Draft Script: The Sand Castle

Metadata

• Target duration: 13 minutes
• Word count: ~1,950 words
• Date: 2026-02-13

In 2024, Americans who consumed zero news -- not Fox, not MSNBC, not podcasts, not anything -- backed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by twenty points. Sixty to forty. These weren't the red-hat faithful. They weren't ideological warriors. They were people who watched nothing and still preferred Trump by a landslide.

Today, that same group's approval of Trump has collapsed to 43 percent.

After the 2024 election, the prevailing story -- and you heard it everywhere -- was that Trump had pulled off something historic. A genuine working-class realignment that crossed racial lines. The new Republican majority. Conservative commentators were practically measuring the drapes for a generation of power. And the story wasn't crazy. Trump did expand his coalition. He did make inroads with Black and Latino voters. He did win young men who'd never voted Republican before.

But a new analysis from G. Elliott Morris at Strength In Numbers, using polling data from Verasight, looked under the hood of that coalition -- and what it found should keep every Republican strategist up at night.

Morris divided voters by a simple knowledge test: can you name which party controls the House? Which party controls the Senate? About 75 percent of 2024 voters got both right. About 25 percent didn't. And I want to be really clear about who that 25 percent is, because this is where the conversation goes sideways fast. These aren't stupid people. They're the single mom working doubles who doesn't have bandwidth for C-SPAN. The twenty-something juggling gig apps who couldn't tell you the Speaker of the House because he's too busy trying to make rent. The retiree who stopped watching the news because it was making her miserable. They're the people closest to the economic edge -- the ones spending the largest share of their income on groceries, gas, and keeping the lights on.

And they are the people who swung the 2024 election.

Here's the thesis: Trump's 2024 coalition was not an ideological realignment. It was an atmospheric coalition -- built from the frustration of people who weren't paying close attention and just knew things cost too much under Biden. Atmospheric coalitions evaporate the moment the weather changes.

And the weather has changed.

Those voters who couldn't ID which party controls Congress -- the ones I've been calling "voters on the economic edge" -- backed Trump by a net margin of 11 points in 2024. Today, those same voters disapprove of him by 13 points. That's a 25-point swing. Meanwhile, high-knowledge voters -- the political junkies, the people who follow every news cycle -- moved against Trump too, but far more modestly. They went from roughly even to minus-14.

Now here's where it gets interesting. When you break down Trump's approval issue by issue, high-knowledge and low-knowledge voters look [emphasis]almost identical[/emphasis] on everything. Economy? Nearly the same. Trade? Nearly the same. Foreign policy, immigration, healthcare, government funding -- the gap between the two groups is statistically negligible on every single one.

Except prices.

On inflation and the cost of living, voters on the economic edge disapprove of Trump by 40 points. High-knowledge voters disapprove by 30. That 10-point gap is the entire story. It's the only statistically significant difference between the two groups. Everything else is noise. Prices are the signal.

So why prices, specifically? Why is the grocery bill the one thing that cuts through when nothing else does?

Because a hundred-dollar-a-month grocery increase means very different things depending on where you sit. If you're making a hundred grand, it's annoying. If you're making thirty-five thousand, it's five percent of your after-tax income. That's not an abstraction. That's the difference between paying all your bills and choosing which one to skip.

The voters who swung hardest toward Trump in 2024 are disproportionately lower-income, younger, and less educated -- which means they spend the largest share of every paycheck on the essentials that tariff-driven price increases hit hardest. And it's not just groceries. According to the same polling data, 19 percent of these voters report losing health coverage or facing premium increases since the enhanced ACA subsidies expired at the end of 2025. Among high-knowledge voters, that number is 11 percent. So the grocery bill went up and the safety net got thinner at the same time. That's a compounding squeeze, and these voters are feeling it first and worst.

And here's the thing that reframes this entire conversation: these voters aren't failing a knowledge test. They're passing a different one. They're the most responsive to material reality precisely because they're not filtered through partisan media ecosystems. When a political junkie sees the price of eggs go up, they process it through whatever ideological lens they already have -- "it's the tariffs" or "it's Biden's fault" or "it's corporate greed." When someone who doesn't follow politics sees the price of eggs go up, they just know one thing: it went up, and whoever's in charge right now owns it.

Their opinions might look "soft" by political science standards. But they're the purest signal of lived economic experience in the entire electorate. These voters are the canary in the coal mine. And the canary is choking.

Trump's political superpower -- the thing no other Republican could replicate -- was mobilizing people who don't normally vote. Low-propensity, low-information voters who'd never shown up for a Mitt Romney or a John McCain. He expanded the electorate in his direction in 2016, held it in 2020, and extended it across racial lines in 2024. That was the magic trick. That was the "realignment."

But the voters who are most elastic in your favor are also the most elastic against you. Only 58 percent of voters on the economic edge hold strong opinions about Trump in either direction -- approve or disapprove. Among political junkies, that number is 74 percent. Those high-knowledge voters have hardened views. They've picked a side and they're staying there. The voters on the edge haven't. Their opinions are movable. Conditional. Tied to what's happening right now in their lives, not to some ideological commitment they made years ago.

Trump built his castle on the only part of the beach where the sand shifts fastest. His greatest electoral asset is also his most fragile.

Now, the obvious pushback -- and it's a serious one -- goes like this: you're confusing a temporary polling dip with the reversal of a fifty-year trend.

And that's a fair challenge. The working-class shift toward Republicans has been building for decades. Since the 1970s. White working-class voters started drifting right under Reagan, accelerated through the Gingrich era, and Trump turbocharged it. Analysts like Ruy Teixeira at AEI, Sean Trende at RealClearPolitics, and Patrick Ruffini have all documented this from different angles. The cultural alienation between Democrats and the working class is real. It's structural. And it didn't start with Biden-era inflation.

