Political scientists have long seen American electoral politics functioning in terms of cycles. President-elect Donald Trump’s historic winning coalition may have signaled the beginning of a new cycle in 2024.
During these cycles or eras, which on average seem to last around 40 years, one party or another might have an advantage, as Republicans did from 1896-1932 and Democrats did from 1932-1968, but their defining characteristic is the stability of the coalitions behind each party. While landslides will occasionally happen, in general, which factions vote Democratic and Republican generally remain the same, and the winners and losers are determined by the ability of each party to keep their respective coalitions together and undermine the cohesion of their opponents.
Hence why the winning coalitions of Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson, the only two Democratic presidents to win during cycles in which Republicans dominated, looked remarkably similar to those carried by losing Democratic candidates during the same period. They included the “Solid South,” northern Catholic immigrants, and Western farmers hostile to business interests. They owed their victory not to expanding their coalitions, which they didn’t really accomplish, but rather to splits within the opposing Republican coalitions over the nomination of James G. Blaine in 1884, currency policy in 1892, and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Similarly, Republicans Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon both won during periods when the Democratic coalition was fragmenting.
However shocking Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 was to the American political and cultural elite, his coalition wasn’t particularly novel. It was in large part made up of the traditional Republican electorate combined with defectors hostile to Hillary Clinton. He only increased his vote total by two million above Mitt Romney’s 2012 number, and Hillary Clinton’s loss came down as much to her inability to keep her own coalition together as to a new one being formed.
Already, however, 2020 presented a very different picture. Whereas Donald Trump had increased his support by only 2 million votes from Mitt Romney’s 2012 total in 2016, in 2020 he increased his vote total by 12 million. Disguised by the unique nature of the COVID-19 election, and the fact that Joe Biden assumed the presidency, 2020 increasingly looks like the end of the era that began with the 1996 election.
That era, during which Democratic candidates received 49 percent, 48 percent, 48 percent, 53 percent, 51 percent, 48 percent, and 51 percent of the vote, saw major changes to the Electoral College map when it came to state partisanship, but remarkably few when it came to the makeup of the parties. Democrats, increasingly, became the party of non-whites and the white professional elite. Democrats became the party of urban America, Republicans of rural America, and the suburbs the major geographical battleground of U.S. politics. Democrats won younger voters, and Republicans were older voters.
One thing that defines a political cycle is that the coalitional polarization begins soft, and then hardens over time until it becomes impossible for a party to win without breaking it. Just as critically, the beneficiary of the ossification becomes increasingly convinced it cannot lose, which in turn causes it to behave in manners that shatter its own coalition. The greatest triumph for the Republican Party during the pre-1932 party system came in 1928 when Herbert Hoover broke through into the Solid South, and it was followed by a period of arrogant governance that offended everyone. Lyndon Johnson won a landslide in 1964, and promptly set off a cultural revolution that shattered the New Deal coalition.
Under Bill Clinton, the Democrats won younger voters but not by that much. Republicans won older voters but by a similarly small margin. The result was a focus on nominating candidates with broad appeal.
However, as the party system ossified, Democrats focused on only two things. First, candidates who could mobilize non-white turnout. And second, candidates who could appeal to upscale white suburban voters. Barack Obama largely dropped any pretense of slowing age or rural polarization in favor of doubling down on support for Democrats among young voters and minorities.
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton identified “soccer moms” as a constituency he could woo away from Republicans and build a majority through. In the 2000s, Barack Obama added the kids of 1980s soccer moms to the coalition. In the 2010s, however, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris made Democrats the party of Soccer Moms and only Soccer Moms.
This narrowing of the Democratic coalition could only work if Republicans voluntarily ceded the field by narrowing their coalition as well, as Mitt Romney did in 2012. In a historical irony, Mitt Romney did more good for his party in defeat than Barack Obama did in victory. Obama’s 2012 victory led Democrats to believe they could win any election by focusing on winning over suburban college graduates, while Romney’s defeat led Republican voters to conclude that the GOP could expect only defeat if it continued playing by the rules of the post-1996 political system. So, Donald Trump smashed them, and Democrats, until November 2024, had no idea what hit them.
Donald Trump grasped that American politics is about representation. Americans do not want their leaders to always agree with them, but to represent them. Someone who has to take a poll before making a decision is inherently seen as weak. What Americans want is someone who asks for their vote and treats them as valuable. Donald Trump had policy differences with many Muslim voters in Hamtramck and Dearborn Heights, Michigan, but he still traveled there to ask for their votes. No Democratic candidate had bothered in decades.
By focusing solely on suburban upscale white voters, the Democrats had taken for granted the groups who had long constituted their coalition: urban voters who saw their cities fall into crime and unrest to pander to the academic theories of elites; young voters left behind by messages to “just learn to code”; and Latino voters for whom the Democratic message of “amnesty” had not been updated since 2004 and now came off as patronizingly racist. It was not that those voters merely disagreed with Democratic policies. Rather, it was that the Democratic message itself showed that Latinos, young voters, Asian Americans, and others were not important.
Ironically, the Democratic embrace of identity politics had the effect of making American politics zero-sum. If Democrats had embraced a policy-based message designed to explain how their approach would make all Americans better off, then their messaging to one group would not have had the effect of signaling to everyone else that their concerns were not as important. But by embracing the concept of “LGBT Issues,” “African American Issues,” “Latinx/Latino Issues,” and “women’s Issues,” they made the decision to emphasize any of them a deliberate choice to snub every other group.
The Democratic decision to campaign heavily on abortion, then, was evaluated not on whether voters agreed with it, but whether they agreed with the decision to talk about it instead of Gaza, the border, inflation, or crime. African American and Latino men reacted negatively not because they were pro-life per se, though many were, but because it indicated Harris was not interested in their economic and quality of life issues. The decision not to have prominent transgender or Palestinian speakers at the DNC became snubs, while Harris’s support for sex change operations for illegal alien prison inmates became evidence she was for them, not for you.
This behavior is typical of a party at the end of a cyclical period in American politics when it becomes arrogant and inflexible. A predominant party ceases being a coalition as one group gains more and more control – as was the case with Southerners within the 1850s Democratic Party and white liberals within the Democratic Party after 1964. They then alienate everyone else.
The net effect is that rather than dominating American politics, that group becomes irrelevant. Democrats won elections and played a key role in American politics between 1856 and 1928, but Southern white Democrats were irrelevant. The Democratic Party won elections after 1964, but never by running a campaign focusing on white liberal identity. When the party fully embraced the concerns of largely white liberal elites after 2012, it met steady defeat.
The new American party system is therefore unlikely to be one of permanent Republican rule, and it may not even be one of conservative hegemony, but what we can be certain of is that those who bid for total power during the final days of the old system and triggered its death will be the least relevant. The Cheney Republicans and suburban elites for whom hating Donald Trump became a core element of their class identity will no longer be swing voters because they have abdicated that role by becoming straight-ticket Democratic voters. In turn, by showing they are willing to vote Republican when they feel neglected, young voters, Latinos, Asian Americans, and the 2024 Trump coalition have ensured a central role for themselves in the new order.
In 2020, Democrats tried to cancel Bernie Sanders for appearing on Joe Rogan’s show. In 2024, Harris decided to forgo an appearance under internal pressure. In 2028, appearing on Rogan is likely to be a right of passage for every serious Democratic Presidential candidate. It is unlikely a single one will be caught dead with Rachel Maddow, assuming she is still on the air. That is what a realignment looks like.
Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.
