2025-11-07 02:35:00
When President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, many American voters wanted immigration reduced, and Trump quickly complied. He boosted funding for immigration enforcement, opened new detention centers, and pushed more Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as Customs and Border Patrol troops, into US cities.
While American disapproval of immigration was key to Trump winning two presidential elections, polls today show a growing divide.
Gallup found 30 percent of Americans want immigration decreased, which is down from 55 percent a year ago. In a New York Times/Siena national poll, a majority of voters still disapproved of immigration but also said Trump’s actions on enforcement have gone too far.
According to immigration reporter Molly O’Toole, the shift is a response to Trump’s oversimplified message that “all immigration is bad.” She said it was a successful message with no effective counterbalancing force until people saw firsthand Trump’s deportation tactics.
Speaking with Today, Explained fill-in host Astead Herndon, O’Toole explained why capturing voter sentiment on immigration often misses nuance, and why it may not deter the president’s push for faster and more extreme methods of arrests.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Recently, I’ve been curious about how the public is reacting to Trump’s immigration raids. Because, on the one hand, he promised all this, and you could argue voters knew what they were signing up for. But now that they’re seeing it in real life, are they having buyer’s remorse?
What Trump has done very effectively is shift the American public’s perception on immigration to the right. If you look at the polling, there actually is much more bipartisan support for immigration and broadly positive views on immigration writ large than you would think based on the rhetoric that we’ve heard and the electoral successes.
Instead of a conversation where illegal immigration is “bad” but refugees, asylum seekers, and other forms of legal immigration are “good” — which is how the debate broke down in the pre-Trump era — now, you just have “all immigration is bad.” And, in that way, I think the Trump administration has been remarkably effective at shifting the nature of the conversation.
That speaks to something that Democrats have done over the last several years, which is to kind of agree with Trump’s premise rather than offering their own affirmative vision. Is that how you have seen it?
Exactly. Trump has a strategy here, and it has been effective. But it’s easier to shift the whole conversation to one side of the spectrum if there is no counterbalance from the other side.
Some recent polls have found that, while voters want mostly immigrants who come to this country illegally to be deported, they don’t necessarily like the way the administration is doing it. It’s kind of weird, right? Voters want deportations, but not like this.
This gets into the complexity of the issue and the fact that political messaging is not a useful tool for communicating something this complicated. Because Trump shifted this conversation to “all immigration bad,” the American voter was not thinking, “Well, wait. Actually, a lot of these actions are targeting people who have permission to be here. They’re asylum seekers. They’re not these scary sort of criminals that the Trump campaign was talking about.”
There was a Gallup poll this summer that really drove this home for me. In 2024, 55 percent of people wanted to reduce all immigration, which I think is helpful to understand what was fueling Donald Trump’s comeback. But this year, the same poll found that number had dropped by almost half; just 30 percent of people wanted to reduce all immigration. It seems as if now that Donald Trump is there, maybe the sentiment or the public effort has at least swung back to the other side.
I think that poll is absolutely fascinating, but it’s really hard to know what to attribute it to. It’s hard to know to what extent that shift — which is a really quite dramatic shift sort of back towards a pre-2021 feeling on immigration — is because people feel like, “Okay, Trump ‘fixed’ the border.” Or does it have to do with people seeing what those promises look like in practice and being like, “Wait a second, I didn’t vote for that”?
It seems the White House is still pushing forward with deportations, even though there seems to be growing evidence that the public is liking what it’s seeing less and less. Under the normal rules of politics, isn’t that a bad thing to do? Why do we think the Trump administration seems completely removed from that more traditional form of political calculus?
I do think that the Trump administration has very effectively used the media to suck up all the oxygen in the room as a way to really magnify their sort of messaging. The Trump administration doesn’t really care what the media says about their message; they just want that message to get out. I think that what we saw in 2016 — and I think what we saw in 2024 — is you can have a very impassioned vocal minority that can win an election, even if what they support is not necessarily what a majority of the American public supports.
And so, I think the messaging, even though it seems counterintuitive, that’s who it’s for. It’s for their diehard supporters. Then, I think there’s another level, which is: They want people to be afraid, to “self-deport.”
