If you’re like me, you’ve read endless analyses of president Trump’s victory. You have probably formed an opinion of what the Democrats did wrong and how they can fix it. But are you familiar with the strong arguments suggesting that Trump’s victory was based on factors that have relatively little to do with Trump himself and how these factors will be at play long after Trump is gone?
I suspect there’s a good chance you haven’t read the book, written by a Republican pollster and published a year ahead of the election, that spelled out the factors that would lead to Trump’s triumph; and you also may not have read about a religious movement called the New Apostolic Reformation and the role it played.
For anyone with an interest in understanding the voting block that elected Trump and how it might persist beyond his administration, the book and the article discussed below are essential (and, for Democrats, sobering) reading.
A preview of the election. In November of 2023, a year before the presidential election, Simon & Schuster published “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP” by Patrick Ruffini. It’s an excellent book, but what makes it particularly remarkable is the accuracy with which Ruffini identifies the factors that would ultimately lead to Trump’s election.
In retrospect, we know that the Democratic party depended too heavily on its past reputation as champions of the working class, and that it emphasized philosophical viewpoints too much and failed to sufficiently address “kitchen table” issues—jobs, health care, the economy as it affects workers and their families. The party spoke to college-educated voters, but failed to reach those without college—65% of the electorate. Ruffini saw these trends coming, and he took a very careful look at what underpinned them. The trends, he shows, have been building for years.
Some of the best insights in this book (and there are many) are based on data—often census data or polls. For example, Ruffini was able to show that income levels don’t have much effect on voting, but education levels do. The following graphs are an example of the data Ruffini presents.
Democrats, Ruffini thinks, have focused too much on the “cosmopolitan elite”—the 35% of the voters with at least some college–and in doing so, they lost many of the rest. White, college-educated Democrats are much more liberal than other Democrats, and have gone overboard on some of their support for minorities. An example that Ruffini gives is that Hispanics almost never use “Latinx” as a gender-neutral term for Hispanics. Only college-educated Whites do that. Similarly, Blacks are, on average, much more supportive of increased police funding than Whites.
A few years ago, Democrats convinced themselves that, because minorities are an increasing fraction of the American population and minorities have tended to vote Democratic in the past, demographic change would give Democrats a permanent advantage. But demographics didn’t help after all. Hispanics, Asians, and Blacks have been shifting to the right. Immigrants, in particular, have become more conservative in the second and subsequent generations. In fact, past waves of immigrants, going back many decades, have undergone a similar shift.
In 2020, Trump lost but did better with nonwhites (especially first and second generation immigrants) than he did four years earlier.
In the Texas/Mexico border region along the Rio Grande, Republicans found an opportunity among the middle class. They weren’t responding to Trump and his polemics, but to jobs, taxes, and local issues. Democrats had always been “the party of the poor” but poverty is less prevalent now, particularly given the good jobs available in the oil fields. The growing middle class provided support for GOP candidates, including Trump.
To win an election these days, a candidate needs “a convincing ability to channel the experiences of the large majority of Americans who are not high in education or income”, Ruffini says. Winning candidates on both the right and the left have this in common.
Looking ahead, Republicans will need to do even better with Hispanics, Asians, Blacks, because those groups are all growing. The GOP had 61% of white vote in 2016. But the white vote is shrinking, so that 61% won’t be enough, even if they can keep it.
But Democrats face a challenge too. “The road to a majority in 2036 will run straight through the working class, not through the college-educated avante-garde cordoned off in the blue states,” Ruffini writes. “Democrats … have a chance to become a stronger and better party if they dedicate themselves anew to the middle- and working-class voters who were their focus in the 1990s. That will mean casting aside some newer elements empowered by the rise of social media and the internet. [Ruffini’s examples of these elements include an emphasis on “defunding the police” and “defeating systemic racism”.] Easier said than done, though. And Republicans have similar problems with extremist elements that might prevent them from completely winning over the multiracial populist electorate.” Republicans need to be willing to talk about race and welcome diversity.
These are just a few of the insights Ruffini shares in his prophetic book. If you are interested in the future of either political party, this book is worth a careful read.
An unrecognized religious movement. Ruffini’s book provides insights on topics you’ve probably already heard about. But maybe you haven’t heard of a new movement, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). I hadn’t heard of it until I read the article “The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows” in The Atlantic and learned how important this movement was to Trump’s election. Author Stephanie McCrummen, herself raised as a Southern Baptist, was the perfect person to report on the NAR.
In the NAR, she found a powerful, but largely unrecognized, grassroots evangelical movement with churches all over the country. The group is not associated with any mainstream Christian denomination.
The NAR was the outgrowth of the work of a man named C. Peter Wagner in the 1970s. As a missionary in Bolivia, he had seen massive growth of evangelical churches there, and he saw an opportunity for the same sort of growth in the US. He ultimately became a champion of “dominionism”, which holds that Christians need to work to establish God’s kingdom on earth, not simply to win converts one at a time.
As the NAR movement started bringing worshipers into churches in unprecedented numbers, preachers in other independent churches noticed that and joined the bandwagon, adding NAR elements to their churches and sermons.
In recent years, the NAR has coalesced around a goal: to “take dominion over the 7 mountains”—those being the media, the government, education, the economy, family, religion, and arts and entertainment. In its quest for dominion, the NAR has come to see Donald Trump as an instrument of God. And once the group began focusing on Trump, other politicians took notice too.
In 2020, the NAR provided the religious underpinnings for the January 6 attempt to overthrow the government. And the NAR probably was a significant factor in giving Trump his narrow margin of victory in 2024.
The NAR, though still a relatively small factor in electoral politics as a whole, seems to me to present a more difficult challenge for the Democratic party to overcome than the challenges outlined in Ruffini’s book. Finding good candidates and the right policies to win over working-class, non-college voters (as Ruffini suggests) is one thing. Persuading tens of thousands of the NAR faithful that their religious beliefs are misguided is quite another.
On the Kendal Journey 