The counterargument also correctly points out that even if these voters disapprove of Trump, where exactly are they going? Congressional Democrats sit at 18 percent approval. The party has no standard-bearer, no coherent economic populist identity, and no clear answer to the question "what are you actually offering?" Disapproving of Trump doesn't mean approving of Democrats. It might just mean staying home.

I want to be honest about this: a lot of that is right. The long-term educational realignment -- college voters trending Democratic, non-college voters trending Republican -- is real and durable. I'm not here to argue otherwise.

But there's a critical distinction the counterargument misses, and it's the intellectual engine of everything I've been saying. The multi-decade working-class realignment involves voters who are increasingly sorted -- by education, by culture, by media consumption, by identity. Those voters have been choosing the GOP for reasons that go way beyond grocery prices. They're part of a structural trend.

The 2024 marginal surge was a different population. Voters who aren't sorted at all. Who have no partisan media diet, no ideological framework, no structural loyalty to either party. They're not the white working-class voters who've been trending Republican for forty years. They're voters of every race who couldn't tell you which party controls Congress. And they swung to Trump not because they joined a movement, but because they were mad at the guy in charge when prices went up.

Conflating those two groups -- the structurally realigned and the atmospherically captured -- is the counterargument's central error. The first group isn't going anywhere. The second group was never really there.

We live in a time when political coalitions are built on sand -- because the information environment is fractured, attention is scarce, and material conditions change faster than political identities can form. The atmospheric coalition is becoming the norm, not the exception. Obama's youth coalition frayed. Biden's anti-Trump coalition was always provisional. And Trump's working-class expansion? Atmospheric too.

The implication is destabilizing for everyone. No one owns these voters. Not Republicans. Not Democrats. They're loyal to their own lived experience, and they'll move toward whoever is credibly addressing it -- or away from whoever is making it worse.

This doesn't mean Democrats cruise to victory in the midterms. They still need to show up with something. A message, a vision, an actual plan for making people's lives less expensive -- not just "Trump bad," which is true but insufficient. And the voters on the economic edge probably won't show up in midterm numbers anyway; they never do. Historically, midterm turnout runs 15 to 20 points below presidential elections, and the drop-off is concentrated among exactly this demographic.

But here's what does matter: the floor under Republican power is thinner than either party realizes. The MAGA movement's ability to mobilize these voters almost certainly doesn't transfer to Rubio, Vance, or anyone else. Trump was the sand castle's only architect, and even he can't hold back the tide.

Now look -- I want to be straight with you. Nine months is an eternity in politics. Prices could moderate. The Supreme Court might strike down Trump's broadest tariffs. The administration has already shown it's willing to quietly roll back tariffs that generate political pain. If economic conditions improve, some of these voters could drift back. Their opinions are soft in both directions. That's not a prediction of what will happen; it's an honest accounting of what could.

But the fundamental insight holds regardless of what the numbers say in November: a coalition that doesn't know why it exists cannot survive contact with reality. The voters who swung 2024 didn't join a movement. They expressed a feeling. And feelings change.

Because the voters on the economic edge are still there. Still struggling. Still spending too much on groceries and too much time wondering how they're going to cover the next bill. Still waiting for someone to actually notice.

The first party that figures out how to build something real for those people -- not a vibe, not a slogan, not a personality cult, but an actual answer to the question of why everything costs so much and nothing seems to work -- will own the next generation of American politics.

The sand castle's washing away. What gets built next is up to us.

Writer's Notes

1. Condescension framing: I avoided the term "low-information voters" almost entirely in the spoken text, using "voters on the economic edge" and descriptive constructions instead. The empathetic framing of who these voters are appears early (Context section) and is reinforced in Beat 2 with the Popkin reframe -- turning "they didn't know enough" into "they knew the one thing that mattered." This was the spine's biggest tonal risk and I prioritized it throughout.

2. Counterargument length: I gave the structural realignment counterargument significant room (~350 words) as the spine and steelman both recommended. The distinction between structurally realigned voters and atmospherically captured voters is the crux of the episode's intellectual contribution, so I slowed down and let it breathe.

3. Deviation from spine -- cold open: The steelman recommended potentially softening the "people who knew the least liked him the most" framing in the cold open. I kept the original version from the spine because it creates the "wait, what?" reaction the spine calls for, and the empathetic reframing comes immediately after in the context section. The jarring stat earns the right to be jarring because we contextualize it within 60 seconds.

4. Academic sources: Per production notes, I did not name-drop Zaller or Popkin. The logic of their frameworks (opinions without ideological anchors are elastic and follow conditions; low-information signaling as rational heuristic) is woven into Beats 2 and 3 without citation.

5. Metaphor discipline: "Atmospheric coalition," "the weather changed," and "built on sand / sand castle" recur throughout but are used sparingly enough to accumulate force without feeling repetitive. The title pays off in the close.

6. Word count: ~1,950 words, on target for ~13 minutes at speaking pace.

7. Potential fact-check flags: (a) The 60-40 stat for zero-news-consumption voters comes from a pre-election poll cited in the Morris analysis -- should verify original source. (b) The 19% vs. 11% ACA subsidy loss figure comes from the Morris/Verasight poll -- confirm this is from the January 2026 data. (c) The 18% congressional approval figure for Democrats is referenced in the steelman and Bulwark piece but should be sourced to a specific poll.

8. Close: I expanded the close slightly beyond the spine's blueprint, adding a forward-looking challenge about who builds something real for these voters. This felt more aligned with the show's signature move of ending with earned hope and a call to action rather than just analytical observation. The final line ("What gets built next is up to us") gives the audience agency without being naive.