The point is the intimidation.
Not just of immigrant communities; they want people to be afraid to protest. They want people to be afraid to come out. But I think time will tell also whether it turns enough people off that it becomes a less effective political strategy.
2025-11-07 00:00:00
So far, the biggest successes against President Donald Trump’s second-term assault on democracy have come not from Congress and the Supreme Court, but more unusual sources: lower-court judges, “No Kings” protests, a Disney+ subscriber boycott, and Trump’s own indiscipline and incompetence.
After the 2025 elections, we can add the states to the list. And in some ways, this avenue of resistance may prove to be the most consequential one (at least until the 2026 midterms).
Tuesday’s election results have, specifically, created a major barrier to one of Trump’s most dangerous authoritarian ambitions — an attempted one-sided national gerrymander. But this major development should also be an opportunity for most people, who focus on national politics, to evaluate the power of state governments. The United States is unusual among backsliding democracies in the strength of its federal system, and that creates some major opportunities for institutional pushback that may not have been possible elsewhere.
This is somewhat ironic: For most of American history, states (most notably in the South) have been places where pockets of authoritarianism could exist in a nationally democratic society.
Yet today, as the national government moves in an authoritarian direction, the comparatively major powers invested in states — like control over election administration — are now creating opportunities for small-d democratic to resist a national authoritarian power grab.
For much of his second term, Trump has been preoccupied with the threat of losing the midterm elections. Convinced that such a defeat would spell disaster for his presidency, he has pushed state-level Republicans to engage in a highly unusual round of mid-cycle redistricting: basically, a nationwide attempt to rig the maps in the GOP’s favor.
Of all the many anti-democratic things Trump has been doing, from illegally taking Congress’s power of the purse to abusing regulatory powers to try to silence late-night comedy hosts, this was probably the greatest immediate-term threat to the integrity of the electoral system itself.
Because election administration is almost entirely devolved to the states in the American system, Trump has very limited powers to actually try and rig elections from DC. Instead, gerrymandering at the state level — threatening and cajoling governors and state legislatures into drawing as many safe seats for Republicans as possible — is his best shot at actually stacking the deck in the GOP’s favor in 2026.
There is precedent for this abroad. After coming to power in 2010, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán created a series of single-member districts that were drawn specifically to give disproportionate power to his Fidesz party’s voters. This was a key reason he could maintain power despite rising unpopularity: In the 2014 election, Fidesz maintained over two-thirds of seats in parliament, a majority large enough to amend the constitution at will, despite winning only 44 percent of the national vote.
After the elections, Trump’s pathway to a similarly unfair victory in 2026 got a lot dicier.
The most obvious reason is that Democrats gained new powers to counter-gerrymander. California voters endorsed a ballot referendum in support of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mid-cycle redistricting plan. And Virginia voters handed Democrats a super-majority in the statehouse, giving them the numbers they needed to pass their own new map. The Democratic gains in the two states put together could, per one calculation, cancel out or even exceed GOP gains from currently proposed gerrymanders in states like Texas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri.
This is hardly an ideal solution to the problem of gerrymandering. As my friend Kelsey Piper writes in The Argument, gerrymandering in any sense is bad for democracy: It decreases voters’ ability to make meaningful political choices. The best-case scenario would be a national ban on partisan map-drawing, one that would allow Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red ones equally fair levels of representation in the House.
But in criticizing counter-gerrymandering, Piper misses two other important factors: national representativeness and power.
If only one party gerrymanders, then the effect is to give that party an unfair advantage relative to their true level of national support. If both parties gerrymander in ways that cancel each other out, then the results of the national House election look a lot more like the will of the national electorate as a whole. That makes the outcome meaningfully more democratic than a one-sided gerrymander, even if on a district-by-district level it is far less fair and representative than it should be.
More fundamentally, though, counter-gerrymandering is necessary to put a break on Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.
