Guest Column: The 2020 Election Was An Outlier In America’s Political Trajectory

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by BILL WILSON

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A decade ago, I theorized that overlooked voters who had become politically disengaged after the modern Democratic Party abandoned them would be the key to conservatives creating a realigned political majority.      

In the last three presidential election cycles, we’ve seen non-college whites, rural voters, young people – particularly men – and minority voters shift substantially toward the right, forming the robust working-class coalition that got President Donald Trump elected twice. 

New evidence continues to show that 2024 was not a blip on the political radar, but a manifestation of long-brewing political divisions that are causing the modern Democratic Party to internally combust. In his article in Compact Mag entitled “The Emerging Democratic Minority,” John B. Judis makes a strong historic case that Democrats have been losing key demographics – namely the white working class, young men, and minorities – for decades, and that trend reached an inevitable crescendo in 2024. 

The re-election of President Trump in a landslide victory was not the exception in the political trajectory of the United States – but Joe Biden’s narrow win in 2020 was.  

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Dissatisfaction with out-of-touch elites has been brewing for decades, and President Trump’s first victory in 2016 was a warning shot that the globalists running the Democratic Party were losing control of the working-class coalition they had built.    

Then in 2020, the pendulum appeared to swing back – with Biden eking out a narrow victory due largely to the Black Swan event of the coronavirus pandemic. Covid-19 created a whole host of externalities, not the least of which was the vast and questionable implementation of absentee voting, a system that placed Republicans at a measurable disadvantage. The results of the 2020 election can be seen not as a rejection of the populist movement Trump both recognized and inspired – but as a political blip that was quickly and vehemently corrected, as long-brewing political clashes came to a head.   

Trump won in 2024 not because of a political fluke, but because Democrats had been self-sabotaging with the working-class, men, minorities and young people for several decades. As Judis points out, Hillary Clinton lost the working-class vote by three points to Trump in 2016 – and she lost the white working class vote by 27 points, an early warning signal that Democrats were losing control of a coalition they needed to survive.   

While Biden made meager efforts to recover a portion of the working-class in 2020, his Vice President Kamala Harris floundered miserably with working-class voters in 2024, losing the working-class vote by 13 points and the white working class vote by a striking 31 points.  

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Judis also points out that Harris suffered losses among minority working-class voters as well, once a cornerstone of the Democratic Party. She lost 16 points with non-college Hispanics and three points with non-college Blacks.   

Judis also traces the Democratic Party’s losses with rural and small-town voters over time, demonstrating this is a facture that has been deepening for years. 

Rural voters began splitting from Democrats in the 2010 midterms under Barack Obama. They showed lukewarm support for Clinton in 2016, with just over a third of rural voters (34%) supporting her against Trump in 2016. While Biden managed to slightly improve on the rural vote compared to Clinton, Harris received only 34% or 35% of the rural vote in 2024, as Judis points out.  

Democrats have also been turning off men for decades, with an increasing gender gap prevailing since the 1980’s. Through the 2000’s Democrats banked on politically active female voters to win. Judis points out that while Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 in large part due to active female voters, she performed worse among men than Obama did. In 2024, Trump won men by 13 points, gaining significantly with Hispanic, Black, and young men in particular. 

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Then there are the catastrophic losses Democrats experienced among young voters, a reliable Democratic voting block that played a crucial role in Democratic losses last year. 

After losing 18–24-year-olds by a resounding 34 points in 2020, Trump lost them to Harris by a mere eleven points in 2024. Among voters 25-29, Trump went from losing them by eleven points, 54 percent to 43 percent, to losing them by eight points.   

Trump also gained fourteen points nationwide among Latinos between 2020 and 2024, and he outright won Latino men by ten points, 54 percent to 44 percent. One-fifth of Black men also supported Trump in 2024.  

And so while Democrats viewed the election of Joe Biden as a victorious rejection of Trumpism and populism – and confirmation of their party’s renewed vigor – the reality is 2020 was the fluke. Biden’s win was the outlier election in a political trajectory that heavily favors a working-class conservative coalition.  Four years into the catastrophic Biden Administration, working-class Americans came out swinging vehemently against not only Biden and Harris, but the web of ineptitude, negligence, and fraud, that have taken over the Democratic Party. 

The working-class victories in 2016 and 2024 were years in the making, and while the establishment are certainly scheming for power as we speak, the political divisions that left the Democratic Party fractured will not be easily reversed.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…

Bill Wilson is a veteran conservative strategist and activist who has spent decades advancing the cause of freedom and free markets across the United States. After working as a youth coordinator on Ronald Reagan’s 1976 campaign, he joined the National Right to Work movement and eventually became its vice president of operations. Wilson has also been a board member of U.S. Term Limits and Americans for Limited Government, including a seven-year stint as president of the latter group from 2006 to 2013. Wilson is married to the former Tessie Capellas. They have two grown children and reside in Fairfax County, Virginia.

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