Patrick Ruffini

Open any national publication, and you’ll read all about a cultish, fire-breathing MAGA majority in the Republican Party, slavish in its devotion to Donald Trump. Nothing will shake their conviction that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. This is the group that fumbled the ball on the one-yard line in the 2022 midterms, nominating unelectable kooks who could not perform the most basic of political tasks: winning undivided control of Congress amid 8 percent inflation that Americans largely blamed on the incumbent Democratic president. And now they’re poised to do it again. The front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024 is (at present) the twice-indicted Donald Trump.

If you live in the world inhabited by Donald Trump’s strongest supporters, you’ve seen the man perform all sorts of difficult tasks: getting elected over all the odds, overcoming every media onslaught. You’ve seen him do it all — except lose. In any objective sense, Trump is a middling electoral performer who has only ever cleared exceedingly low bars. Yes, he overcame steep odds in the 2016 election, but that election should have been a cakewalk for Republicans against an historically unpopular Democratic nominee running to extend her party’s rule for a third term. While he oversaw deep losses in the 2018 midterms, but no less a political athlete than Barack Obama had also sustained an even worse defeat in 2010.

A coveted working-class demographic that has been loyally Democratic for generations stands poised to vote Republican in record numbers. Its voters are upwardly mobile, having risen from the deep poverty of their immigrant ancestors to a decent middle-class life. Their incomes are rising quickly and are soon expected to reach the national average. They start businesses at rates that exceed the native born. Recent government data shows them moving into the suburbs from ethnic enclaves in the cities. All of this has coincided with their political shift to the right. This demographic is family-oriented and deeply religious.