Since President-elect Donald Trump’s decisive victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November, Republicans have been riding high. What was predicted by pundits on both sides of the aisle to be a nail-biter of an election, with results that may not be certified for weeks or longer, became the modern version of a blowout. No, Trump didn’t put a Reagan vs. Mondale beating on his political foes, but in a country so polarized along party lines, with a clean sweep of all seven battleground states and a victory in the national popular vote by 2.3 million, the former president had as good a showing as any Republican could have wanted.
Congressional Republicans lagged behind Trump, but not by much. The GOP retained the House of Representatives, albeit with a historically tiny majority, and regained the Senate on the back of victories over longtime Democratic red-state stalwarts Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Jon Tester (D-MT), as well as Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV)’s retirement.
Regional political realignments happen all the time. For instance, West Virginia was once a reliable Democratic state, at least regarding presidential elections. Republicans won the state only once from 1972 to 2000, the lone GOP victory being the aforementioned 1984 election between President Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, which saw the incumbent Reagan win 49 states. Democrats were surprised when Vice President Al Gore lost West Virginia to George W. Bush in 2000, but their setback was more like a seismic shift in the Mountain State. No Democrat has come close in the two decades since, and Trump bested Harris in the state by nearly 42 points in November.
Interestingly, in all of the discussions surrounding the all-important battleground states leading up to the general election this year, two longtime bellwethers were left off of the list: Ohio and Florida. Ohio voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election from 1964 until 2020, when Trump won the state in a losing effort to then-candidate Joe Biden. Former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush won the Buckeye State by the skin of their teeth, and Trump has now won the state by 8, 8, and nearly 12 points in three consecutive elections.
Following Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) landslide near-20-point reelection victory during the 2022 midterm elections, in which he won Miami-Dade County and a majority of the state’s Latino voters, all eyes were on Florida. Was DeSantis uniquely popular, or was there a realignment afoot in the Sunshine State? Trump didn’t win Florida by 20 points, but he won by the widest margin of any presidential candidate in 36 years, besting Harris by over 13 points and replicating DeSantis’s surprising feat by winning the state’s Hispanic vote. Predicting future electoral results is a fool’s errand, but all indications are that Ohio and Florida are likely headed in a solid red direction for the foreseeable future.
As the late Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture. I would be less optimistic that we are seeing a substantive rightward shift in the body politic if Republican gains could simply be attributed to running against a deeply unpopular incumbent showing clear signs of severe mental decline, and later a wildly incompetent vice president who allegedly hits the bottle like Hunter S. Thompson. But cultural signposts paint a picture of a Democratic Party that will be lost at sea for a generation without serious reflection and wholesale moderation.
The Left outkicked its coverage on the transgender issue, especially regarding the transitioning of children, and Democrats and their allies are finally beginning to read the writing on the wall. The corporate press are starting to run pieces questioning the efficacy of sterilizing or otherwise permanently altering minors, and this comes after most European countries, including the United Kingdom, under the leadership of the most left-wing government in recent British history, have banned puberty blockers and other forms of gender transition for children.
Disney, which has long been at the forefront of the push to mainline transgender propaganda into children’s content, recently backed off of the issue that has been central to the Left’s ideology in recent years. The media giant made the wise decision to remove a storyline that included transgender propaganda from its upcoming series Win or Lose. “When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline,” a spokesman said.
Right-wingers, for good reason, trust institutions such as Disney and the New York Times about as far as they can throw them. (As a man of average strength, I can’t throw Mickey Mouse very far, assuming, of course, that there is an adult human being inside of the costume.) But considering that we are witnessing an about-face on an issue as important to the Democrats as transgender “rights,” it is safe to assume that wealthy and influential executives, who are themselves surely members of the political Left, are realizing that they bet on the wrong pronouns.
After the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in southern Israel by the terrorist organization Hamas that left over 1,200 civilians dead, including several dozen American citizens, Democratic leadership made the decision to play both sides. The Biden administration sent money and weapons to Israel to aid in its war effort against both Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon but consistently muddied the waters in an effort to placate Muslim American voters in places such as Dearborn, Michigan. The act fooled no one, enraged Jewish voters, and lost Michigan for Harris anyway. A vast majority of voters support Israel, and even voters with no opinion on the Middle East whatsoever can see the contrast between the actions of an elected democratic government and a U.S. government-designated terrorist organization.
Most of the problems that Democrats are having when attempting to relate to everyday people stem from the fact that the party is so beholden to hard-left special interest groups that it can no longer see how far outside the realm of “normal” it has become to large swaths of the general public. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance illustrated this recently when he responded on X to a New York Times Magazine reader who submitted a question to the magazine’s ethicist columnist. The inquiry said: “My neighbor won’t stop praying for me. What should I do?” The unidentified questioner went on to complain to the ethicist about an elderly neighbor who routinely commits the grave sin of being a good neighbor.
“What should you do?” Vance replied. “Accept it as a sweet gesture and stop being a weirdo. Or: consider that the woman praying for her neighbors has it more figured out than the person whining to the paper.”
Why are we possibly witnessing a political and cultural shift? While many elected Democrats, and the people who staff legacy media institutions, likely relate to the person complaining about his or her neighbor’s prayer habits, a vast majority can relate to the elderly neighbor or can at least admit that Vance makes a good point. It turns out that Americans like normal, and they viewed Republicans, and Trump, as a “return to normalcy.”
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Surveys show that 66% of Americans identify as Christians, and 81% believe in God. In 2022, Gallup found that 37% of Americans identify as moderate, 36% as conservative, and 25% as liberal. Despite the best efforts of the lapdog press to normalize Democratic policy proposals, people correctly decided Trump and Republicans were the more moderate option at the ballot box.
Who knows what the next few years or even months will bring. I have been extremely wrong in the past, and Lord knows I’ll get a few things wrong from here. But if I were a betting man, I’d put money down that, yes, the tide has turned. Democrats are in for a rough ride, and they couldn’t be more deserving of the political and cultural backlash headed their way.
Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.