FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump points as he attends a meeting with oil industry executives, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 9, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
After the United States' 2024 presidential election, Democratic strategists spent months asking what went wrong for their party. It was a close election: Donald Trump won the national popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent. But the fact that Trump flipped six states Joe Biden won in 2020 (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona) and made gains among Latinos, Generation Z, independents and swing voters was a source of major frustration for Democrats.
Trump, according to Pew Research, won 48 percent of the Latino vote in 2024 compared to 51 percent for Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. Biden, in contrast, won 61 percent of the Latino vote in 2020.
But according to The New Republic's Alex Shephard, Trump is rapidly squandering the gains he made in 2024.
"A year ago, Donald Trump was riding high," Shephard recalls in an article published on January 17. "The man who had lost the presidency four years earlier, then led a failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was now about to be inaugurated again after improbably winning a nonconsecutive second term. Almost everyone seemed to agree something seismic had just occurred. Trump was no longer just the leader of a powerful movement. He had 'remade the electorate,' as CNN's Harry Enten said in February: Republicans were surging not only with men — particularly those without college degrees — but also, with young people and Latinos…. What a difference a year makes."
Shephard adds, "Today, that widely accepted consensus about the 2024 election seems absurd. Trump hadn't reshaped the electorate at all — he had simply won another toss-up election. Yes, he narrowly won the popular vote this time, but by a margin — in both popular and Electoral College terms — that was not historically impressive. And now, those new voters he brought in have already abandoned him."
Shephard notes that a CNN poll released on January 16, "found that" Trump "is 29 points underwater with independents and 30 points down with both Latinos and young voters."
"Trump's new coalition is already in tatters," Shephard writes. "And there is no sign that these voters will be coming back to the president or his party anytime soon…. Fifty-eight percent of the electorate already sees his second term as a failure. He receives failing marks from a majority of voters in every policy area, including the two — the economy and immigration — that played the most decisive role in his 2024 victory."
Read Alex Shephard's full article for The New Republic at this link.
