It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Pollsters and pundits promised that the 2024 presidential election between Vice President Kamala Harris and, now, President-elect Donald Trump would be a nail-biter. But in the end, it was a blowout, and it opens the door for Republicans to grasp generational power.
Since 1994, when Americans signed up for the GOP’s Contract with America and ended four decades of Democratic control of the House of Representatives, our country has not had a truly dominant political party.
It has been a 50/50 society since then politically, with neither side able to maintain long enough simultaneous control of Congress, the presidency and the courts to enact the kind of sweeping change that Franklin D. Roosevelt achieved in the 1930s and which Lyndon B. Johnson did in the 1960s.
FDR’s alphabet soup of federal agencies and LBJ’s welfare state are still with us; they have this permanence precisely because they were enshrined during prolonged periods of Democratic Party power. Today, it could finally be time for Republicans to return the favor.
The biggest takeaway from Trump’s – pollster humiliating – win is not how much he won by, but who he won with.
Exit polls tell us that Trump won an astounding 46% of the Hispanic vote, an eye-popping 35% of Black men in Texas, and won first-time voters, who he lost badly to President Joe Biden in 2020, owing to growing support among Gen Z men in their 20s.
As Biden is so fond of saying, ‘this is not your grandfather’s Republican Party.’
