“For all his apparent divisiveness,” wrote the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, “Trump assembled the most diverse Republican presidential coalition in history and rode political trends that will prove significant for decades to come.” That statement neatly describes Donald Trump’s sweeping electoral victory this week. But Ruffini wrote it more than a year ago.

Even though Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he dramatically improved his performance that year among Black and, especially, Latino voters compared with 2016. According to Ruffini’s 2023 book, Party of the People, this was no fluke. American politics was undergoing a fundamental reordering in which the old dividing lines of race and wealth were being supplanted by new ones, namely education and trust in institutions. The ties that once bound low-income and nonwhite voters to the Democratic Party, he argued, were breaking. “If this trend continues,” Ruffini wrote, “it would mean the birth of a new party system, replacing the old twentieth-century class divide between the parties.”

Then came 2024. We don’t yet have precise data on how different groups voted, but the geographic swings make certain conclusions unavoidable. Trump made gains everywhere on Tuesday, but the places where he improved the most compared with 2020 were heavily nonwhite counties that have overwhelmingly supported Democrats for decades. Miami-Dade County, which is majority-Hispanic, voted for the Republican candidate for the first time since 1988; Baldwin County, Georgia, which is 42 percent Black, went red too. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the 97 percent–Latino Starr County, Texas, by 60 points. In 2024, Trump won it by 16 points.

In Ruffini’s view, the Democratic Party can no longer take the votes of nonwhite Americans for granted. “I think if they want to win back some of these voters,” he told me, “Democrats need to stop presenting themselves solely as the defenders of American institutions and instead as a party committed to change.”

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Rogé Karma: On Election Day, you wrote on X that “the FDR coalition is being dismantled piece by piece and being reassembled in Donald Trump’s GOP.” That’s a pretty provocative statement. So tell me what you were actually seeing in the data on Tuesday that made you think that was happening.

Patrick Ruffini: I often cringe a little bit when this is described primarily in terms of a “racial realignment.” In many ways, it’s a racial de-alignment, because the parties are realigning on educational lines.

If you look at a place like South Texas, which is very heavily Hispanic, Democrats were winning by 50, 60 points in 2012. And now we are at a point where it’s not just trending red but objectively red. You look at a place like Miami-Dade County, Florida, obviously home to a lot of Hispanics—Trump won it by 11 points.

But I think the more interesting county to me was Osceola County, outside of Orlando, a heavily Puerto Rican community. There was obviously a lot of focus on Puerto Rican voters in the closing days of the campaign because of the joke told at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally. But Trump actually wins that county, which is unheard of. And if you believe the exit polls, then there’s evidence that this is happening with Black voters and Asian voters as well.

So when I use the term FDR coalition, I’m referring to a lot of groups that have a lot of disparate interests. To me, that has been the character of the Democratic Party for decades. You have groups who are not necessarily ideologically aligned on everything but can all find a home in this big tent. And you’re seeing that more and more in the Republican Party now. Since 2016, educated white voters have shifted left but every other group has shifted right. That was only enough for a near win for Trump in 2020, but this time it was enough for a popular majority in the country.

Karma: The data here are still preliminary, but let’s say you’re right and we are indeed experiencing this racial depolarization. I think the big question is why. One way of viewing it, as you do, is as a continuation of this broader educational realignment in our politics. But another way of looking at it is we’re in the midst of a global anti-incumbent backlash. Ruling parties in countries all over the world are losing left and right, mostly driven by what you once described to me as a “post-COVID inflationary malaise.”

[Rogé Karma: Age isn’t Biden’s only problem]

Ruffini: I think you’re completely right. Absolutely this was an election about the economy. Absolutely it was a change election. But underlying it is a divide in the electorate that has been building for a while now.

I’m not even sure I’d describe it as strictly educational sorting. What happened in 2020—and I think what we’ll continue to see in 2024—is an ideological sorting. Lots of nonwhite voters identify ideologically as conservatives but historically have tended to vote for Democrats anyway. That started to change in 2020. You had data suggesting that Hispanic conservatives, Asian American conservatives, Black conservatives moved by about 35 to 40 points toward Trump. I think that tells us that politics is sorting on an ideological axis.

