How the GOP Can Be the New Majority Party
Editor's Note
Though Donald Trump and the Republicans secured an impressive win in November’s election, the real fight is still ahead of us, as Glenn Ellmers and John Marini recently argued on this site. To win not just this or that battle but the entire war, Republicans must build a stable and decisive governing coalition. Jeremy Carl examines the latest voting patterns and concludes that the only way to do so is not by leaning into Trump’s impressive gains among minority groups, but by bringing college-educated white voters back into the Republican fold.
The 2024 victory of Donald Trump was a political earthquake — the GOP’s first presidential popular vote win since 2004 and, from an electoral college perspective, its most resounding win since 1988.
And Trump’s GOP is much more conservative than the 1988 version, one which still had large numbers of liberal Northeastern Republicans in it (including the president-elect, George H.W. Bush) — but nonetheless, it won in a much more diverse country. The electorate was 85% white in 1988. Despite extraordinary white turnout in 2024, Trump’s electorate was just 71% white, up from the 67% white electorate of 2020. Indeed, so critical was Trump’s white support that, had the racial composition of the electorate in 2024 been the same as it was in 2020, Trump would have lost the popular vote and possibly the presidency. Had it moved further toward non-white voters in line with the diversifying electorate, Trump would have lost the popular vote by a significant margin.
Trump made serious inroads into places like New York and New Jersey where the GOP had not been competitive for decades. For all of us who said that to win over minority voters, the GOP needed to stop apologizing for being the party of heritage America and its values and start celebrating them, this was indeed a vindication.
Or, as GOP political consultant Patrick Ruffini put it after an extensive analysis of election data: “The rundown of which groups swung right & didn’t looks like an intersectional layer cake of oppression. Old, white, married, educated people hold steady, young, nonwhite, single, and non-college educated people zoom right.”
Republicans lost Latinos by just 5% and Asian Americans by just 15%, and Trump won “other” minorities (Arab Americans, Native Americans, etc.) by 14%. He won married men by 22% and also won among single men and married women. Only the “Single Women” demographic eluded him, which Kamala Harris won overwhelmingly, 61-38 (a number that was doubtless higher among never-married single women). Trump won white men 60-37 and white women 53-45. He took 21% among black men, a number doubtless far higher among younger black men. He won voters with children by nine points, 53-44.
Trump won white college-grad men 50-47 while winning non-college whites 66-32. In the biggest metros (1 million plus) he improved most vs. 2020 in the areas where voters were 80% minority or more, where he saw an 11.4% rise in vote share.
Yet despite all of this, and despite his commanding electoral college win, Trump’s popular vote win was marginal — on the order of 1.5 percent — and he took not quite a majority of the electorate. If even Trump’s overperformance can only net the GOP a marginal win, and a minority of the vote overall, it seems that the GOP will still need to fundamentally alter American electoral dynamics if it wants to become the default governing majority party.
But where to get these new voters from?
Looking at the results of 2024, it might seem natural to look at ethnic minority communities. But building on top of Trump’s record performance there may be difficult. The Democrats already have an enormous ethnic patronage network for these groups. There are communal voting traditions that are hard to break. And, perhaps most importantly, the Democrats can offer tangible race-based benefits to these communities in terms of resources and preferences that the GOP can’t match without rejecting its own core values.
In particular, among African Americans the prospects seem slim. Among Hispanics, a party that actually moves forward with an aggressive mass deportation plan as Trump has promised to do seems unlikely to win a lot more votes from a community that will be disproportionately affected by that policy. For single women, the Democrats’ Life of Julia narrative of lifelong care by the state seems almost perfectly attuned to their short-term needs, even as it damages them long-term.
But there is one large group in the Democrat coalition whose interests are currently very poorly served by the Democrats and figure to be ever worse-served going forward: college-educated whites, who accounted for approximately 36% of Harris voters, supporting her by a seven-point margin — a sharp contrast to Trump’s 30+% win among non-college whites. Among whites with graduate degrees, Harris won by a 21 point margin. If we were able to narrow this further to those who earned graduate degrees from so-called “elite” schools and those who obtained “elite” degrees (MD, JD, PhD), the gap would have been even more extreme.
Of dozens of demographic groups listed by AP VoteCast the only ones Trump lost ground with compared with 2020 were white people 45+, white male college graduates, white urban voters, and those with postgraduate degrees. He gained just 1% with white voters overall, even after the radical anti-white orgy of the Biden administration.
