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Youngstown State University professor Paul Sracic said it is pretty unprecedented for a party to fall this far from grace in just one year. “This big party shift just doesn’t ever happen, and these numbers are just stunning.”

Sracic speculates the numbers just have to make Democratic strategists sick to the stomach. “It is hard to think of a worse-case scenario,” he said.

The former two-time Fulbright Scholar, an expert in modern American populism, said it is also fascinating that these voters are moving away from Democrats despite a tremendous amount of cultural pressure. “And that is an important nuance to include at looking at this historic shift.”

Sracic said the political and cultural messages from the Democratic Party are more often than not echoed by the entities that have outsize power in our culture, “such as Big Tech, academia, corporations, national sports organizations, the national news media, unions, and Hollywood. And these voters aren’t just pushing back from that pressure, they are rejecting it.”

These results are based on aggregated data from all U.S. Gallup telephone surveys in 2021, which included interviews with more than 12,000 randomly sampled U.S. adults. It is the same survey I watched carefully in 2016 in trying to calculate whether anecdotal reporting was reflected in the data available during that year’s presidential election.

These voters didn’t tell many how they were voting the 2016 cycle or in 2020 because of the cultural pressure that came from all of the entities Sracic mentioned. Former President Donald Trump won in 2016 in part because few saw it coming. He won more votes than anyone expected in 2020 for the same reason. Now, however, with him off the national stage, voters are less timid about saying how they feel.

“There is an underlying anger for a lot of voters that they can't say things that are considered taboo among the media and the ruling class, that they aren’t allowed to debate things like mandates, school choice, crime, etc. because when they do, a label is attached to them,” he said. "And I think what you are seeing is that breakthrough in this survey."

There are people skeptical of both sides, often referred to as swing voters, who were not in love with Republicans or Democrats but were willing to give Democrats a chance last year. When the Democrats were given that chance, they answered to a group of liberals, and that is forcing both centrist Democrats and swing voters to pick Republicans instead.

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