Trump’s base goes blue

Sparky’s is not the sort of place you take a girl you are trying to impress. It’s the place you go to enjoy a $3 Miller Lite while you smoke Marlboros and meet neighbors.It’s also the sort of place wry liberal journalists liked to mock after 2016: a working-class dive bar in Bristol, Pennsylvania. Nothing could be more trite than a reporter traveling to a Pittsburgh-area diner or a Northeast Philly saloon and asking the blue-collar workers if they still support President Donald Trump.But Bristol, it turns out, is exactly where to look to understand Election Day 2026. Bristol Township and neighboring Tullytown Borough are two towns in Lower Bucks County sitting on the Delaware River just across from New Jersey. These were quintessential Trump towns: working-class, formerly industrial towns that swung very hard from blue to red between 2012 and 2016.These were also quintessential blue-wave towns in 2026, swinging much harder toward Democrats than the rest of the state, thus flipping a congressional seat and a state Senate seat.In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the blue-collar precincts with the most dramatic pro-Trump shifts over the past decade had the most dramatic pro-Democrat shifts this year.And the same pattern shows up in other states, too: Trump country went blue.Here’s the tough lesson from yesterday for Republicans: Trump’s core base of working-class white, non-churchgoing, economically centrist, independent voters has no loyalty to the GOP, and this year at least, these Trump voters elected Democrats.The numbers Every single county in Pennsylvania was more Democratic in 2026 than it had been in 2024, but the county with the biggest blue swing, percentage-wise, was Greene County, which lies south of Pittsburgh and is tucked into the corner of the state bounded by West Virginia.This is former coal country. If not a poor county, it’s working class: The median household income here is 25% below the national median.Before swinging 15 points toward Democrats this year, it swung 14 points to Trump: The sons of coal country were exactly the folks who came out of nowhere to give Trump the Keystone State in 2016 and again in 2024, and they were the vanguard of the state’s blue wave in 2026.From 2012 to 2024, only five Pennsylvania counties swung more redward than Greene, and three of those — Fayette, Carbon, and Schuylkill — were three of the 10 counties where Democrats made the biggest percentage gains.It’s even clearer in Ohio.Ohio’s five Trumpiest counties — that is, the five counties where Trump picked up the highest percentage of votes compared to Romney — are all among the top 10 counties on the score of pro-Democrat swing this year.And in lower Bucks County, Democrat Bob Harvie defeated five-term Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R), and Democrats flipped a state Senate seat. The biggest swings from Fitzpatrick’s 2024 reelection were in Bristol and Tullytown, the most working-class part of the district, and exactly the places that gave Trump his victory in Bucks County last election.Trumpers are not Republicans Jim is a Bristol man I met at Sparky’s in October. Jim grew up in Bristol. His father was a steamfitter. Jim was a forklift driver. When politics came up, I asked if he votes. “Since Trump, yes.” Before then? “Nope.”“I think he actually wants to make the country better,” Jim says of Trump. “I know he’s an asshole, but you look at what the Democrats are doing. …”Jim’s brief against the Democrats is not ideological: open borders and covering up Biden’s age-related decline are the two complaints. Jim is not a conservative in the inside-the-Beltway sense of the term. He doesn’t complain about high taxes, he doesn’t care about social issues, and he articulates no foreign policy.Jim lost his job driving a forklift because, after an accident, he tested positive for marijuana, and so he got fired. Now Jim gets his income from Medicaid, working as a home-health aide for his girlfriend.He’s unmarried, doesn’t go to church, and doesn’t really work. He can’t name a single Republican he would support for president after Trump. He can’t even name his governor, who is up for reelection.I meet voters like Jim all around the country. Until this week, I assumed they would stay home when Trump wasn’t on the ballot. I was wrong. Instead, they turned out on Tuesday and voted for Democrats.Vice President JD Vance explained this in a post-election analysis. Vance noted that the 2026 electorate was pretty similar to the 2024 electorate, but then he quoted a pollster relaying the bad news for Republicans: “The data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us.”“The main problem is not turnout,” Vance said. “The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.”Many segments of the 2024 GOP electorate flipped to the Democrats in 2026, the early numbers suggest. But the most extreme swings, again, came in the places where Trump seemed to have special appeal.‘American preservationists’ By 2024, Trump had a massive base of electoral support. About half the country voted for him, after all.Also, many reluctant Trump voters or standard-order Republican voters in 2016 became fervent Trump supporters by his third run. Enthusiastic Trumpers run the gamut from anti-abortion Catholics and religious Right evangelicals to fierce libertarians and country-club Republicans — and everything in between.But the molten-hot core base of Trump’s support — the voters he brought to the party that nobody else did, and who gave him the Republican nomination in 2016 — were the voters from Sparky’s and 100 dive bars and diners like that across America. These voters were concentrated in the industrial or post-industrial parts of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio.Trump’s early core base was not dedicated to limited government or Christian morals. Pollster Emily Ekins described them best in a post-2016 study. Ekins, working with the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group, grouped Trump supporters into five categories, which included religious conservatives and free-market types. But Trump’s strongest group was distinctive. She called them “American preservationists,” a term that echoes Trump’s motto, Make America Great Again.“These Trump voters lean economically progressive, believe the economic and political systems are rigged, have nativist immigration views, and a nativist and ethnocultural conception of American identity,” Ekins wrote.“Although American Preservationists are less loyal Republicans than other Trump voter groups, and nearly half had positive views of Clinton in 2012, American Preservationists comprise the core Trump constituency that propelled him to victory in the early Republican primaries.”Ekins went on, explaining the contours of this group: “Despite being the most likely group to say that religion is ‘very important’ to them, they are the least likely to attend church regularly. They are the most likely group to be on Medicaid, to report a permanent disability that prevents them from working, and to regularly smoke cigarettes. Despite watching the most TV, they are the least politically informed of the Trump groups.”CHARACTER MATTERS, UNFORTUNATELY FOR REPUBLICANSThese are the voters who propelled Trump to his primary victories in 2016 and repeatedly helped him outperform Romney in rural and industrial places.It’s not hard to see why these voters would have no allegiance to the Republican Party, though. It’s also not hard to imagine them voting Democrat while Republicans preside over high inflation, a costly war very distant from U.S. interests, and evident corruption at the highest levels.It was surprising that voters swung so far toward Democrats in the 2026 elections. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that it was Trump’s base that led the way.