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Demographic Defeat: Why Trump Is Unlikely to Win Reelection
by Fuzzybrain

Friday, April 26, 2024 at 3:00:15p EDT


All our fears to the contrary, Trump actually has little real chance of winning the upcoming election. The key is demographics.

There are, of course, a number of factors that influence which voters vote for which candidates, and these factors can change from year to year, month to month, or even day to day. Unforgettable is the FBI’s announcement, just days before the 2016 election, that it was investigating Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Nevertheless, foundational to the issues and events of the moment is demographics. And there is no denying the fact that Trump’s voters are thinning out while Biden’s are growing—and that voter preferences are changing as a result.

Older voters are dying
As Reed Galen, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, pointed out in an article I first came across on Social Europe:

Between the 2016 and 2024 elections, some 20 million older voters will have died and about 32 million younger Americans will have reached voting age. Many young voters disdain both parties and Republicans are actively recruiting (mostly white men) on college campuses. But the issues that are dearest to Generation Z’s heart—such as reproductive rights, democracy and the environment—will keep most of them voting Democratic.

Demographics is something that doesn’t change significantly from week to week, month to month, or even year to year. Demographic trends may be gradual, but they are all the more stable. Demographic change is tectonic.

The GOP is declining
A related aspect to consider is that the Republican party itself is declining—and I don’t mean just morally, but terms of pure numbers as well. Pew Research finds that while voters of both parties have generally become older since the 1990s, the aging process is more apparent in the GOP than among Democrats:

Reflecting this broader change, both parties’ voters are significantly older now than they were 20 years ago. But today Republican and Republican-leaning voters tend to be older than voters in the Democratic coalition. (In 1996, there was very little difference between the age profiles of the two parties.)

Like clothes dried too long in the dryer, MAGA Republicans of today are shriveling and wrinkling. They may be getting hot under the collar, but in the short term there’s no way to iron out those demographic wrinkles.

As a consequence of such trends, Biden will have a larger pool of possible voters than Trump—which means in turn that Biden can tolerate more of his voters not voting. A Trump victory, on the other hand, will require a higher percentage of GOP voters going to the polls.

Irrespective of how Trump’s criminal cases turn out in the end, he is facing in the wrong direction of demographic trends. Like the GOP in general, he is swimming against the stream in so many ways.

The fundamental issue, then, is that the winds of change do not favor Trump. A slow but ineluctable storm of transition in electoral makeup, with its concomitant shifts in voter preferences, is blasting him head-on, and he’ll have no real chance in November. This doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels, but it also means there is no cause for deep despair.

Because demographics is destiny.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/4/26/2237483/-Demographic-Defeat-Why-Trump-Is-Unlikely-to-Win-Reelection?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web