THE REDDENING OF NEW YORK

How Trump's rising popularity in the city (and everywhere else) exposed a Democratic Party DEEP IN DENIAL.

- SIMON VAN ZUYLEN-WOOD

THE MORE CAMOUFLAGE HARRIS-WALZ trucker hats I saw around Brooklyn, the greater my sense of foreboding. "Courting disaster," I texted a colleague, half-joking, as I walked to my Fort Greene polling site on Election Day. Scanning as working class, the hats seemed to be worn exclusively by people who didn't match that description.

They reminded me of the Big Buck Hunter arcade game at a bar near the campus of my elite college, which lent wry "authenticity" to the setting and whose plastic rifles were the only kind most of us had any interest in handling. I wondered if some of the hat wearers were in on the joke or simply liked the aesthetic. But some of these people looked sincere, as though they felt the hats really reflected the campaign's resonance with regular folks.

In the end, the Harris campaign lacked such appeal. Blue-collar voters of every ethnicity drifted right. Donald Trump, according to exit polls, carried voters from families earning between $30,000 and $50,000, a group Joe Biden had won by 13 points. Among minorities without a college degree, Harris performed 26 points worse than Clinton did in 2016. Trump's 45 percent share of the Latino vote was the highest ever for a Republican presidential candidate. Cementing her party's new white-collar identity, it was Harris this time who won voters making six figures or more. Never in the recent history of the Democratic Party has a presidential campaign appealed less to the actual trucker-hat set, auguring a tectonic class realignment of the two parties.