In competitive authoritarian systems like Hungary’s, no individual move is decisive in ending democracy. Democracy instead dies from an accumulation of incremental advantages, each working in tandem to make it nearly impossible for the opposition to win fairly. Of those, gerrymandering is among the most singularly important weapons. It directly raises the threshold of national unpopularity that the incumbent party needs to reach to lose the legislature, and thus lose its power to pass legislation empowering an authoritarian executive.
Preventing the party from attaining that advantage, then, is a direct blow to their attempt to stay in power indefinitely and undemocratically. If Democrats had not won approval for counter-gerrymandering in California and Virginia, Trump would be meaningfully closer to creating a system like Hungary’s.
There is, internationally, a fairly well-worn playbook for an elected leader who wishes to seize autocratic control. They consolidate formal power in their own hands, neuter independent checks on their authority, undermine the fairness of election administration, and impose political constraints on civil society and big business.
In Trump’s second term, he has attempted to check every box — helped along by a completely pliant GOP majority in Congress and a Supreme Court that has only rarely ruled against him on executive power. On paper, this seems like a recipe for democratic failure. In recent cases of resistance, such as Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro failed to consolidate power and lost his 2022 reelection bid, and South Korea, where activists and legislators stopped President Yoon Suk Yeol’s overnight coup attempt in 2024, presidents lacked meaningful control over the other two branches of government.
But in the American system, control over the federal government isn’t the entire ball game. Many of the key functions of state, like election administration and policing, are handled at the local level. That has, as my colleague Ian Millhiser points out, presented significant legal barriers to Trump’s authoritarian consolidation. It is much harder to rig elections or successfully prosecute your political opponents when a real measure of power in those areas is delegated to localities that you do not control.
That being said, federalism is not a panacea against authoritarian takeovers. A recent study by three political scientists found four cases of countries with federal systems where the national leadership attempted an authoritarian power seizure: the US during Trump’s first term, Brazil, India, and Venezuela. In Brazil and the United States, they found that states posed a major barrier to said takeovers. By contrast, states in India and Venezuela were less effective in stymying national backsliding.
In their view, the key differences were the balances of formal and partisan power. In the US and Brazil, states have greater control over core government functions than they did in India and Venezuela. Moreover, the opposition had control over greater numbers of states in the first pair of countries than in the second.
It’s not that strong federalism guarantees democracy: Any look at American history shows that, in fact, federalism can allow authoritarianism to rise and thrive at the local level. Rather, it’s that the US federal system creates opportunities for contestation when the national government is moving in an authoritarian direction — one that people in non-federal collapsed democracies, like Hungary and Turkey, simply didn’t have.
These fights do not just matter for the state in question, but rather directly implicate the powers available to the executive branch. It’s possible to think of states as a kind of “fourth branch” of the federal government, one imposing constraints on the executive’s efforts at power consolidation even when the federal firewalls are failing.
We can see this at work, very obviously, in the 2025 Virginia election results. But there will be many fights to come in statehouses and governors’ mansions, ranging from red-state decisions on complying with Trump’s demands to gerrymander to blue-state decisions over checking abusive federal law enforcement, that can serve as a crucial backstop in the year-plus before the midterm elections provide an opportunity to stiffen federal resistance.
2025-11-06 22:25:00
For the past few months, a shadowy company called Dumb and Co. has been convincing people in Washington, DC, to ditch their smartphones for a month. It’s part of a project called Month Offline, where participants get a flip phone and access to a support group to talk about algorithms, doomscrolling, and why smartphones make us feel so lonely.
This isn’t just another digital detox retreat. To me, it sounds more like a hip social club. The home base is a bar called Hush Harbor, the first phone-free bar in DC, and early on, the experience of joining involved calling a 1-800 number and leaving a voicemail application.
The local movement is going national. There’s now a website and an option to join a cohort from anywhere in the United States. For $100, you get the Dumb Phone 1, which is really just a TCL flip phone; a new phone number with a 404 area code; and a curriculum of sorts to guide you through the month. There are also weekly dial-in radio programs that take the place of the in-person meetings. The first in-person cohort outside of DC is also accepting applications: Month Offline Brooklyn starts in January 2026.
