By Jim Ellis — Friday, Jan. 24, 2025
2024 Election
President Donald Trump / Photo by Gage Skidmore
The change in voting patterns, particularly among the working class, minorities, youth, and the highly educated, could be suggesting that we will see a different electoral paradigm develop should the 2024 result prove to be something more than a historical anomaly.
The Free Press news site published an op-ed from New York Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres earlier this week entitled: “The Rising Democratic Coalition Fell. Now What?”
The Representative’s piece analyzes why the Democrats lost the 2024 election and how the party can return to its winning ways.
In the op-ed, Rep. Torres highlights how President Donald Trump made inroads in minority communities, and particularly those within the Empire State’s 15th Congressional District, which he represents.
Torres illustrates that his Bronx-anchored district, which is approximately 90 percent minority (of the combined minority voting age population, the percentage breakdown is as follows: 51.4 percent Hispanic; 42.4 percent Black; 4.3 percent Asian; 3.2 percent Other), saw a 22 percent increase in turnout for Donald Trump in 2024 compared to Barack Obama’s re-election performance in 2012. In that year, President Obama received 96 percent of the vote from the precincts that today comprise the 15th CD, while in this election Kamala Harris dropped to a support figure of 74 percent.
Rep. Torres describes Trump’s performance in his district and others like it as being more impressive than the end result in the Rust Belt where the President “connected with” the working class whites from that region.
Torres says: “[President Trump’s] most improbable and formidable feat lies in chipping away at the blue wall in urban America. Few places saw a more impressive swing toward Trump in 2024 than my own deeply Democratic congressional district in the Bronx.”
The Congressman explains his reasoning in the following paragraphs:
The original sin of the new left is that it speaks for people of color without actually speaking to them—and listening. For if the new left actually spoke to people of color, it would never embrace movements like #DefundThePolice, it would never use terms like Latinx or Latine, and it would never have kept the Biden administration from acting decisively to secure the border in the face of an overwhelming migrant crisis that, in the end, cost us the election.
Listening to working-class people of color means unshackling ourselves from self-anointed socialist saviors who speak falsely in their name.
There is a difference between the beliefs of communities of color and the beliefs projected onto those communities by elites. The pattern of mistaking the latter for the former is what has made the Democratic Party lose touch with working-class voters of all backgrounds. (Full story here: The Free Press)
It is probable that we will soon see Torres put his ideas to work in a New York statewide campaign. It is no secret that he is testing the political waters for a 2026 Democratic primary challenge against Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Writing such an article is another signal that Rep. Torres is preparing a gubernatorial run with a strategy of moving closer to the political center in contrast to Gov. Hochul positioning herself on the party’s left flank. While Rep. Torres would be an attractive candidate in a New York general election, it will be most interesting to see if he can win a Democratic primary without being the most liberal contender in the race.
The odds of Torres winning the party nomination may be a bit better than in years past, however. In addition to Gov. Hochul’s low job approval rating, Donald Trump’s 2024 enhanced performance in the state versus the support numbers he garnered in 2020 suggest the Congressman may see a more hospitable electorate.
New York could be on the threshold of at least incremental change. Trump improved his standing in all 51 voting entities when comparing his 2024 performance to that of 2020, but none was stronger (net 11-point increase) than the state of his birth.