And I think the reason that’s happening is because the forces that have long kept certain racial and racial-identity groups within the Democratic fold are no longer binding them to the Democratic Party. I think you have large numbers of folks in these groups who are temperamentally not on board with what they perceive to be the race-and-gender identity politics of the left. And that’s very problematic, potentially, for Democrats.

Karma: This is one of the big themes of your book: Democrats have alienated working-class voters of color by moving far too far to the left on issues around race and gender identity. But it seems to me that Democrats really learned their lesson from 2020. Kamala Harris ran way to the right on immigration. She talked about the importance of having a strong military. She played up her background as a prosecutor. She hardly mentioned race. And yet we saw even bigger shifts than we did in 2020. How do you explain that?

Ruffini: Harris ran a very clinically competent campaign. Speaking as a Republican, I was pretty concerned that she was going to successfully erase the taint associated with the Biden policies. I think it was clear she was trying to pivot the party in a more moderate direction on these issues.

But as the campaign wore on, she was unable to articulate how she would be different from Biden. And Trump got more and more effective at painting her as an extremist. He ran ads saying things like “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you,” in the voice of a Black man. Sometimes campaigns are not just about what you say about yourself. Campaigns are about how the opposition is able to define you.

The big problem for Democrats is there’s a powerful lingering perception that they are too progressive on some of these issues. And I don’t think anything short of an act of full-on repudiation is going to change that. Some kind of decisive action to distance themselves from that agenda—a kind of modern Sister Souljah moment. And Harris didn’t have any of those.

Karma: I’m interested in what you think that kind of moment would look or sound like. Because one critique I think you could make of her campaign is that you can take moderate positions all you want, but what really tells voters you are serious is when you pick fights with your own side. And she didn’t really do that. She wasn’t getting in fights with the immigration groups or the racial-justice groups. And in areas where she did get into fights, like the corporate-price-gouging proposal, she pretty quickly backed down.

Ruffini: I would put it almost exactly in those terms, because obviously conflict and controversy can be incredibly clarifying for voters. When the differences are subtle, voters are not necessarily going to get the message.

Karma: But there is an area where the difference between the parties isn’t so subtle, and that’s on economics. Nonwhite voters are much more likely to vote their material interests and prioritize economic issues. And when you look at where the two parties stand on those issues, Democrats have embraced a very progressive, redistributive economic agenda. That’s included these huge investments in clean-energy and manufacturing jobs. Lowering prescription-drug prices. Expanding the child tax credit in a way that slashes child poverty. Meanwhile, Trump has sort of gone in the other direction: He’s promising huge corporate-tax cuts and joking with Elon Musk about firing striking workers. Wouldn’t you think that kind of difference would make working-class voters more likely to vote Democratic, not less?

[Rogé Karma: Trump isn’t even pretending anymore]

Ruffini: It’s true that nonwhite working-class voters in general are much more materialist. I simply just don’t think that those policies that you mentioned actually register in the same way as the underlying state of the economy. Maybe sometime down the road these things will bear fruit and Democrats will get credit for these programs. But the economic issue that matters most for voters right now is inflation. And that’s poisonous for the Democratic Party.

Karma: We’ve really only seen this shift among nonwhite voters in the past two election cycles. How much of this is a product of just Donald Trump himself? And would these same shifts still hold in a future where a non-Trump figure was at the top of the Republican ticket?

Ruffini: That’s the big question, because I think, in many ways, Trump ran the perfect campaign that was optimized to exactly this coalition.

Karma: Okay, I have to stop you there. Because, if anything, I think the liberal perspective is that Trump ran a way more unhinged campaign. A way more dark, xenophobic campaign. Alongside some super gimmicky things like serving french fries at McDonald’s. So what about his campaign do you think was so good at breaking through?

Ruffini: In response to the McDonald’s thing, you had some Democrats saying, “That’s crazy. That looks weird. The garbage-truck thing backfired.” But that’s the opposite of how it played. Trump was masterful in this election at crafting these images and these contrasts between him and Kamala Harris, where she was very cautious and scripted. And you’ve got that versus somebody like Trump, who is able to go on Joe Rogan and mix it up and just shoot from the hip for hours.

