Focusing on the 2024 campaign obscures a larger conflict over the American people. The virulence of today’s struggle is not for the presidency alone but for the populace overall. It is arising because America’s elite and general public are shifting political parties.
This year’s election is a battle in a larger war: America is in the throes of a political realignment unequaled in a century.
A recent Gallup poll shows the political migration of the elite and the general public that is underway in America. Americans without a college education now back Republicans 50 percent to 36 percent, and those with some college back Republicans 49-40 percent. In contrast, college graduates back Democrats 48 percent to 43 percent, and those with postgraduate education back Democrats 60 percent to 31 percent.
As Gallup notes, there were only “modest differences” from 1999 to 2013, but “since then, and particularly since 2017, when Donald Trump became president, those differences have expanded greatly.”
According to Gallup, those without college education and those with postgraduate education “show the largest political divide between the most Democratic and most Republican educational subgroups measured in any year to date.”
The split between people and elites in relation to education could not be clearer.
Americans should not need numbers to tell what their eyes already should. However, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes to Watson: It is one thing to see, it is another to observe. Democrats are the party of America’s self-styled elites. In academia and the establishment media, it has been this way for as long as most can remember. Entertainment’s entrenchment with the Democrats is only slightly shorter. This entrenchment now extends to sports, the wealthy and even corporate America.
As Americans are beginning to observe, Democrats are resisting the resulting realignment with everything they can muster. The reason is it is an existential threat.
Going back to the numbers: there are a lot more everyday people than there are elites. Of course, elites like it this way — if everyone is a VIP, then no one is a VIP. Elites revel in their separation, but they do not want to be revealed in their separation.
Populism is also a Democratic legacy, and Democrats are jealous of their historical heritage. As long ago as 1896, when William Jennings Bryan stampeded the convention with his Cross of Gold speech, and himself to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Democrats have been thumping the populist tub.
In 1932, when FDR wrongly vilified Hoover and the Republicans for causing the Great Depression, their populist seeds finally bore fruit. For the next nine decades, Democrats have sought to reprise FDR’s run.
Yet apart from numbers and legacy, there is a more profoundly important reason that Democrats refuse to relinquish the populist mantle. Populism is their dual justification.
Democrats use populism to justify all they do. Even as their policies run increasingly left and away from the American people, Democrats cloak them as being done “for the people” — when in fact they are being done “to the people.”
Democrats also use populism to insulate themselves from their leftward policies’ fallout. Despite these policies hurting the American people — the working and middle classes especially — Democrats rationalize the pain as being somehow for their own good.
Radical environmental policies inflicting their greatest costs on those least able to afford them, defund the police initiatives victimizing inner-city neighborhoods, sanctuary cities transforming themselves into crime centers, open borders funneling illegal immigration to Democrats’ sanctuary cities with defunded police and Democrats’ opposing school choice (something that American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten denounced as “undermining democracy”) are just top-shelf examples of Democrats’ anti-people policies.
Without their populist persona, Democrats stand to be unmasked for the elite they have become: their rhetoric of Lady Liberty belying the reality of Marie Antoinette.
None of this is to say that the Democrats and their base of elites do not hate Trump. They do. But they fear even more the threat he embodies as Republicans’ prophet of populism. That fear far exceeds one candidate or one election; it extends to generations. So, Democrats and America’s elites do not simply seek to discredit Trump but to disconnect Republicans from the populism he preaches.
To see this threat’s potential, look back to the Gallup poll. Among non-Hispanic Black adults, Democrats’ lead “is the smallest Gallup has recorded in its polling, dating back to 1999. Most of the decline has been recent, with the net-Democratic ID for this group falling 19 points from a 66-point advantage in 2020.” While “Democrats’ 12-point advantage among Hispanic adults in 2023 represents a new low in trends dating back to 2011.”
And among white adults, Republicans “have maintained a 14- to 17-point preference…in most years since 2014. The parties were closer to parity among this large segment of the electorate between 1999 and 2009.”
Republican populism is splintering Democrats’ historic coalitions. And the more they are threatened, the more Democrats retreat into leftist identity group policies that their disconnected elites imagine should appeal to a base they no longer recognize or resemble.
J.T. Young was a professional staffer in the House and Senate from 1987-2000, served in the Department of Treasury and Office of Management and Budget from 2001-2004, and was director of government relations for a Fortune 20 company from 2004-2023.