Trump’s relative deficit of white votes is reflective of a long-term trend of the GOP bleeding support among white elites. College-educated whites began to desert the GOP in George H.W. Bush’s re-election campaign. But this is a particularly averse group to Trump stylistically. The same brash affect that is so appealing to the working class often grates against professional class sensibilities. If one were to look at the most likely Trump successors — Vice President-elect Vance or Governor DeSantis or even longer-shots like Vivek Ramaswamy or Nikki Haley — none would have Trump’s magic with the white working class or, potentially, minorities; but all may be stylistically better suited to gain with white college graduates.
The consequences of this GOP deficit among elites is profound. The GOP was absolutely obliterated among wealthy voters, with the Democrats raising multiple times what the GOP did nationwide. Harris outraised Trump among wealthy donors by more than 3.5 to 1. In my home state of Montana, a very conservative, overwhelmingly white state where every single statewide official is a Republican, Harris outraised President Trump despite losing the state by 20 points. The recent U.S. Senate election in Montana saw the GOP candidate outspent $69 million to $19 million (despite the GOP candidate leading in the polls for months). The GOP Senate candidate ended up winning easily, but it shows how much white elites have migrated to the Democrats, even in GOP strongholds.
Yet it is difficult to ascertain what tangible benefits the Democrats are giving white elites to earn their votes. Certainly, the prospects for young white Democrats who want to be elected to high office are grim. With rare exceptions like Trump, serious presidential candidates usually come from the ranks of senators and governors. Democrats have only 12 whites of Christian background serving in these roles who will be under the age of 70 at the next election cycle. (By contrast, the GOP has 39.)
The GOP has five white supreme court Justices of Christian background; the Democrats have zero. Among Biden’s cabinet of 26 there was just one white Protestant man, Pete Buttigieg, a gay convert from Catholicism. (There were five white Catholics and seven Jews). Among the 100 federal judges nominated in the first two years of the Biden administration, there were just 6 white men and 22 black women. Given demographic trends, there is no reason to think that these ratios will improve with future Democrat candidates.
But looking at younger talent, who have come of age at the time the Democrats went woke, their picture is even bleaker.
The GOP has 14 whites of Christian background serving as governors or senators under 50 years of age. The Democrats have one, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, the son of a popular former governor.
Whites, and in particular white men, are being locked out of the power structures of Democrat politics. If you were a young white man looking to obtain high office or a position in the power structure, which party would offer you more opportunities?
But the problems go beyond politics. Many professional class whites fit extremely awkwardly in the Democrat coalition. Members of the bureaucratic managerial class, especially within the government and universities, will continue to have their interests largely aligned with Democrats regardless of race, but whites are a declining percentage of that class. Just 60% of the federal workforce identified as white in 2023, compared with 76% in the private sector. Even at the top levels of the bureaucracy (GS-14, 15, and SES) whites constituted only about 70% — well below their share of the private sector labor force — and this number figures to be substantially reduced each year as older SES veterans age out of the workforce.
Top young white law students have only the narrowest path to elite positions under the Democrats. In the medical field, less than half of entering medical students are white. In the business world, your chances are more expansive, but again, you’ll have problems in everything from explicit board quotas to de facto affirmative action in hiring.
Added to that are the cultural factors. Democrat leaders belittle American history and those who made it, lecture Americans on white privilege and white supremacy, and open our borders to a wide range of people who will completely transform the demographics of the country.
Combine all of these and the continued support of elite whites for the Democrats looks more and more like an unsustainable anomaly in which cultural affinity cannot sustain allegiance when it is so far out of line with their material interests. As Trump was able to consolidate the votes of conservative Hispanics and Asians (groups that had long voted disproportionately Democrat despite their right-of-center ideology) by showing that he would protect their interests, so Trump’s successor can win back the allegiance of elite whites. Trump can begin that process by emphasizing the ways in which the Democrat party has abandoned them.
The long-term road to electoral domination runs through increased support from college-educated white voters. They are there for the taking, and they will bring not just their votes but substantial financial and managerial resources currently lacking in the Republican party. Furthermore, they are distributed efficiently from an electoral college perspective. By bringing college-educated whites back into the fold, we can permanently crack the blue wall — the Midwestern states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, while potentially adding states such as Minnesota, Maine, or New Hampshire, as well as strengthening our performance in just about every other battleground. A GOP that won college-educated whites at the rate that Reagan did in his 1984 re-election (68%) would have won in 2024 with a 57% landslide rather than a narrow 50% majority.
The same voices that sold us the “GOP autopsy” in 2012 that encouraged us to sell out on immigration to win minority votes will be back with the same bad advice today. By all means, we should continue to build support among minority communities, and in particular I expect that our 2024 gains with conservative-identifying minorities will be sustained, but in terms of allying interests with policies, it is college-educated whites that provide the biggest target of opportunity.
The possibility for a durable governing majority is there, but we must recognize the nature of our opportunity before we can move to seize it.