It’s been a weird few months as we liberals have come to terms with the reality of yet another four years of Donald Trump-fueled chaos, instability, hatred, and insanity. Unlike 2017, when outraged liberals took the streets in resistance, it seems many of us are just shrugging our shoulders this time.
This is their America. They are welcome to wallow in it.
And Civiqs polling, visualized by The New York Times, confirms it.
For those who don’t know, Civiqs is a polling and research firm owned by Kos Media, which also operates Daily Kos. It’s hard to be a reality-based community if we don’t have solid data to understand where America is and what might move it in the right direction. Thus, for the last decade, Civiqs has provided insight deep into the American psyche.
For example, early last year, I declared that Democrats had lost the immigration debate and that it was right for President Joe Biden to work with Republicans to take the issue off the board for the elections. I based that primarily on this Civiqs chart, which shows support for granting undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship fell from 58% on Election Day 2020 to around 46% by early 2024—with those wanting deportation moving up from 31% to 45% across the same time period.
More distressing, Civiqs’ paywalled data shows that Latino support for a pathway to citizenship fell from 67% on Election Day 2020 to 53% by early 2024.
The signs were all there. We’re tracking them.
The New York Times used Civiqs’ data to come up with nifty visualizations contrasting how voters when Biden was in the 2024 race, after he left it and endorsed Kamala Harris, and now, as Trump takes office. As you can imagine, Republicans have radically shifted from being angry to being hopeful. Democrats are scared and depressed.
But there are a couple of interesting observations within that broader take.
Among all respondents, those saying they’re angry have gone from 29% to 16%. Yes, a big chunk of that is happy conservatives. But among Democrats, we’ve gone from 10% angry while former President Joe Biden was running, to 6% angry when Vice President Kamala Harris was running, to 13% today.
We just haven’t seen an outpouring of liberal anger, and the reason is clear: We warned Americans about what would happen if Trump was reelected, and they didn’t listen. They believed Trump’s lies about Harris, refused to believe him about his plans, and ushered in the dumbest, most incompetent president in history back into office.
We’re not angry. We’re shrugging our shoulders, saying, “You fucked around. Having fun finding out.”
One of the harsh realities of the Republican Party is that it is heavily composed of white, non-college-educated Americans, while Democrats are largely a white-collar, college-educated party. Biden funneled billions of dollars into red counties and states to rebuild shattered rural economies, bailed out the Teamsters, and enacted the strongest pro-labor agenda since former President Franklin D. Roosevelt—and voters, by and large, rewarded him and his Democratic Party by bringing back Trump.
Trump won those making $50,000 or less by 2 percentage points, after Biden won them by 11 points in 2020, according to exit polls (which are not perfect). And while the exit polls don’t break out income and race, it’s clear that poor white voters went overwhelmingly for Trump.
Non-college-educated white voters—a decent proxy for income attainment—voted for Trump 66% to 32%. Meanwhile, college-educated white voters backed Harris 53% to 45%. Among all college graduates, Harris won 56% to Trump’s 42%. So it’s not surprising that among voters making more $100,000, Harris won them 51% to 47%.
A significant number of Democrats also live in blue states, which have the kind of social safety nets to insulate their residents from some of Trump’s promised abuses.
Obviously, lots of Democrats will still suffer under the Trump administration, but his own voters will likely bear the brunt of it—and that takes some of the sting out of Harris’ loss. It’s easier to suffer the consequences when we see his own voters (as well as nonvoters) realize the error of their ways.
For instance, when Trump rescinds Biden’s “Executive Order 14087 of October 14, 2022 (Lowering Prescription Drug Costs for Americans),” it isn’t just Harris voters suffering the consequences. When Trump targets the Latino community—my community—it’s hard to feel too sorry when 46% of them voted for Trump, according to exit polls.
Even the GOP’s most loyal Latinos—Miami Cubans—got slapped on Day 1 of Trump’s new presidency when he ended emergency parole for them, which provided an additional pathway to legally enter the country.
On issue after issue, the Trumpists are running into the cold hard reality of their choice. Take the Trump-loving account Jamieson on X. Here’s them on Jan. 10:
And now here’s them just a day into the new Trump presidency:
Who signed that executive order, Jamieson? Who??? It’s about time people learn about all the ways that Biden did lower prices.
Trump has also stopped disbursements under the Inflation Reduction Act, most of which has benefited red America. “Republican-led states were projected to receive the lion’s share of the IRA’s grants and subsidies,” reported PV Magazine, a publication covering the solar industry. “$337 billion in IRA funding for factories and renewable energy projects in ‘red states,’ significantly outpacing the $183 billion expected for ‘blue states.”
If Democrats pass legislation with only Democratic votes, like the IRA, the bulk of the benefits should go to blue states and blue voters. But hey, Biden foolishly tried to help them, and they empowered the guy who wants to hurt them.
This is the same guy who surrounded himself with working-class people at his rallies but who, at his inauguration, featured a trillion dollars of net worth in his small crowd, even seating many of them in front of his own Cabinet picks. That’s who they voted for.
So it totally makes sense liberals aren’t as angry as we were in 2017. Back then, we assumed the American people were bamboozled, or that Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate, or something something.
But now? People knew exactly what they were voting for, and they will suffer for it. And yes, that makes our own suffering more bearable.
And who knows, if even 5% learn from their mistakes and decide to vote differently in 2026 and 2028, then we’ll be able to salvage something from this clusterfuck.
One final point, from the conclusion of The New York Times’ article:
No matter how you slice the numbers, it’s clear the American people were itching for change. Good change. Scary change. Risky change. They wanted someone to acknowledge that the status quo was not working for them—that something’s got to give. Trump is nothing if not an agent of disruption.
Shit is fucked up, and people are fed up. And the Democratic Party’s deference to institutions that haven’t served America well ended up biting us in the ass. Trump supporters are, at their core, nihilist. They don’t care about norms and institutions and traditions being torn down—none of those have demonstrably helped them. And that’s not just MAGA but also a lot of soft Republican voters and even some Democrats who voted the right way, despite feeling alienated from our economic and political classes.
Democrats will need an answer for that. In fact, the 2028 presidential primary, which will start much sooner than anyone realizes, will be all about it.