It all smacks of the same nostalgia that led to the resurgence of CDs and the return of compact digital cameras. The idea of a piece of technology that does one thing and does not take over our entire attention span is appealing.
“The phone certainly amplifies some of our avoidant tendencies,” said Grant Besner, one of the co-founders of Month Offline. “Just replacing it even for a little bit and needing to sit with your own thoughts to be bored can be a transformative and really positive experience in someone’s life.”
Month Offline is part of a new generation of solutions to your smartphone-addled existence. These include carefully designed smartphone alternatives, like the Light Phone 3. There’s also the Brick, an NFC-enabled magnet that blocks access to certain apps when you tap your phone against it. You can also find plenty of apps, like Freedom, One Sec, or Forest, that will accomplish similar ends. The overarching concept is that hiding from your phone for a weekend won’t do much to change your habits long-term. You need to learn how to be more intentional about your phone use.
I first learned about Month Offline from Brittany Shammas, a Washington Post reporter who participated in one of the DC-based cohorts and wrote a feature about the experience. Something that stood out in her coverage was the extent to which people weren’t just looking for a phone fast. They wanted community and connection.
“It definitely had elements that made it feel like a support group,” Shammas told me. “People in the group sometimes would say, ‘This is AA for smartphones.’”
After talking to several other people who did the Month Offline program, it was clear that some did want to go full flip phone, while others just needed a break from their iPhone. One of them, Lydia Peabody, said she quit her smartphone for a month because she was struggling with her mental health and “scrolling [her] life away.” Then she switched to a flip phone, and everything changed.
“I didn’t know life could feel this way,” said Peabody, who now works for Month Offline. “I didn’t even know I could exist in this type of way.”
For those who don’t want to do the whole month-long challenge, the organizers of Month Offline will sell you a Dumb Phone 1, with the new phone number and cell service, for $25 a month. They also make an app, Dumb Down, that makes it easier to sync calls and texts between an iPhone and a flip phone. Even without the support group component, switching to a flip phone can deepen your existing friendships and improve your attention span.
For about as long as smartphones have existed, there have been programs designed to help us stop using them. More than a decade ago, you could spend hundreds to go to Camp Grounded, an adult summer camp in California where all digital devices were banned. The organization that sponsored it, Digital Detox, inspired groups worldwide to help people disconnect. The Offline Club, for example, hosts phone-free events and retreats all over Europe. There’s even a special festival that happens annually on the first weekend of March called the Global Day of Unplugging. Verizon is a corporate sponsor.
But what was once a wellness trend is quickly turning into a full-blown social movement. After Jean Twenge asked “Have smartphones destroyed a generation?” in The Atlantic in 2017, the idea that tech use had created a youth mental health crisis went mainstream. It didn’t help, when, a few years later, the Wall Street Journal reported that Instagram knew its product was harmful to teens, citing internal documents. That was around the same time that the Wait Until 8th pledge to keep smartphones out of kids’ hands until they’re 13 or so popped up, and some families even hired consultants to help them ditch their smartphone habits. Then came the pandemic, when everyone’s lives became even more mediated by screens.
Now, school phone bans are a major legislative priority. Florida became the first to push phones out of classrooms in 2024, and there are now 35 states with laws or rules restricting or outright banning phones in schools. We don’t know all the ways this will transform education, but at least in one Kentucky school district, the statewide phone ban correlated with a spike in the number of books checked out of the library.
You have to wonder what a school phone ban for adults would look like. Over half of US adults are worried about being addicted to their smartphones, according to a 2024 Harris Poll, but it seems unlikely they all want to throw them into the sea. Spending a weekend on a digital detox retreat can be relaxing, and research even suggests that these kinds of interventions can help reduce the time people spend on their phones when the program is over. Staying off social media definitely seems to be good for your mental health.
“Overall, there is now emerging evidence that digital detox can and does work,” said Kostadin Kushlev, a Georgetown psychology professor who leads the Digital Health and Happiness Lab. But much of the research focuses on quitting a single feature, like social media, Kushlev added.
Let me confess: I haven’t done the Month Offline. I didn’t last a week using just a Light Phone 3. A big reason why is just that it’s not a good time for me to reorganize my digital life. Even though the Month Offline organizers have made it easier, switching to a flip phone is hard.
