You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here.
Voters under age 30, Black voters and Latinos were much more supportive of President Trump in 2024 than they were of past Republican presidential candidates. But exit polls conducted last week of the races in New Jersey and Virginia show that Republican candidates didn’t match Trump’s performance. The GOP lost overwhelmingly among all three voting blocs. Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO and now a prominent writer on Substack, argues that the idea that Trump had built some kind of durable multiracial working class coalition was always overstated. He says both the 2024 and 2025 elections can be attributed to backlash against the incumbent president. Podhorzer and Perry also discuss the election results in New York City, which showed that Zohran Mamdani’s base isn’t really working class voters, but self-identified liberals and those under 30. He won more than 70 percent of those two blocs, while running about evenly with Andrew Cuomo among voters without college degrees and those with less than $50,000 in family income.
