Ronald Brownstein: Trump's MAGA coalition just got vaporized

In Tuesday’s emphatic Democratic sweep, voters repudiated President Donald Trump as resoundingly as any president in decades.

The results reduced to rubble Republican hopes that Trump had engineered a political realignment grounded in expanded support from working-class minority voters. The drubbing also exposed some cracks in the core MAGA coalition of non-college White and rural voters that has sustained Trump since 2016. How Trump responds could shape the GOP’s fate not only over the next two years, but the 2028 election to succeed him.

Trump begged voters to pretend he was on the ballot, and exit polls suggest they did. In the national Voter Poll conducted for a consortium of news organizations, just 38% of voters approved of Trump’s job performance while 62% disapproved, much weaker than his standing in 2018. Nearly two-thirds of voters in the survey said tariffs, and Trump’s overall agenda, had hurt the economy. Roughly three-fifths said Trump prioritized his own financial interests over the country’s, and that high prices were a direct result of his policies, rather than factors outside of his control. In Trump’s first term, opposition to him centered more on who he was than what he did; now, far more of his specific policy choices face broad opposition.

As important as the depth of Trump’s decline was its breadth. In 2018, Trump’s approval remained above 50% in most red-leaning states, which allowed Republicans to oust Democratic senators in North Dakota, Missouri, Indiana and Florida. This time, however, Trump faced majority disapproval even in states where he had won 55% of the vote or more two years ago, including Ohio, Texas, South Carolina, Iowa and Kansas. Even about half of White voters without a college degree — Trump’s core group — disapproved of his performance in crucial states.

Key swing groups in the electorate, including independents and college-educated White men, tilted back toward Democrats on Tuesday. Especially in heartland and Rust Belt states, Democrats also clawed back some ground with working-class White voters. But the shift with the greatest long-term implications for the balance of power between the parties was the GOP’s retreat among the groups where Trump made his greatest gains in 2024.

In the 2024 election, Trump expanded the GOP’s reach among non-White voters without a college education, nearly doubling his 2016 share with this group to two-fifths, according to the Validated Voters studies by the non-partisan Pew Research Center. The increase was particularly pronounced among Latinos and Asian Americans of both genders, as well as Black men. Those gains were vital because they mapped a way out for Republicans from the demographic squeeze created by the decline in the population of their most loyal groups — evangelical White Christians and White voters without a college degree. Republican strategists exuberantly predicted that Trump had built a durable Republican advantage by forging what they called a “multiracial working-class coalition.”

But Tuesday’s results showed that those predictions were wildly premature. In the national exit polls measuring how people voted for the House of Representatives, Democrats on Tuesday carried 61% of Latinos, 69% of Asian Americans, 88% of Black voters (including 83% of Black men) and 71% of adults aged 18–29. The broader group of all non-White voters without a college degree preferred Democrats by a 67-29 margin, much better than in 2024, the exit poll found. Those showings brought Democrats back within range of their lead with those groups in 2020, in effect erasing almost all the gains Trump recorded in 2024.

Results on the ground confirmed these trends. The epicenter of Trump’s 2024 Latino gains were the Rio Grande Valley counties along the Texas- Mexico border. But Democrats defended two incumbents there that Republicans tried to oust through their gerrymander and flipped a GOP-held South Texas seat behind Tejano singer Bobby Pulido. In 2024, Trump made massive gains in Hidalgo and Cameron counties, carrying each of them (after losing both by at least 30 points in 2016); on Tuesday, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico won each decisively en route to his victory over Ken Paxton.

Nevertheless, there was little evidence minority voters have returned as reliably to the Democratic camp as during the Barack Obama years. Although Democrats restored their support among them to 2020 levels, the Voter poll still found the party attracting less support than in 2018 and earlier. Instead, the GOP losses point toward non-White voters — especially Latinos — as the nation’s largest bloc of swing voters that either side can attract.

Even sweeping midterm gains of the sort Democrats notched Tuesday don’t guarantee a party victory in the next presidential race. But it’s also true that since 1900 every time a president has left office as unpopular as Trump is now, control of the White House has flipped to the other party in the election to succeed him. (Think: Woodrow Wilson in 1920, Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, George W. Bush in 2008 and Joe Biden in 2024.)

Celinda Lake, a longtime Democratic pollster, told me earlier this fall that Trump is facing “the broadest sense we’ve had that a president has failed” that she has seen in her career. “It is broader than it was in 2018 for him, or even for George W. Bush in 2006.” Tuesday’s results mostly validated her assessment.

If Trump doesn’t recover at least some of the support he’s squandered, that history suggests Democrats will be favored in the 2028 presidential race. For dazed Republicans picking through the rubble, that may be the most discouraging part: recognizing that their fate in the next election, too, could hinge on whether Donald Trump responds to this roar of rejection.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is a CNN analyst and the author or editor of seven books.