Book Excerpt: Party of the People
Dear Readers: Today we are featuring an excerpt from Patrick Ruffini’s new book, Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. Ruffini, a Republican pollster and cofounder of the firm Echelon Insights, meticulously tracks the political changes in the wake of Donald Trump’s ascension to the top of the Republican Party. In the excerpt below, Ruffini documents the improvements Trump made in 2020 among nonwhite voters even as he lost his reelection bid. We also spoke with Ruffini about his book as well as recent polling trends on our “Politics is Everything” podcast. — The Editors From PARTY OF THE PEOPLE: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP by Patrick Ruffini. Copyright © 2023 by Patrick Ruffini. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, LLC. The story in the 2020 presidential election was largely that of an electorate that had made up its mind on Donald Trump four years earlier, with just the right number of votes in just the right states turning a narrow victory into a narrow defeat—but with one crucial exception. In most of America’s nonwhite communities—especially those filled with first- and second-generation immigrants—Trump did better than he had in 2016. In