Eugene Scott, a journalist based in Washington, D.C., and a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University SNF Agora Institute, is a contributing Globe Opinion writer.
Democrats are favored to win several races next year, including the Massachusetts gubernatorial election and the campaign for Senator Ed Markey’s seat, according to the Cook Political Report. But most of America isn’t Massachusetts. So if Democrats want to increase the chances of a blue wave next year, they need to pursue voters who have backed President Trump and his agenda.
But a couple of Democratic politicians have faced intraparty pushback for suggesting that they don’t need Trump supporters. Last week, CNN host Laura Coates asked Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat from Texas, how she would go about winning over voters “who previously voted for Trump” days after she launched her campaign for the US Senate with an ad featuring the president calling her “a very low I.Q. person.”
“I don’t know that we’ll necessarily convert all of Trump’s supporters,” Crockett said. “That’s not our goal.”
Coates then asked Crockett if she needed to convert them.
“No, we don’t, we don’t need to,” the Senate candidate replied. “Our goal is to make sure that we can engage people that historically have not been talked to. Because there’s so many people that get ignored, specifically in the state of Texas.”
The exchange was reminiscent of a tense conversation between a journalist and Katie Porter, a former US representative from California who is running for governor.
When asked about her message to the 40 percent of California voters who supported Trump in 2024 that the Democrat would “need in order to win,” Porter scoffed at the premise.
“How would I need them in order to win, ma’am?” she asked while laughing. Porter later lost her temper with the reporter and ended the interview, suggesting that it was getting “unnecessarily argumentative.”
Last week’s election of the first Democratic mayor of Miami in nearly 30 years could provide a model worth replicating. Eileen Higgins won the majority of independent voters a year after they backed Trump. And a lower percentage of Cuban Americans and other Latinos backed her Republican opponent than backed the president a year ago.
Higgins’s victory — along with Democratic wins last month in largely conservative states like Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina — is a reminder that many of the voters who cast ballots for Republicans last year are up for grabs next year.
As I wrote last month, only a minority of Republican voters are “Trump-first voters,” according to a recent report by the Johns Hopkins University SNF Agora Institute, where I am a visiting fellow. And even if flipping the remaining Republican voters over to Democratic candidates appears to be a herculean feat, running a campaign that discourages them from turning out for Republican candidates could help some Democrats.
It’s also worth remembering that 43 percent of Americans identify as independents and that not all Trump voters are Republicans. In fact, the president won 4 percent of Democrats in 2024. Winning over these voters might be an easy climb for some Democratic candidates. As last month’s election reminded us, Republicans have a hard time turning out Trump voters when the president’s name is not on the ballot — and it won’t be next year.
Trump claimed to have a mandate when he returned to Washington earlier this year with a Republican-controlled House and Senate. But a sizable percentage of Americans are giving him historically low marks. He has even seen a decline in support from Republicans. This is good news for Democrats like Crockett who hope to run statewide races in Republican strongholds like Texas.
But dissatisfaction with Trump does not guarantee a vote for a Democrat. And dismissing Trump voters as unreachable certainly will not guarantee that vote. But attempting to connect with those voters might. If Democratic candidates inform them of what they will do for them if elected and remind them of how Trump and the Republicans have failed to live up to their promises, it could be what it takes to get some of these candidates across the finish line.
