For the Democrats, back to the drawing board.

The typical Democratic message in Presidential defeat is that they didn't do enough to get their "message" out to "disengaged," low-income voters. But this is demonstrably false.

Several Ringside readers have thanked us for reading the New York Times so they don’t have to. I appreciate it, but I have to confess that the NYT does from time to time tell the truth about the political lay of the land, so it might be worth the subscription price. One such article appeared yesterday.

The headline is:

IF EVERYONE HAD VOTED, KAMALA HARRIS STILL WOULD HAVE LOST

The subhead is:

New data, based on authoritative voter records, suggests that Donald Trump would have done even better in 2024 with higher turnout.

Ooooooooooooops.

In the wake of last November’s election, many Democrats blamed low turnout for Kamala Harris’s defeat.

It wasn’t entirely without reason, as turnout dropped in Democratic areas, but many months later it is clear the blame was misplaced. Newly available data, based on authoritative voter turnout records, suggests that if anything, President Trump would have done even better if everyone had voted.

The new data, including a new study from Pew Research released Thursday, instead offers a more dispiriting explanation for Democrats: Young, nonwhite and irregular voters defected by the millions to Mr. Trump, costing Ms. Harris both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

You gotta love it when the leading organ of the MSM discusses the real reason for the Democrats’ November 2024 defeat as July of the following year approaches. Better late than never, one might generously suppose.

Nate Cohn, the Times’ chief political analyst, is the author. I have found him unusually honest, and it had to pain him to write this piece. I congratulate him on getting it past the editors.

The findings suggest that Mr. Trump’s brand of conservative populism once again turned politics-as-usual upside down, as his gains among disengaged voters deprived Democrats of their traditional advantage with this group, who are disproportionately young and nonwhite.

…and also disproportionately hurt by Bidenflation, and, I have often read, by losing menial jobs to a surge of unchecked immigration. It can’t come as that much of surprise that economic basics told the tale in the election. It certainly didn’t come as a surprise to the Trump camp, which geared its campaign toward them. Nor did it hurt Trump’s chances when Kamala Harris admitted, in the one straight answer she gave last fall, that she couldn’t think of a thing she would do differently from Joe Biden.

Thank God for your opponents, my father used to tell me.

For a generation, the assumption that Democrats benefit from high turnout has underpinned the hopes and machinations of both parties, from Republican support for restrictive voting laws to Democratic hopes of mobilizing a new progressive coalition of young and nonwhite voters.

N.B.: “restrictive voting laws” = you still have to be alive.

It’s not clear whether Democrats will struggle with irregular voters in the future, but the data nonetheless essentially ends the debate about whether Ms. Harris lost because she alienated swing voters or because she failed to energize her base. In the end, Democrats alienated voters whose longtime support they might have taken for granted.

“Irregular voters” indeed. Cohn might be an honest reporter, but it’s still the New York Times. But, for however that may be, it’s hard to see how the Dems could have been so blind as to take their supporters for granted when the Right Direction/Wrong Direction polling at the time was running 70-30 against the incumbent administration.

The post-election studies aren’t perfect, but they all tell the same story: Nonvoters preferred Mr. Trump, even if only narrowly.

The average of the six polls is that nonvoters preferred Trump by about eight percentage points.

The decline in Democratic support among young and nonwhite voters and the decline in Democratic turnout can be understood as part of a single phenomenon: As traditionally Democratic voters soured on their party, some decided to show up and vote for Mr. Trump and others simply decided to stay home. But if they did show up, polling data suggests they would have voted for Mr. Trump in surprising numbers.

Why surprising? When the opposition is running on “vibes,” and the GOP is running on what you see every day at the grocery store and the gas station, who do you think is going to have the advantage?

The voters the Democrats lost in 2024 may not be lost for good. Still, their willingness to support Mr. Trump may throw a wrench in Democratic strategies. Until now, Democrats mostly assumed that irregular young and nonwhite voters were so-called mobilization targets — voters who would back Democrats if they voted, but needed to be lured to the polls with more door knocks, more liberal voting laws or a more progressive candidate. At least for now, this assumption can’t be sustained.

The Democrats’ problem, which they have spent years creating, is that they seem to think at all the wrong moments that the electorate in their primary in New York City has the same political outlook as the electorate in the general election across the country.

Hint: Transgenderism, socialism, defund-the-police and green energy may go over big time at NYU et al., but NYU is not the United States.

This assumption had important implications in a decade-long debate about whether Democrats should win by mobilizing new voters or persuading swing voters. While this debate was seemingly about arcane electoral tactics, it was really a proxy for whether the party should move toward the left or the center, with progressives arguing that a bold agenda could motivate new voters and moderates saying the party needed to pivot toward the center to win swing voters.

I’m not a political scientist, but even I know that national elections are won in the center. Trump was substantively closer to the center than Harris, as I suggested here. So today he sits in the White House, while Ms. Harris, a la’ the Richard Nixon “comeback,” is having a tough time getting traction even in her home state.