In the wake of the recent 2024 U.S. election results, many articles — including two published by the Daily — have circulated the internet as a preliminary electoral autopsy, examining the causes of Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss which ushered President-elect Donald Trump back into the White House. I do not intend to write such an article. Instead, I aim to look ahead to the 2028 elections. Those, I posit, will really be the most important elections of our lifetime, despite rhetoric going back years that every preceding election has fulfilled that role.
Why do I believe that 2028 will be more significant for electoral politics than 2024? Obviously, 2024 was a monumental election in American history. In terms of demographics, an ongoing realignment seems to have intensified. In particular, Black and Latino men further decreased their margins of support for Harris relative to Biden by 4 and 35 points respectively. Furthermore, Democrats seem to increasingly represent a party of white, college-educated people, as Harris improved on Biden’s margin here by 4 points. But I believe that 2028 will show exactly how durable this new configuration of American politics will be. Huge electoral realignments take a while to manifest themselves more clearly, as illustrated by the electoral cycles following the election of Reagan in 1980. Reagan made significant gains in his electoral coalition during his 1984 reelection bid, and in 1988, George H.W. Bush held onto many of the demographic gains his predecessor had made among the electorate.
My expectation that 2028 may cement trends illuminated by 2024 seem to make an important presupposition about the new Republican Party as remade in the image of Trump — and let there be no mistake, the party belongs to Trump. Senate leadership is willing to acquiesce to his demands, most evident in the speed by which Republican Senate leadership promised to enable recess appointments. All of this goes to show: Trump is no longer a fluke. A mere contrast of the 2020 or 2024 electoral results with that of the more Democrat-friendly 2022 midterms seem to confirm that Trump has a unique staying power which drives low-propensity voters to the polls, energizing a new Republican base in a way that no other politician can. In fact, I expect that the 2026 midterm elections will largely be positive for Democrats, given that there will be no presidential candidates at the top of the ticket and that some commentators project that the voting constituency is more likely to resemble that of the 2022 midterms.
Nonetheless, I think that there is a politician who is poised to replicate Trump’s effect on politics — J.D. Vance. In spite of Democratic attempts to label the vice president-elect from Ohio as weird, he was the only candidate on the top of the ticket to maintain a positive favorability rating in the exit polls, with a 1% net favorability rate compared to -7% and -5% favorability ratings for Trump and Harris, respectively. Vivek Ramaswamy, who had painted himself as an alternative to Vance’s broadly socially conservative but economically populist political message, has been given a much less glamorous role than Vance, running the Department of Government Efficiency, which is unlikely to be taken seriously by Congress. The future Republican Party probably belongs to Vance, who seems like he could build on the electoral coalition Trump has consolidated.
Meanwhile, Democrats will remain in the wilderness. Elites aligned with the party maintain that the economy was doing well under Biden, effectively alienating or patronizing the 31% of voters who ranked the economy as their top concern motivating their vote. On cultural issues, Democrats seem to have too much baggage from the last several years. A backlash against the invention of the term “Latinx” may not have directly accounted for the shift of Latino voters to the right in 2024, but a similar line of frustration with college-educated liberals across other matters probably played a big part in the realignments we have witnessed. A Democratic Party that avoids tough discussions about meeting the public where it actually stands — even if Democrats think the public may be wrong on those issues — will not remain a functional party for much longer.
Ironically, what I’ve just said seems to defeat the thesis of my article, that the 2028 election will be important. The picture I paint would leave Democrats with likely only a Bill Clinton-esque path to victory — adopting many Republican-adjacent positions on the issues in an attempt to claw back voters before they are lost for good. Indeed, I admit that is, to an extent, my point. But I would also say that 2028 will be important in a different sense — remaking a new era of American politics. In that way, 2028, which I suspect will confirm that we are under a new American political order, will indeed be the most important election of our lifetimes.
