The Tennis-Serve Election: An Excerpt from the 2026 Almanac of American Politics
August 14, 2025 · 2:28 PM EDT
By Louis Jacobson
The following is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the 2026 Almanac of American Politics, which has been published after each election going back to 1972. The Almanac includes 2,200 pages with updated chapters on all 435 House members and their districts, all 100 senators, all 50 states and governors, and much more. Jacobson is the chief author.
Imagine a still photograph of a tennis player midserve. His back is arched, his racket dangles behind. His other arm is throwing the ball upwards, awaiting the racket’s eventual thwack.
In this moment, the ball hovers in midair. Is it still rising? Or is it dropping? From a still image, it’s impossible to know.
This is how I feel about the aftermath of the 2024 elections, including the first few months of President Donald Trump’s second term. Has the Democratic Party suffered permanent setbacks in the 2024 election—a turning away by once-core supporters such as Latinos, young voters, and Black voters, and policy losses on such issues as transgender rights and diversity, equity and inclusion? Collectively, will these developments erode the Democratic Party’s long-term competitiveness and produce a long-lasting political realignment? Or are the Republican victories and the Democratic defeats of 2024 temporary—destined to reverse again in a coming pendulum swing?
There’s evidence in support of both theories.
Republicans have ample reason to feel good about the results of the 2024 election
Not only did Trump in 2024 become just the second GOP presidential nominee to win the popular vote since 1988 (the other was George W. Bush in 2004)—Trump also improved on Republican presidential performance across the U.S.
“Compared with his showing in 2020, Trump didn't pick up a huge amount of ground in many places, but he did gain at least a little bit nearly everywhere,” Almanac contributor Geoffrey Skelley wrote for (the sadly shuttered) FiveThirtyEight.com. “This marked the first presidential election since 1976 in which all 51 components of the Electoral College moved in the same direction relative to how they voted four years earlier.”
FiveThirtyEight found that more than 9 in 10 voters in 2024 lived in counties that swung right in 2024.
All told, Trump flipped 85 counties that four years earlier had voted for Joe Biden; by contrast, Kamala Harris flipped zero counties Trump had won in 2020. Trump’s 2024 flips included some populous locales: Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix); Miami-Dade County, Florida (Miami); Riverside County, California (Riverside); San Bernardino County, California (San Bernardino); Tarrant County, Texas (Fort Worth); Hillsborough County, Florida (Tampa); Nassau County, New York (Long Island); Duval County, Florida (Jacksonville); and Fresno County, California (Fresno).
Mark Muro and Shriya Methkupally of the Brookings Institution calculated that Harris won 427 counties, a decline from the 512 Biden won in 2020. The share of the nation’s GDP generated in Trump-won counties remained a distinct minority, as in recent elections, but it improved from 29 percent in 2020 to 38 percent in 2024.
The share of counties won by a “landslide”—in which one candidate prevailed by at least 20 points—rose from 77.6 percent in 2020 to 80.2 percent in 2024, data from the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter shows. Trump, not Harris, won the vast majority of those counties.
Meanwhile, in the all-important battleground states, Trump went seven for seven in 2024, pushing them all rightward, from 1.4 percentage points redder in Wisconsin to 5.8 points redder in Arizona.
Some of 2024’s most striking red shifts came in solidly blue states. Of the 10 states that shifted most aggressively toward Trump in 2024, six were solidly Democratic: New York (a red shift of 10.5 points), New Jersey (10 points), California (9 points), Massachusetts (8.3 points), Rhode Island (seven points), and Hawaii (6.4 points), the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman calculated.
Harris still won these solidly blue states easily—but in the closest one, New Jersey, the trend lines went strongly against Democrats. As NBC’s Steve Kornacki has noted, locales such as Perth Amboy, Union City, West New York, Passaic, Dover and North Bergen shifted Republican by 22 to 35 points between 2020 and 2024.
Such pro-Trump shifts spanned demographic groups: The GOP fared its best in decades with Black voters, Latino voters, and young voters. Maps showing county-by-county shifts from 2020 to 2024 are a veritable thicket of red arrows, with barely any blue visible; this was especially true for predominantly Black, Latino, Asian and Native American counties.
Data collected by the New York Times’ Nate Cohn shows that from 2012—the last pre-Trump presidential election—to 2024, Black voters turned 19 points redder, Hispanic voters 29 points redder, Asian Americans 17 points redder, and voters ages 18 to 29 14 points redder.
As for the defining demographic shift of the Trump era—the rightward movement of white, noncollege-degree voters—this group has become 13 points redder since 2012, while nonwhite, noncollege-degree voters have become 37 points redder.
Some of this shifting stemmed from weak Democratic turnout; some, apparently, stemmed from persuasion.
“Interviews over the past year with hundreds of working-class minority voters revealed the challenges confronting Democrats as both clear and daunting,” Jennifer Medina wrote in a New York Times 2024 election postmortem. “For many, hope had already hardened into cynicism. Promises about affordable housing fell flat and promoting accomplishments on insulin prices failed to break through. Simply put, their trust in the Democratic Party was gone.”
Daniel Trujillo, an East Las Vegas barbershop owner who watched many of his customers shift from supporting Barack Obama to favoring Trump, told Medina, “The right turned blue collar and went full border control, strong economy and law and order. Who doesn’t want that?”