But I did get a Brick. Anytime I want to prevent myself from reflexively scrolling through Reddit at night, I just tap my phone on a little grey square and the app stops working. To get it working again, I have to get up, walk across my apartment, and tap it again. It sounds simple, just a little bit of friction to snap me out of stupor. And that’s all I need right now to feel more present.
Update, November 6, 9:25 am ET: This story was originally published earlier on November 6 and has been updated with news of Month Offline Brooklyn’s launch.
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2025-11-06 07:35:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration has killed a short-lived IRS program designed to make filing tax returns fast and free.
What happened? The fate of IRS Direct File, which was introduced as a pilot program in 2024, has been in question since earlier this year, when it became a target of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Now, we have confirmation that it’s no more, after the IRS notified multiple states this week that the program would be unavailable in 2026.
What did Direct File do? Exactly what it says on the label: It allowed taxpayers to file their annual tax returns directly with the agency, cutting out third-party tax prep companies with a profit motive. In the two tax seasons it was available, the program grew in users and functionality, and it had been poised to expand even further.
What’s the context? Tax prep is usually not free or fast; on average, according to the IRS, it costs taxpayers about $160 and eight hours of their time per year. And private tax prep is big business, making companies like Intuit TurboTax and H&R Block billions of dollars. Direct File, if it had lived, could have reduced both of those burdens.
Why does this matter? In a vacuum, Direct File’s loss may not seem catastrophic. It was a small, new program, used by just shy of 300,000 Americans last tax season.
Symbolically, though, it matters: The program was, by all reports, intuitive, popular, and easy to use. Most importantly, it was free. The administration’s decision to axe it removes the possibility that government could make a near-universally dreaded annual chore just a little bit easier and more elegant.
I thought that this New York Times story, about how Zohran Mamdani’s winning mayoral campaign doubled as a pro-social engine for young New Yorkers, getting them out of the house and involved in their communities, was pretty uplifting (as always, here’s a gift link).
Sticking with the NYC theme, I also recommend this video of a very cute dog in a sweater. (Its subject, Simon, happens to be the “dog mayor” of New York City — a real, if honorary, title!) Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
2025-11-06 06:30:00
Less than one year into President Donald Trump’s second term, we finally have solid evidence that the coalition that carried him to victory one year ago today is unraveling. The slate of Republican losses — and the magnitude of Democratic wins in New Jersey and Virginia, especially — suggest not just that the Democratic backlash to Trump has finally arrived, but that a key part of Trump’s majority — Latino voters —might not actually be loyal Republican voters after all.
In no place was that more clear last night than in New Jersey, where exit polls suggest that Democratic Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill won nearly 70 percent of Latino voters, compared to the 31 percent who sided with Republican Jack Ciattarelli. That’s a huge reversal: Trump got within 6 points of winning the state in 2024, largely with the help of Black and Latino voters who swung for him across the state. Now, in the precincts, municipalities, and counties with large Latino populations that swung toward Trump last year, particularly in North Jersey, Latino voters seemed to have turned out at higher-than-expected rates, and mostly returned to the Democratic side.
But that still leaves many more questions: Are these disillusioned Trumpers turning back to the Democrats? Or are they just going to sit out more elections? To get a better sense of what we can — and can’t — discern from Tuesday’s results, I turned to one of the leading pollsters and experts on Latino politics in the US: Carlos Odio, the co-founder of the Democratic-leaning research firm Equis, for some answers. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Heading into the election, what was your main question concerning Latino voters?
My question going in was whether this race was going to look more like 2021, the last governor’s race, [with lower but steady Latino support for Democrats] or 2024, when Trump made these huge gains. Ultimately it does look like 2021. And I think what that suggests is, going into 2026, Latino support for Democrats is more likely to be equivalent to what it was in 2021 than what it was in 2024.
Can you unpack that for me? What is the deeper significance of Latino voting patterns looking more like 2021 than 2024?