Look, elections are not clinical exercises of people evaluating competing sets of policy proposals and making rational decisions. They are, in a sense, popularity contests and image-making contests. And something remarkable Trump did was, through the Musk endorsement and the podcast appearances and the UFC matches, he was able to bootstrap his own version of pop culture. And he was able to project that forward as something that voters in his target groups could gravitate toward.

I think that was fundamental. And I think that very few Republicans or Democrats understand how to do it well.

Karma: What advice would you give to Democrats who are dismayed by this election, by the fact that they’re losing so many of their core voters, and want to reverse that trend?

Ruffini: I think the thing they can do to best respond to it is take a page out of Bill Clinton’s playbook. On the one hand, he openly repudiated some of the toxic tendencies within the party. But I think fundamentally what he did was, he was able to address himself as a change agent. People outside the political system don’t like Washington. And I think, unfortunately for the Democrats, their position right now, especially on these issues of democracy and upholding institutional norms, is just completely the opposite temperamentally of where most Americans are when it comes to institutions in Washington, D.C., and Beltway politics.

Karma: Say more on that. It seems pretty clear that at its core, the college-versus-noncollege divide is really a high-trust-versus-low-trust-in-institutions divide. Why are Democrats losing those low-trust voters, and can they do anything about it?

Ruffini: I understand why Democrats are so focused on the need to preserve democracy. Obviously, that’s a message a lot of people can agree with. But think about somebody who is disaffected, angry, who dislikes everything about traditional politics. When they hear that, they immediately think that this is a pro-system party. That this is a party that doesn’t share the dislike and distrust they have—maybe not of institutions generally but of Washington, D.C., in particular. And so I think it was a big mistake for Kamala, in the final days of her campaign, to pivot back to defending democracy with Liz Cheney at her rallies.

Barack Obama was a change candidate. Bill Clinton was a change candidate. I think if they want to win back some of these voters, Democrats need to stop presenting themselves solely as the defenders of American institutions and instead as a party committed to change.

Election Night is upon us, with all of its finger-gnawing anxiety, its cortisol-driven fear, and, for roughly half the country, the possibility of ecstatic relief after another surreal presidential campaign.

Results could take days, even weeks, to shake out. But the state of the race could also reveal itself surprisingly quickly. At 7 p.m. eastern time tonight, polls will close in the battleground state of Georgia. At 7:30 p.m., polls will close in North Carolina, another crucial toss-up. Both swing states are known for counting their ballots quickly, due to state laws that allow them to tally early and mail-in votes before Election Day.

[Read: Election anxiety is telling you something]

So when will we know the results, how can we sensibly extrapolate the early returns, and—perhaps most important—what information and analysis should we ignore? David Wasserman, a political analyst with the Cook Political Report, joined my podcast, Plain English, to explain how to watch the election returns like a pro—without falling for false hope or conspiracy theories. Here are three tips for following Election Night without losing your mind.

1. This might sound weird, but don’t expect this election to be as close as 2016 or 2020.

Wait, what? Aren’t Kamala Harris and Donald Trump essentially tied in national and swing-state polling averages? Didn’t Nate Silver put the odds that Harris will win this election at an exquisitely decimaled number between 50.00 and 50.99 percent? Isn’t there a nonzero chance that both candidates win 269 electoral votes?

Yes, yes, and yes. “This is the closest election in polling that I’ve covered in my 17 years, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to produce the closest result,” Wasserman told me. The 2016 and 2020 elections were absurdly close contests, both of them decided by about 78,000 votes. But, he said, “even elections as balanced as 2024 aren’t likely to hinge on 80,000 votes distributed across a handful of states.” Close polling does not predict historically close elections.

