View / How the MAGA map cracked - Semafor

It’s easy to understand why Republicans couldn’t imagine the Trump coalition cracking. The MAGA electoral map, first built in 2016, stayed mostly intact for eight years and five elections. Rural areas stayed red or got redder. Non-white, working class areas drifted away from Democrats. The party of the New Deal was reduced to an urban and suburban archipelago, blue smudges on a red map that the president liked to show off to White House visitors.

One good thing about America’s languid vote count is that a more interesting picture fills in after the big story is over. We knew last week that the Trump coalition came apart, and we’re learning now that Democrats won the country by 14 points, in the average House vote. 

Republicans couldn’t imagine that shift before Tuesday. Obviously, they didn’t plan for it when they heeded the president, in deep red states, and re-drew congressional maps. They planned for at least another decade of the Trump coalition, with rural America locked up, suburban America still competitive, and non-white voters alienated from the “woke” opposition party.

The story of North Carolina this year is the shattered GOP gerrymander — seven seats that backed Trump by double digits in 2024, then elected Democrats. The stories in Indiana, South Carolina, and Utah are that Republicans tried to re-draw their maps, failed, and were saved from electoral disaster. Had Republicans built the districts they wanted, most of them, across those three states, would have voted for Democrats.

Why were Republicans so hubristic? Look closely at what happened from 2016 to last week. The Trump electoral map was the most solid either party had built in generations. It kept the upper Midwest competitive, which George W. Bush hadn’t been able to do. It made Appalachia nearly uninhabitable for Democrats, which Ronald Reagan couldn’t do. Richard Nixon couldn’t carry a GOP Congress on his coattails. Trump did several times — both chambers in 2016 and 2024, the Senate in 2018, the House in 2022.

Every political coalition falls apart eventually, unless you’re running the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan or something. Barack Obama’s 2008 win led Democrats into some dizzy daydreams about a “permanent” majority that Republicans could only temporarily defeat. “Obama doesn’t need right-leaning whites anymore,” Ron Brownstein wrote in 2013, after Democrats won a second presidential election with a minority of white voters but a supermajority of non-whites.

For a long time, both parties wondered if Trump had built something sturdier than that. He wasn’t counting on demographic change to keep Republicans in power. He’d ditched the GOP’s commitment to entitlement reform, which alienated working class voters, and its support for free trade, which was one of the Democrats’ best arguments when those voters got queasy about their cultural views. Not only did he do it, but Republicans who campaigned like him were able to keep those gains.

In 2016, Trump carried 206 counties that had supported Barack Obama twice. Democrats believed this was a fluke, that more populist politics could win them back — not asking “if we broke up the big banks, would that end racism?” In 2020 they campaigned like eastern Iowa, northeast Ohio, and southeast Pennsylvania had gotten their anti-establishment votes out of their system and could be won again.But when he won back the White House in 2024, Trump carried 181 of those counties. And nearly every Republican walked the same map. The GOP’s disastrous midterm strategy was premised on voters who had become comfortable supporting Republicans after 2016 and nodded when Mike Johnson said “this isn’t your grandfather’s Democrat Party” — always “Democrat,” never “Democratic.”

Republicans didn’t plan for Democrats to change, and offer a less culturally left-wing package to these voters. In much of the country, Democrats were able to reintroduce themselves and slice up the Trump map. The Rio Grande Valley and South Florida were disasters for Republicans, who treated Latino voters like new members of the MAGA movement, not as the swing voters they are. But the drop-off with rural white voters was more damaging in more of the country. Republican gerrymandering followed a simple formula: Carve up Democratic cities and overwhelm them with rural voters. This worked because they had a good idea of how Republican those rural voters were. It stopped working because Democrats competed for so many of them.

That explains the disaster in North Carolina, where 47% of white voters backed Sen.-elect Roy Cooper, and Republicans did historically poorly with those voters down-ballot. Rep. Tim Moore, who had helped draw the state’s gerrymander, had given himself a seat where liberal Mecklenburg County voters were outnumbered by rural conservatives to the west. Lakesha Womack beat him by doubling the Democratic margin in Mecklenburg and by losing by less elsewhere, cutting his margins in rural counties by 15 to 20 points.

“Rural voters are not necessarily all the way MAGA voters,” North Carolina Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton told me last week. “They’re not necessarily bought into Republican politics. It’s just that the Republicans were the only party that’s been communicating to them and aggressively trying to be in their communities, and running candidates in them.”

Clayton had been trying to make this change for years. Lots of Democrats had, with little success. This gave Republicans the confidence that, while Trump voters were harder to motivate without him on the ballot, they had ruled out supporting Democrats and could be convinced to come out to protect their guns, kids, and religion from them.If that’s not true, the electoral map stops looking so solid. Seats built to withstand a +13 swing to Democrats couldn’t be saved on a +14 swing. But Republicans believed that Trump’s nationalism and populism were locking in voters; Democrats were relying on their messy coalition and old issues, like protecting Social Security, losing their most loyal voters to the grave.

It was a good strategy for a decade. It lasted longer than Karl Rove’s “permanent majority,” which was less appealing to rural voters and more appealing in the suburbs. But neither theory of the electorate worked without voters who believed their vote was protecting their way of life – culture and costs.

What implications does this have for the electoral map, which both parties are still empowered to re-draw next year? It’s definitely changed the risk assessment. Republicans learned that black voter turnout will increase, against them, if their party draws maps to reduce their power — and that they don’t get a commensurate thank-you turnout from white voters.

That will probably cost them a Senate seat in Mississippi, nearly cost them another in Louisiana, and almost blocked Marsha Blackburn’s wide path to the governor’s mansion in Tennessee. Republicans won’t have the power to re-draw Georgia’s maps next year, but they woke up last week realizing that if they had, they might have lost more seats in the Atlanta exurbs.

The rest of the country looks dicier, too. Years ago, Pat Buchanan told me (and I presume everyone he talked to) that if white voters in the Midwest began voting like they did in the South, Republicans would win every election. Trump showed that Buchanan was right, and when they got control of redistricting, Republicans maximized the strength of that new coalition. For the first time, they are not sure that the coalition will come together again. That has enormous implications for the map war that both parties were suiting up for, before Tuesday. And it’s what happens to every permanent majority eventually.