So if [Tuesday’s results] looked more like 2024, then what you would say is, Well, these Trump gains weren’t a one-off. There is a durable shift that Republicans are holding onto and might even build on. Had that happened, it would’ve suggested that Latinos were not going to be part of any “blue wave,” if such a thing were to even happen.
If the results were more like 2021, however, then the takeaway would’ve been more like, Well, we’re back to a more normal off-year election, something like that middle [level of Latino support for Democrats] that we saw coming out of 2020.
So, from our vantage today, It’s almost like you’re turning back the clock to how the Latino vote looked like before the Biden presidency happened.
Which, it should be noted, most Democrats would still consider not great. Not devastating, like in 2024, but still not great.
That’s exactly right. We are still in the Trump era.
I remember I was working in Florida in the 2018 cycle when Florida Hispanics obviously sat out the national “blue wave.” I saw how Latinos in Florida behaved differently, shall we say. The resistance was mobilizing people, but Latino voters didn’t feel caught up in that wave or in that moment.
So that was a question for me going into this election: How many Latinos were basically going to be like, I just don’t feel mobilized against Donald Trump. I am so frustrated with both parties that I’m either going to sit this out or I’m going to vote on other considerations; but I’m not catching the anti-Trump fever.
How much can we reasonably extrapolate from this election and apply to our expectations for the midterm elections or even the next presidential election?
Can you draw conclusions from last night in New Jersey to what will happen in Texas? I don’t think that’s quite right, but these results are certainly a stronger data point than anything else we’ve had so far this year. When you look at the trend lines back to 2016, it’s true off-years and presidential years tell a different story, so what happened in 2025 isn’t necessarily going to tell you very much about what’s going to happen in 2028. But I think it is a pretty good indicator of what to expect for 2026, or at least it sets a better benchmark than 2024 for what to expect in 2026.
How much of the results were persuasion — Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 voting for Democrats in 2025 — versus pro-Trump Latinos simply sitting this off-year election out?
We’ve got to tear down the wall implicit in your question that separates these two categories of voters. The truth is, support and turnout point in a similar direction. When people have somebody to support, they’re more likely to vote. When people don’t like their choices, they’re less likely to vote. And so what we’ve been seeing in our polling is 11 percent of Latino Trump voters saying they’d vote for a Democrat in 2026.
That actually ends up being a lot. That’s a meaningful chunk. And at the same time, you can look at Trump’s strengths being among more of an irregular-voting Latino — the kinds of people who didn’t vote in 2022, who didn’t turn out — who might not vote in 2026. But also I’d say that, even among these voters, it’s not so simple. I think there’s another aspect there, which is that low-propensity voters are the swingiest, the most sensitive to the environment. And what we’re seeing right now is that the Latinos who vote irregularly are the most disappointed in Trump.
2025-11-06 05:45:00
The Republican Party has had better days.
In Tuesday’s off-year elections, the GOP lost every major race by a mile. Democratic candidates won the Virginia governor’s race by around 15 points, the New Jersey gubernatorial election by 13, and Georgia’s statewide public commissioner elections by more than 25 points. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Supreme Court justices retained their seats in a landslide.
All these results represent huge improvements on the Democratic Party’s showing just one year ago. Kamala Harris won Virginia and New Jersey by just 6 points, while losing Pennsylvania and Georgia by about 2.
Polls had anticipated Democratic victories in Tuesday’s major gubernatorial races. But they drastically underestimated the scale of the Democrats’ success. The party appears to have both engineered exceptionally high turnout among its base for off-year elections — and won a significant number of swing voters. Indeed, Tuesday’s blue tide rose high enough to lift even the Democrats’ leakiest boats: In Virginia, Democratic attorney general candidate Jay Jones managed to secure a comfortable victory, despite having wished for the death of Republican children in leaked text messages.
Tuesday’s results will directly undermine the Republican Party’s broader political project in various ways. For example, Virginia Democrats are now likely to draw a new congressional map that’s less favorable to GOP candidates.
But to many Republicans, this year’s elections are most alarming for what they may tell us about their party’s future. Put simply, the results suggest that the GOP has become perilously reliant on voters who will only turn out for President Donald Trump — a man who will (almost certainly) never be on the ballot again.
