Understanding Coalition Shifts

Topic: Elections

A fifth-grade class has 20 students, and kickball is the preferred recess game of 14 students.  Four prefer basketball, and two want to play hide-and-seek.  The teacher allows the students to vote for the recess activity every day, and the results almost always come down to 70 percent of the students voting for kickball, 20 percent for basketball, and 10 percent for hide-and-seek.  The end outcome is always the same.

Later, the four students who like basketball figure out that adding trampolines will add excitement to their preferred activity, and naturally appeal to those students who are growing tired of playing kickball every day and voting for it just because some of their friends want to keep playing it.  In a stunning turn of events, six defectors from the kickball side join the basketball side during the next vote, giving a 10 to 8 edge to the basketball side.

The result is a 60 percent swing in the vote, accomplished in very little time, and aided by a stagnant pool of voters.  I have essentially described for you the political natures of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin over the past decade.  These states are losing population in nearly every county, represented with a loss of electoral votes in this coming decade, and somehow, the media apparatus expects you to believe that hundreds of thousands of new two-party votes are going to occur in the middle of what is called a “coalition shift.”

The concept is old.  The term is creditable to Richard Baris, one of the finest pollsters in the nation.  Simply put, a coalition shift occurs when one party’s voters start voting in large numbers for the other party.  In a state with a stagnant population, the results are dramatic, because the increase in votes for the ascendant party is coming at the expense of the other.  Texas underwent a coalition shift beginning in the 1980s, when longtime “Solid South” Democrats began voting for the Republican Party, leaving the Democrats in the dust.  Northern Virginia underwent a coalition shift in the mid-2000s, when DC Beltway moderates began breaking from the GOP and voting for the Democrat Party. 

In 2020, Donald Trump’s gains with Cubans and Venezuelans in Miami-Dade County crushed any hopes the Democrats had for stealing the Sunshine State.  I constantly remind people that Donald Trump was elected by two-time Obama voters in the Midwest who crossed party lines, unexpectedly, and voted for the economic nationalist candidate.  Let me demonstrate a coalition shift for you, using Macomb County, Michigan, the home of the “Reagan Democrat,” as the example.

You can see George W. Bush carried the county narrowly in 2004, when he ran well in Michigan, despite a close loss.  Barack Obama, with the tailwind of eight Republican years behind him, flipped the county, and did so in dramatic fashion, winning by over 36,000 votes.  He captured the union voters, soft suburban voters, and a record share, with record turnout, of minority voters. 

Now, you will see the shift beginning.  Unfortunately for Republicans, Mitt Romney was so weak with working class voters, the full impact of Obama’s losses were not realized.  The white working class voter stopped identifying loyally with the Democrats in Obama’s first term.  They showed this in 2012, when Obama received nearly 16,000 fewer votes than he had in his first run through Macomb County.  Romney was only able to gobble up another 4,000 votes, mainly from suburban moderates.

The beauty of the coalition shift is observed below.  Keep in mind, the most recent census reports Macomb County grew by just 40,000 in the past ten years, a growth rate of 4.8 percent.  That is not a surge, by any means, and when a coalition shift is underway, the changes can be dramatic.  This is why Donald Trump won the county by 48,000 votes, just four years after Mitt Romney lost it by 16,000.  Trump pulled the working class voters, in a county with a largely stagnant population, away from the Democrats.  They lost 32,000, and he gained 33,000 over Romney’s total.

Clearly, any legitimate forecaster would expect a large Trump gain in 2020 to be a death knell for Democrats.  With a stagnant population (caused by the trade and industry crisis in the “Rust Belt”), it goes without saying it would probably take Trump’s own stagnation to allow for Joe Biden and the Democrats to make up any ground in this crucial county, which, along with Monroe County, is used to help cancel out Oakland County in GOP statewide victories.

Clearly, with a gain of 39,000 votes, even bigger than the previous GOP jump, Trump is on pace for a blowout of over 100,000 votes in margin, given the lack of any real population gain, which drives voter registration, and the consistent Democrat decline over the past two cycles.  This pattern, replicated over Michigan’s other 82 counties, will lead to an easy 7-10 point Trump landslide in the state.

Or…

Or…Joe Biden will gain nearly 48,000 new votes, dwarfing Trump’s gain in the middle of a coalition shift, likely shortening Trump’s margin of victory by at least 60,000 votes (in a state “lost” by just 154,000).

After reading this article, go have a look at Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, or Wisconsin’s 72 counties, and look for counties that show this same trend.  Pennsylvania even registers its voters by party, showing just how ridiculous it is to believe that a candidate who didn’t even campaign could reverse the tide of a coalition shift in states moving away from the Democrat Party for a full decade.

Author’s Note: This article is free for all subscribers as of June 22, 2023. It is an essential curriculum pillar related to something the media will not explain to you, that most states don’t have the population base to justify both parties gaining substantial amounts of votes in the same election. This dynamic is called a “coalition shift” and explains why President Trump carried the Midwest in 2016 and would have again in a real 2020 election.

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