil liberties, and tearing the Constitution into shards³.

If you read Lucian on this, and especially the comments, you will see the denial in the progressive and center left commenters.

And this is why the Never Trump phenomenon is bound to fail. They are righteous, but in the face of the naked evil, the population and electorate will continue to chase the cotton candy high that is Trumpism, reveling in the cruelty to the LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities.

Dismal days indeed. Almost hopeless.

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1. This is why the “Student Loan Forgiveness” is so unpopular.

2. I am using “bleak” a lot in this post. I have no other words.

3. There is much more in the NY Times article, and it is worth fortifying your mien and reading it all. And it doesn’t get any better for Democrats.