If there was one lesson from the presidential election, it might be about counting chickens.
The old adage suggests not counting them before they are hatched. Farm wisdom will tell you just because you have an egg doesn’t guarantee you get a chicken. That egg could end up in an omelet, in the belly of a hungry fox or just failing to hatch at all.
That might be how some Democrats look at the numbers after Republican Donald Trump pulled out a decisive win over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
In the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision that rolled back abortion protections of Roe v. Wade, women were expected to be a critical voting bloc, much like they were in 2018 and 2020. Reproductive health was a major pillar of the Harris campaign.
Women 18 to 44 did go to Harris in the majority — but not by much. Harris took 55% with Trump pulling 43%.
Black voters have been important to the Democratic Party for decades, and that was not different in a year where the nominee was a Black woman who attended the Harvard of historically Black colleges — Howard University. Harris netted 83% of that demographic. That still meant 16% of Black voters saw themselves in Trump’s message.
Hispanic voters were a difficult needle to thread in a race where immigration — especially focused on the southern border — was a major issue. While 55% of those voters pulled toward Harris, 42% went to Trump.
In Pennsylvania, while most counties stayed in their red or blue lanes, the math was less sure. Trump was able to carve large enough swaths off Democratic enclaves to make a difference statewide — which then made a major difference nationwide.
All of this is a lesson in bold block letters for both parties: No one owns a demographic.
Women, in particular, do not vote in a way that can be guaranteed — even when the election features a woman in a historic role. Black voters are not voting for “Black” issues because issues can’t be divided by color. And Hispanic voters are not a single entity marching in lockstep. They are a rainbow of myriad backgrounds that can have radically different priorities.
Republicans did not take a majority of any of these groups. If they want to, they need to increase the attention paid to their concerns.
And if Democrats want to win them back, or stem the bleeding, they need to stop assuming these pillars have no where else to turn. Clearly, they do.
