Donald Trump didn’t just outperform expectations for the 2024 election — he likely redrew the electoral map for a generation to come. His impressive performance wasn’t merely about swing states or suburban voters but something far more profound: the complete realignment of America’s two staid political coalitions.

The story of Trump’s improbable comeback from felony convictions and endless bad publicity isn’t found in the usual metrics of male versus female voters or red states versus blue states. Instead, it’s written in the faces of young voters, black Americans, and Latinos who abandoned the Democratic Party’s increasingly out-of-touch messaging for Trump’s brash, countercultural appeal.

The numbers tell a stark tale. According to AP VoteCast data, Trump captured more than 40% of voters under 30, a dramatic increase from the roughly one-third who backed him in 2020. This shift among young voters — traditionally a Democratic stronghold — signals more than just campaign success. It represents a fundamental transformation of the Republican Party’s image and appeal.

In Michigan, a “blue wall” state essential to a Kamala Harris victory, the reversal was even more dramatic. Exit polls show that voters aged 18-29, who gave Joe Biden a commanding 61% of their support in 2020, appear to have narrowly backed Trump in 2024. The shift was particularly pronounced among young men, who seemed to respond to Trump’s unconventional alliance-building with figures such as Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and even Hulk Hogan — moves that mainstream media figures regularly mocked as desperate or misguided.

But Trump’s coalition-building went beyond young voters. He secured 45% of Hispanic voters nationwide, trailing Harris by just eight points — a 13-point improvement from 2020. Among black voters, traditionally the Democratic Party’s most reliable constituency, Harris’s support dropped to around 80%, down from the roughly 90% who backed Biden four years earlier.

The Harris campaign’s response to these demographic shifts revealed the fundamental weakness of the Democratic establishment’s strategy. Rather than addressing the economic anxieties of working-class voters struggling with inflation, Harris pursued educated moderates and anti-Trump Republicans. Her campaign events, complete with carefully staged Saturday Night Live appearances and legacy media coverage, seemed to be lifted directly from Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 playbook — only with less substance behind them.

Harris never underwent the rigorous vetting of a primary campaign, and it showed. Her messaging focused on abstract “vibes” rather than concrete solutions, alienating lower-income households who had felt the sting of rising prices since 2020, as well as young people unable to enter a tight entry-level labor market. The contrast with Trump’s direct, often unpolished style couldn’t have been starker.

The magnitude of Trump’s coalition shift becomes clear in the state-by-state numbers. Buoyed by youth turnout and defections from reliable voting blocs, traditionally Democratic strongholds such as New York and New Jersey showed a nine to ten-point Republican shift from 2020. Florida, once considered a perpetual swing state, moved decisively into the Republican column.

This realignment suggests something more significant than a single election victory. Trump has effectively positioned the Republican Party as today’s counterculture — a genuine youth movement that finally matured after years of online activism and memetic warfare. By selecting J.D. Vance as his running mate, Trump further cemented his appeal to younger, digitally-native voters who see through the carefully curated “authenticity” of establishment politicians.

The Democratic Party’s embrace of what critics call “woke politics” — long stripped of any economic populism that made Bernie Sanders a compelling figure to young people in 2016 and 2020 — left it vulnerable to Trump’s unconventional coalition-building. While Democratic strategists focused on maintaining their grip on educated suburban voters, Trump’s team recognised that the real opportunity lay in expanding its base among working-class voters of all backgrounds.

The implications of this realignment will likely reverberate through American politics for the next decade or more. Trump made the Republican Party’s coalition younger, more diverse, and more working-class than at any point in recent history. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, finds itself increasingly dependent on affluent, educated voters — the very establishment figures it once defined itself against.

What emerges is a political landscape that would have been unrecognisable to those of us who came of age during George W. Bush’s presidency: a Republican Party beginning to embrace youth energy and working-class multiracial solidarity, facing off against a Democratic Party that increasingly represents well-off Boomers, the professional-managerial class, and corporate interests. The only question now is whether the Democrats can adapt to this new reality, or if they’ll continue running campaigns better suited to the political landscape of 2016 — where they bungled a near-certain victory — than the transformed America of 2024 and beyond.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

MoustacheClubUS

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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