Today I’m going to answer two questions.
One of the ones I got the most on the campaign trail in Missouri: “Where have all the Democrats gone?”
And probably the question I’ve gotten the most over the last year, some variation of: “Why doesn’t the Republican Party stand up to/distance themselves from/ditch President Trump given his high disapproval ratings?” (Recent polls reflect just 35% approval and 61% disapproval for the President)
For the second question, people often pose all sorts of theories from cowardice, to apathy, to Republicans simply just believing in the Administration’s policies and actions despite polling seeming to show a lot of Americans aren’t fans. I’m sure everyone has their own varying shades of personal reasons for supporting the President, but for the Republican Party as a whole, whether they like the President or agree with him isn’t nearly as important as one great overriding factor: math.
Which brings us back to “Where have all the Democrats gone?”
People in Missouri are very interested in this question because up until 2016, Democrats held nearly every statewide elected office in Missouri and now they hold none.
To get a feel for what’s happening, let’s compare my US Senate election in 2024 (Presidential + Senate year) to 2016, the last time there was both a Presidential and Senate election in the state.
The difference ii percentages is stark. In 2024, I lost my senate election in a wave Republican year by 13.8%, while in 2016, Democratic challenger Jason Kander barely lost his bid for the Senate by just 2.8%.
But looking at the raw vote totals is confusing.
In 2024, I received 1,243,728 votes.
In 2016, Jason got 1,300,200 votes, not even 60,000 more votes than I did.
However…
In 2024, Josh Hawley got 1,651,907 votes.
While in 2016, Roy Blunt received just 1,378,458 votes, nearly 300,000 fewer than Hawley did.
The Democratic votes in the Senate race essentially stayed the same, but I was beaten by 400,000 votes and Jason only lost by 78,000.
In fact, even if I had the same amount of votes in 2024 as Jason had in 2016, and they were taken directly from Hawley’s total, I would have still lost by nearly 300,000 votes: 1,595,435 to 1,300,200.
So what gives? If I had close to the same amount of votes as Jason, why were the results so different?
Election numbers can be interpreted in zillions of different ways, but my experience with the electorate and these numbers don’t make it seem like all the Democrats are necessarily gone. And it can’t be a red population increase swamping Democrats, because Missouri’s population only increased by about 150,000 people between 2016 and 2024 (which includes non-voters and kids).
So what is the most likely answer?
It’s Donald Trump.
Does anyone remember the early 2010’s when Obama was President and pundits everywhere were talking about the future death of the Republican Party due to American demographic changes?
The subtitle for this article is “Where have all the Democrats gone?” Ironically, in 2009, people were asking literally the exact opposite question, like this article that is literally titled “Where have all the Republicans gone?”
The truth is that Donald Trump saved the Republican Party from what many deemed an unavoidable slow death by creating hundreds of thousands of new Republican voters in Missouri and millions more across the country. And these new voters are enthusiastic about it, too (or at least they were in 2020 and 2024 in Missouri).
It’s been a massive boon for the Republican Party with real coattails, because since 2016, President Trump has both taken over the Republican Party and also educated all of his voters that that must vote for Republicans in order to support him.
I experienced that on the campaign trail. Missouri used to have a huge amount of ticket splitting, yet over and over again I was told on the by voters that they couldn’t stand my opponent and liked me (which was backed up by favorability polling), but that they had to vote Republican in order to support President Trump.
He hasn’t just transformed the Republican Party, he has transformed the electorate in a way that the Republican Party desperately needed in order to bounce back from the demographic and other challenges that they didn’t have another answer to.
So when you wonder why the Republican party doesn’t distance themselves from President Trump, it’s important to remember that (like the President says), he IS the Republican Party. He was the miracle they needed to turn what seemed like an insurmountable tide. And if they abandon the new slice of electorate he delivered them, which is generally working class and in a vacuum probably more amenable to liberal than conservative policies, particularly economically, they risk returning to an era where they were staring down a political landscape with no real future.
In the end, the question isn’t necessarily where have all the Democrats gone, it’s where have all these new Republicans come from? And the answer is the reason they stick by the President no matter what.
Lucas