The only group that shifted significantly toward Democrats from 2012 to 2024 were white voters with a college degree; this group became 17 points bluer. But in 2024, their votes weren’t enough to carry Harris to victory. Even voters who liked the Democrats’ agenda on social issues weren’t slam-dunk Harris voters: In all 10 states that had an abortion-related ballot measure in 2024, support for the abortion measure outpaced support for Harris, often by double-digit margins.
It’s easy to see why Democrats were so deflated after the 2024 election. Early in Trump’s second term, approval ratings among Democrats for their own party stood at historic lows, fed by Democratic lawmakers’ inability to block Trump’s unilateral second-term actions. An NBC survey in March 2025 showed Republicans with a four-point advantage on party identification—the Republicans’ largest lead at any point in recent memory.
Noting that three states won by Obama in 2012—Florida, Ohio and Iowa—are no longer considered competitive for Democrats in presidential races, Florida-based Democratic strategist Steve Schale wrote in the Bulwark, that this is “not just a canary in a coal mine. It is a massive boulder landing in front of you on the only road home. Even worse, my party has largely avoided reckoning with how big that boulder is.”
Democrats may not need to blow up their party and start from scratch
Yet amid the Democratic doom and gloom, it’s important to remember some context.
First, Trump’s 2024 winning margin was the fourth-smallest in a presidential race since 1960—less than 1.5 percentage points—and Trump didn’t secure a majority of votes cast. That the 2024 race was this close was impressive for the Democrats, given the tides Harris was swimming against.
For instance: Since Richard Nixon, any president with an approval rating higher than 50 percent has won a second term, while any president with an approval rating below 50 percent has lost. Biden’s approval rating going into the 2024 election: 39 percent.
Similarly, every president with a University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Survey index higher than 82 was re-elected; every one below that mark lost. Biden, at 70.1, had the worst index of any president during that period.
Economic concerns clearly weighed on voters’ minds. An October New York Times/Siena College poll found that two-thirds of Trump voters said they’d had to cut back on groceries, compared with one-third of Harris voters who said the same.
And it wasn’t only Trump’s presidential victory that was narrow; the Republican victories in the House and Senate were, too.
The Democrats came within 7,309 votes across three districts (Iowa’s 1st, Colorado’s 8th and Pennsylvania’s 7th) from winning the House majority. That was just 0.005 percent of the House votes cast in 2024, making it the smallest decisive share since at least 1994, Inside Elections’ Jacob Rubashkin calculated.
In the Senate, Democratic candidates won races in four battleground states Harris lost: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin.
Heading into the 2026 midterms, Democrats can leverage a new and favorable pattern to break these narrow majorities, especially in the House. A decade or two ago, Republicans tended to fare better in lower-turnout elections, including midterms, because the GOP was disproportionately the party of educated, affluent voters. But in the Trump era, this part of the electorate has become much more Democratic, enabling Democrats to fare well in low-turnout special elections. A good example is the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April 2025, which the Democratic-aligned candidate won by double digits, just a few months after Trump had won the state.
Trump, by contrast, has built an advantage with low-propensity voters—but these won’t help his party as much during a midterm election. A pre-election NBC national poll found that, among voters who said they follow politics closely, Harris led Trump by five points, and Democrats led Republicans for control of Congress by seven points. By contrast, voters who did not follow politics closely favored Trump over Harris by 14 points and Republicans over Democrats to control Congress by 15 points. Republicans, younger voters and noncollege graduates were all disproportionately represented in the “don’t follow politics” camp.
Republican drop-off in low-turnout elections has been a constant throughout the Trump era. I’ve noticed this in my regular visits to southwestern Pennsylvania to write election postmortems for PoliticsPA. In five blue-collar counties that were ancestrally Democratic but have become solidly Republican—Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland—Republican turnout has dipped noticeably in midterm years when Trump’s name wasn’t on the ballot. By comparison, Democratic turnout in those counties has remained mostly steady between presidential and midterm elections.
Even if Democrats have a good 2026 midterm, the longer term is looking challenging
How the Electoral College map looks today matters less than how it will look starting with the 2032 presidential election.
Based on census data projections, New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice forecasts that solidly red states will gain seats after the 2030 Census, and solidly blue states will lose them.
Specifically, the group’s calculations show Texas on track to gain at least four seats (and possibly five). Florida is poised to gain four, and Utah and Idaho are on track to gain one seat each.
Among blue states, California is on track to lose four seats, New York is set to lose two and Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon and Rhode Island are each poised to lose one. The seven battleground states are more of a wash; North Carolina and Arizona are poised to gain one seat each, while Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are on track to lose one seat each.
A switch of at least 10 electoral votes from solidly red states to solidly blue states will make matters more difficult for any Democratic presidential candidate beginning in 2032.
Even worse for Democrats, reversing these population trends will not be easy or quick. As Almanac contributor Drew Savicki has noted, the 15 fastest-growing metro areas from 2020 to 2024 with at least 500,000 residents are exclusively in states that voted for Trump in 2024—six metro areas in Florida, three in Texas, and one each in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, North Carolina, South Carolina and Utah.
By the time the next Almanac comes out, I suspect we’ll have a better sense of which direction that tennis ball is heading.
The 2026 Almanac of American Politics is scheduled to be released on September 2. Inside Elections readers can receive a discount by using the code Elections2026 when ordering at the Almanac’s web page.