Shor, Teixeira, Greenberg, and like-minded critics now argue that this process has gone too far and that analysts (including me) who have highlighted the impact of demographic change on the electoral balance have underestimated the risks the Democratic Party faces from its erosion in white, non-college-educated support, especially in the Trump era. Although Democrats have demonstrated that they can reliably win the presidential popular vote with this new alignment—what I’ve called their “coalition of transformation”—the critics argue that the overrepresentation of blue-collar white voters across the Rust Belt, Great Plains, and Mountain West states means that Democrats will struggle to amass majorities in either the Electoral College or the Senate unless they improve their performance with those voters. Weakness with non-college-educated white voters outside the major metros also leaves Democrats with only narrow paths to a House majority, they argue. Shor has been the starkest in saying that these imbalances in the electoral system threaten years of Republican dominance if Democrats don’t regain some of the ground they have lost with working-class voters since Clinton’s time.

These arguments probably would not have attracted as much notice if they were focused solely on those non-college-educated white Americans who have voted predominantly for Republicans since the ’80s and whose numbers are consistently shrinking as a share of the electorate (both nationally and even in the key Rust Belt swing states) by two or three percentage points every four years. What really elevated attention to these critiques was Trump’s unexpectedly improved performance in 2020 among Hispanics and, to a lesser extent, Black Americans. The neo–New Democrats have taken that as evidence that aggressive social liberalism—such as calls for defunding the police—is alienating not only white voters but now nonwhite working-class voters.

If it lasts, such a shift among working-class voters of color could largely negate the advantage that Democrats have already received, and expect moving forward, from the electorate’s growing diversity. “You won’t benefit that much from the changing ethnic demographic mix of the country if these overwhelmingly noncollege, nonwhite [voters] start moving in the Republican direction, and that concentrates the mind,” Teixeira told me.