To understand what Wasserman means, perhaps a sports analogy is useful. Both sports betting and political polling try to express uncertain future events in the language of probabilities. The 2016 and 2020 elections were a bit like Super Bowls that went into overtime—something that’s happened only twice in the game’s six-decade history. Let’s say the next Super Bowl, in 2025, looks like a statistical dead heat, with two 13–4 teams with the exact same point differential. Let’s furthermore say that Vegas sportsbooks throw up their hands and declare the game a “pick-’em,” meaning neither team is favored to win. Even with all of this balance, it’s still very unlikely that the game will go to overtime, because so few games ever go to overtime. It’s the same with this election. We are still a normal polling error from either Trump or Harris winning the seven closest swing states, which would be a decisive victory.

[Brian Klaas: The truth about polling]

We don’t know how to forecast future events in any language outside of probabilities, and it’s hard to make peace with a world of probabilities. If you flip a coin 10 times, the median outcome is five heads and five tails. But you shouldn’t expect that 10 flips will yield five heads, because that outcome has less than a 25 percent chance of occurring. You’re actually three times more likely to get a number of heads other than five. So don’t get too invested in any particular electoral map. It’s very unlikely that your highly specific prediction will come to pass, and that includes an election decided by 80,000 votes.

2.  Ignore the exit polls.

Exit polls are exciting, because they provide a morsel of data during a highly anxious evening when audiences and news organizations are starving to know what’s going to happen in the next four hours, or four days. But there’s nothing particularly special about an exit poll. In many ways, it’s just another poll, but with a larger—and possibly misleading—sample. Exit polls might actually be less useful than other public-opinion surveys, Wasserman said, because the majority of voters now cast their ballots before Election Day.

If you’re watching a newscast that’s making a huge deal out of exit polls, it might have more to do with the need to fill time before we get actual election results. Rather, if you want to get an early sense of how things are trending on Election Night, the best thing to do is focus on county-level results that report the complete tally of votes. That means you’ll also want to avoid being overconfident about election results that are incomplete.

3. For the earliest bellwether counties, watch Nash, Cobb, Baldwin, and Saginaw.

By the end of the night, we’re likely to have nearly complete results from counties in Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan. Here are a few to watch:

Nash County, North Carolina

If you’re looking for a coin-flip county in a coin-flip election, it’s hard to find a better one than Nash, just outside North Carolina’s Research Triangle. According to Wasserman, the county has been decided by fewer than 1,000 votes in every presidential race since 2004. In 2016, out of about 47,000 votes counted, Trump won by fewer than 100 ballots. In 2020, out of about 52,000 votes counted, Joe Biden won by fewer than 200 ballots. If Harris keeps Nash in the Democratic column, it would suggest that she can fight Trump to a draw in poorer areas while she racks up votes in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.

[Listen: It could all come down to North Carolina]

Cobb County, Georgia

Metro Atlanta makes up most of Georgia’s vote, and Cobb County is packed with the sort of highly educated suburban dwellers who have shifted left in the Trump years. In 2012, Mitt Romney won Cobb by more than 12 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won the country by 14 points. For Harris to win the election, she’ll need double-digit margins in highly educated counties like Cobb across other swing states.

Baldwin County, Georgia

Although most eyes will be on Atlanta’s Fulton County, Wasserman told me that he’ll also be scrutinizing smaller and midsize Georgia counties, such as Baldwin County. Just outside Macon, in the middle of the state, Baldwin County is about 40 percent Black, and as a college town, it has a lot of young people. In 2016, Baldwin voted for Hillary Clinton by 1.7 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won it by 1.3 points. If Trump breaks through in Baldwin, Wasserman said, “it would be a sign that Harris is perhaps underperforming in both turnout and vote preference among younger Black voters and young voters” across the country.

Saginaw County, Michigan

How will we know if polls yet again undercounted Trump’s support among white men without a college degree? By looking at working-class counties like Saginaw, where Democrats won cycle after cycle before 2016. No Republican presidential candidate had won the plurality of votes in Saginaw since 1984, until Trump carried the county by just over one percentage point against Clinton, only for Biden to claw Saginaw back into the Democratic column by a mere 0.3 percentage points in 2020. “This is a place where organized labor powered Democrats to victory for many years,” Wasserman said. “If Trump wins Saginaw by five points, it’s going to be very difficult for Harris to overcome that.”