Red Earth, Blue Sky
How the Southwest can help us make sense of the 2024 election
It took less than two weeks for the news cycle to accelerate back to the breakneck pace it set between 2016 and 2021, with Donald Trump’s chaotic presidential transition generating news by the hour. Just yesterday, Matt Gaetz caved to Senate resistance to his nomination for attorney general, the city’s attorney in Monterrey, California, released a report detailing secretary of defense nominee Pete Hegseth’s apparent sexual assault of a woman in a hotel room, and Trump nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in Gaetz’ place. Meanwhile, those of us who metabolize events at a more stately pace are still trying to get a grip on how, exactly, we ended up back in the maelstrom.
From my seat, the story of the 2024 election is best understood through the Southwest, where Trump’s topline victory was muddled down ballot, a mixed result Democrats will need to parse if they have any hope of taking back the region’s electoral college votes anytime soon. Arizona snapped back to its historic character, with Trump seizing his most decisive victory in any of the seven swing states: almost two hundred thousand votes, a margin approaching what Mitt Romney posted in 2012. Nevada went red for the first time in two decades, not because Kamala Harris and her allies from the SEIU Local 1107 failed to turn out Democratic votes in Las Vegas — where she earned roughly as many votes as Joe Biden did four years before — but because Trump closed the gap just enough to allow the rural reaches of the Silver State to tip the balance. Texas was a laugher, headlined by Trump winning the four majority Mexican American counties of the Rio Grande Valley, a feat not even George W. Bush was able to pull off. Even New Mexico saw its tightest presidential race in a generation, with Democratic turnout sagging in Albuquerque and Las Cruces at the same time Trump picked up 22,000 new votes across the state.
Nationally, it seems clear that Trump’s win was driven by his gains among low-income people and minorities, trends that were even more acute in the Southwest. According to exit polls, while Harris won just over 50 percent of Hispanic, Latino, and Asian voters nationwide, those numbers inverted in Nevada and Texas. Meanwhile, Trump's narrow margin of victory with people making less than $50,000 a year was surely decisive across the region, where the proportion of households below that threshold is far higher than it is in the rest of the country. While 26 percent of households nationwide make less than $50,000 a year, the proportion is around 32 percent in Arizona, Nevada, and Texas, and an eye-popping 40 percent in New Mexico. Is it any wonder why inflation has remained such a salient issue in a region where so many more people are struggling to get by on less than what’s considered an entry-level salary for white collar workers on the coasts?
Still, the election was far from a washout down ballot. Arizona and Nevada both amended their constitutions to include abortion rights, while New Mexico voters authorized a series of bond measures generating tens of millions of dollars for senior centers, public libraries, universities, and tribal schools. Nevada incumbent Jacky Rosen managed to edge out Republican Sam Brown by 4,000 votes, while, in the race for Arizona’s open senate seat, Ruben Gallego easily defeated Kari Lake. His victory is partly attributable to Lake’s lethal unpopularity across the Grand Canyon State, but it seems Gallego also did a far better job of connecting with Hispanic and Latino voters through a combination of his personal story as a child of Mexican and Colombian immigrants and his ability to speak to the economic insecurity of Hispanic communities. As Regina Romero, the mayor of Tucson, put it to the New York Times, “You cannot count on his cultural signifiers to win with Latinos. That is the icing on the cake, but the cake itself has to be built of substance. I believe that as Democrats, we need to double down on working families and fighting for workers.”
It’s also notable that House Democrats held their ground throughout the Southwest and look poised to pick up at least two seats in California, tightening the Republican majority in Congress to just five or six seats — a margin so small and so dependent on vulnerable Republicans in blue states that it’s possible House Speaker Mike Johnson won’t be able to marshall the votes necessary to pass any legislation more significant than a round of tax cuts. Would Democrats have preferred to knock of Arizona’s Juan Ciscomani and David Schweikert? Sure, but their ability to hold the line across the Southwest helped make up for the three seats Republicans flipped in Pennsylvania and Michigan.
That’s enough numbers for now — surely we’ve all had more than enough of percentage points, demographic trends, and red-hued maps to last a normal human for at least the next four years. For Democratic strategists sifting through these election results, however, it seems clear that working people felt better represented by Donald Trump in this election, regardless of their race or ethnicity. The fact that those same working people were still willing to make big investments in education infrastructure, protect abortion rights, and re-elect Democrats to Congress should at the same time clarify that those voters haven’t ridden off some MAGA waterfall and into an unreachable abyss.
To win the working class back, progressives need to rediscover a style of politics that speaks to their daily reality. The daunting cost of housing, a lack of affordable child or eldercare, threadbare schools — these are chronic problems in cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, and Brownsville, problems that Donald Trump has no plans to address over the next four years. During the campaign, Kamala Harris' most concrete policy proposal was a plan to provide $25,000 in down payment assistance to first-time homebuyers. Such specificity was welcome in an otherwise chronically vague campaign, but to move the needle I suspect that idea would have needed to be offered along with a much more ambitious swath of housing reforms, from dramatically increasing the number of section eight vouchers funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development every year to coming up with a plan to build the three million new housing units Harris’ called for with public money. Likewise, the fortunes of progressives in the Southwest will only fall further unless the Democratic Party can offer a coherent plan to better integrate undocumented immigrants into society rather than cowering in fear every time the issue comes up in a debate or interview, a stance of non-engagement that has allowed reactionary conservative fearmongering to dominate all other discussion.
The Southwest isn’t blue or red — it's both. Let’s hope that 2024, at the very least, puts to final rest the “demographics are destiny” delusions of yesteryear. The Obama coalition that gave birth to that misconception of the electorate is gone, but there are plenty of opportunities for progressives to rebuild something more durable in its place by returning the focus of the party to the working class and offering an ambitious agenda for closing the enormous gap between them and the educated elite who have come to dominate the Democratic Party.
It’s going to be a long four years. All the more reason to get organized now.
For those looking for an overview of what the media can expect from the second Trump administration, I wrote a rundown for Columbia Journalism Review that covers everything from the potential weaponization of the Federal Communications Committee to the persecution local reporters may face for covering the mass demonstrations that are expected to break out should the president-elect act out his plans for mass deportation. That piece should pair well with Jason Mark’s summary of what the election means for the environment in Sierra, Sammy Roth’s take on the climate consequences for the L.A. Times, and Jonathan Thompson’s Land Desk newsletters about the future of public lands in general and Bears Ears National Monument in particular.
Thanks, as always, for reading and subscribing. I’m hoping to get back to using this space for outtakes from American Oasis next month, whether or not the dust has settled from election season (I mean, will it ever really settle?). I should also be ready to share some announcements about book events and other publicity-related shenanigans by then, so stay tuned! In the meantime, you can find me on my website, or rejoicing in the rain now that Massachusetts has gotten its first good soak in three months.
Your pal,
Kyle