Consider the numbers. A very South Asian precinct in Edison, NJ has swung from Donald Trump +30 to Mikie Sherrill +76 in the span of a year. Working-class Hispanic Republicans in New Jersey, who turned the state red in 2024, have swung back to 64 percent for Sherrill, voting for her almost 2:1, compared to around half in 2024. Likewise, Palisades Park, America’s most heavily Korean-American town, flipped from a 52–46 Harris-Trump split in 2024 to 62–38 for Sherrill, an eighteen-point blue swing. Eighty-four percent of young women (18-29) voted for Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral election, around 80 percent for Sherrill in New Jersey, and around 78 percent for Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. Paterson's Arab-American community swung heavily for Sherrill. The dust is still settling, but according to NBC News exit polling on young men (18-29) in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City, in Virginia, Spanberger was +14. The numbers for Sherrill, and Mamdani were +10, and +40, respectively. In her speech Tuesday night, Spanberger said that the people voted for “the Commonwealth over chaos”—a pointed twist on the broken promise of the admin to pursue “commerce, not chaos.” Every single county of Virginia shifted blue. People really don’t like chaos, especially in a state where the top half are all government workers. 

When I was touring New York in 2023 with my parents, who came to visit me, we were chauffeured by a Taiwanese taxi driver who was heavily pro–J.D. Vance. His borough of Queens saw significant rightward shifts in voting for Trump. I wonder how he is feeling today. The core political principle, at least in a democracy, if you must have a democracy, is that you don't win because of the "base,” but often despite the base. Catering only to the base brings one down to their basest instincts. There’s a reason politics is a question of a coalition. 

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Consider that people liked the competence of the Trump administration in stopping the mass migration that was reshaping the country. But instead of competently going on about illegal migration—fining employers who hire them, putting a tax on outward remittance—the admin was cowed by its base into some of the worst optics of the century: a militia harassing children and their mothers at Costco and incessant online anonymous abuse to the smallest, most educated, English-speaking, and law-abiding subset of migrants, H1-B holders. Rumor in Washington is that even President Donald Trump’s foreign and trade policy is now being dictated by a handful who care about nothing other than immigration. There’s no other way to justify or explain the troop buildup in Latin America, the trade war with Japan and India, and the treatment of South Korean engineers in the U.S. by ICE agents. 

One of this magazine’s core principles is free speech and constructive criticism of one’s own side when duty requires. The Trump-Mamdani voters are the swing voters who propelled Trump to victory: the working-class Latinos, Asians, and even Muslims, a significant chunk of whom voted for the Republicans and for Trump for the first time on the promise of competent foreign policy, a golden age of job growth, and conservative social and economic policies. Instead, they got the 12-Day War with Iran, a massive troop buildup in Latin America, trade war with the entire world, enormous grocery prices, and incessant social media abuse, about how they are unwanted in this country or among the right wing at large. They appear to have taken the hint. 

Trump and J.D. Vance should take the hint, too, and should find the courage to cut the cancer out that infects their earlier unifying, positive message. The first four months of the administration was about competence and commerce, nothing more. The last six months have been a weird mix of George Bush and Ron DeSantis: overt evangelical foreign policy, threats of interventions in Venezuela, Iran, and Nigeria, and mindless cruelty towards those who are legal and assimilated. A simple lesson from the most part of the 20th century is that the side with the most optimistic and unifying message and policies wins in the grand struggles of our times. The side that turns it to a Hobbesian war of all against all are usually left alone when everyone else forms a balancing coalition against their hubris. Power, after all, eternally begs to be balanced.