That’s Some ‘Nudge’

The New York Times is a little concerned. But just a touch.

If Republicans look closely enough at Tuesday’s election results, the paper recently conceded, they might see “signs of a game-changing new coalition” gravitating toward the GOP. Donald Trump “did not suddenly transform the Republican Party into the multiracial alliance of working-class voters,” it assured its readers. “But he nudged it in that direction.”

Sounds interesting. Let’s take a look at some of these marginal shifts and their ever-so-slight influence on the American political landscape:

That’s quite the “nudge,” and certainly not one that you need a finely calibrated seismograph to register.

The swing toward not just Trump but many Republicans who rode his coattails to victory on Tuesday is almost uniform, though the swing was more pronounced among some demographics and in particular geographic settings than others.

Trump increased his standing in Hispanic and Native American-dominated areas of the country by double-digits. He pared back his losses in major urban metros by ten points, a shift that produced Trump victories from Fresno, Calif., to a handful of wards in Philadelphia. He reversed the drift of the suburbs into the Democratic column and even pared back some of his 2020 losses in those quarters.

Trump made serious inroads among Hispanic, Jewish, young, male, black, Asian, married, and middle-aged voters. Only seniors and women with college degrees resisted Trump’s appeal, and not appreciably.

Trump’s gains were limited in areas dominated by older voters, evangelicals, and current or former military personnel only because the GOP had already maximized its turnout in these areas. Where Republicans had room to grow, they grew.

If that’s a “nudge,” it’s the sort that would put its recipient in the hospital. But Republicans shouldn’t be too vexed by the Times’ understatement. If pro-Democratic organs are this committed to avoid reckoning with their declining appeal to America’s majority-makers, they’re not likely to fix the problem.