Over the past 10 years, Trump has reshaped the Republican coalition. Between 2012 and 2024, the GOP gained 6 points of vote share with non-college-educated voters while losing 2 points with college grads.
But Trump did not merely build a less educated Republican coalition — he also crafted a less politically engaged one. During his time at the helm of the GOP, Americans began polarizing on the basis of their political engagement — by how often they tended to vote and how important politics is to their identity. Highly politically engaged Americans moved left, while the disengaged moved right.
At first glance, this might look like a bad trade for Republicans. All else equal, you’d rather have the voters who reliably show up at the polls (hence why politicians have historically catered to retirees with lots of free time on election days). But Trump’s realignment worked out well enough for his party — because there are a lot of politically disengaged, working-class people in swing states. And in presidential years, Trump’s personal appeal was sufficient to mobilize them in great numbers.
Perhaps the biggest question in American politics is: What happens to the Trump-era realignment, once Republicans nominate someone else?
Yet there had been a catch. Although Trump’s GOP has held its own in presidential races, they’ve tended to disappoint in less high-profile election years. Democrats dominated the 2018 midterms and did unusually well for an in-power party in the 2022 elections. In general, it appears that Democrats now have an advantage in low-turnout elections, a reversal of the long-term historical norm.
Taken together, winning two out of three presidential races — at the cost of doing poorly in off-year special elections and some midterms — isn’t a bad deal. The worry for Republicans, however, is about whether the upside of this bargain will end with Trump’s political career.
Barring a constitutional change (or crisis), Trump will never be the GOP’s presidential nominee again. Perhaps the biggest question in American politics is: What happens to the Trump-era realignment, once Republicans nominate someone else?
The nightmare scenario for the GOP is that college-educated Never Trumpers will remain solid Democrats — while less engaged, working-class Trump voters will slink back into political apathy.
Tuesday’s results make that future look a bit more plausible. In Virginia and New Jersey, Democrats dominated in highly educated suburbs that were once highly competitive. Meanwhile, Republican turnout in those states was dismal, at least relative to Democrats’ showing. After examining Tuesday night’s returns, the conservative commentator Erick Erickson dejectedly declared, “Trump cannot turn out the vote unless he is on the ballot, and that is never happening again.”
In many respects, the GOP has been going out of its way to reinforce the leftward shift of highly educated, politically engaged voters. Vice President JD Vance, Trump’s heir apparent, has prioritized defending his party’s young neo-Nazis over making Trumpism more palatable to cosmopolitan college grads. Meanwhile, the president himself has been deliberately increasing consumer prices, prosecuting his enemies, trying to deplatform his critics, desecrating his office, and engaging in blatant corruption.
All this said, the outcomes of off-year gubernatorial elections are not a reliable guide to future political developments. A lot can happen between now and the midterms (let alone, between now and 2028).
Further — precisely because Democrats now have an advantage in lower turnout elections — Tuesday’s events might paint a misleadingly favorable picture of the party’s long-term prospects. When Democrats dominated 2023’s special elections, many in the party concluded that it was on track to beat Trump the following year. But this proved to be a mistake. The subset of voters who bothered showing up for off-year elections were simply much more Democratic than the electorate as a whole.
This same pattern could play out again. It’s possible that the GOP’s most disengaged supporters will only turn out for Trump. But an equally valid hypothesis is that they will only turn out for presidential elections — in which they will vote for any MAGA nominee on the ballot. Until Republicans nominate someone not named Donald Trump, we simply cannot know.
What’s more, the Republican coalition remains better matched to America’s electoral geography. The median US state is more conservative and working-class than the US as a whole. For this reason, Trump’s GOP has a structural advantage in the fight for Senate control, one that Democrats still don’t have good odds of overcoming in 2026 or 2028.
Regardless, the Trump GOP’s reliance on low-propensity voters is a clear vulnerability. And the 2025 elections showed us why: If you want a picture of a Democratic future, imagine hyper-engaged, suburban wine-moms stomping on Vance’s face — forever (or, you know, in the 2028 election).