Was Trump's Victory a Political Realignment?
Are we entering a new decades-long era of populist conservative rule?
Donald Trump has done what only Grover Cleveland before him managed to pull-off: Win two non-consecutive terms as president.1 Trump’s two victories feel rather different, however. In 2016, it seemed like an awful accident; this year, it seems like an intentional embrace of awfulness. Or to put it another way, it’s like the difference between terror (2016’s post-election anticipation that something dreadful was about to happen) and horror (2024’s post-election revulsion stemming from the reveal of its monstrous outcome.)
All of which is to say that this year’s election feels pretty momentous. By re-electing Trump, the American people have upended the assumption that voters would defend their democracy from autocratic insurgents. Furthermore, as many analysts have noted, the shift toward Trump occurred within nearly every demographic group and in nearly every part of the country, as this map from the New York Times shows:
The results are both shocking and decisive enough that we might ask if we just experienced what political scientists call a critical election that portends a political realignment.
Some background: A political realignment occurs when the established political coalitions constituting the major parties dissolve for whatever reason and reassemble along new partisan lines. Realignment may also occur if the balance of power within coalitions shifts as factions gain or lose political strength or if independents begin breaking consistently for one party over the other. This process—driven by the generational churn of voters, new campaign techniques, and the emergence of new issues which either fracture and rearrange coalitions or create new constituencies—typically happens incrementally over multiple election cycles, but every now and then, an election occurs that signals a clear and decisive break with past electoral patterns and assumptions. These landmark elections are called critical elections.
Critical elections are said to mark the beginnings of party systems, or eras in which the majority of the American people express a preference for one party’s worldview and political agenda over the other. This does not mean the minority party can never win power, just that if they do, it usually occurs when the majority party experiences a rough patch in office (i.e., a recession), commits a blunder (i.e., leads the country into an unpopular war), or begins to fracture (which is almost guaranteed to happen over time given the breadth of any coalition that attains majority status in the United States.) But even when a minority party is in power, it typically governs in a way that either affirms the dominance of the majority party’s ideology or co-opts some aspect of the majority party’s platform.
Political scientists argue over whether critical elections actually are a thing or if they are just elections that really stand out from others during the always ongoing process of realignment. I think it’s wrong to think of critical elections as moments when voters suddenly shift their views and abandon one governing philosophy for another, as I don’t believe voters with engrained voting habits tend to change that quickly from one election to another. While that may happen with greater frequency during a critical election (particularly if that election coincides with a national crisis) I tend to think of critical elections as moments of political clarity when the mixed signals sent by recent elections suddenly ring out in a clear, unmistakable signal affirming the tenor of a new political era and a new governing mandate.
Political historians generally agree there have been six critical elections in American history:
1800: Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson defeated Federalist John Adams. Jeffersonian Democracy, which favored the interests of yeoman farmers over those of business elites, urban areas, and wage laborers, became the dominant ideology.
1828: After the Democratic-Republican Party shattered into multiple factions, Democrat Andrew Jackson defeated ex-Democratic-Republican/National Republican President John Quincy Adams. Jackson’s victory ushered in the era of Jacksonian Democracy, a populist ideology fueled by universal suffrage for White men that favored territorial expansion and limited government.
1860: American politics became sectionalized as slavery became the central issue confronting the nation. Abraham Lincoln of the upstart anti-slavery Republican Party defeated a divided Democratic Party. The Union’s victory in the Civil War secured Republicans’ hold on political power and significantly weakened the Democrats.
1896: This one is kind of confusing. Democrats re-emerged as a political force in the 1870s as the reformist impulse connected to the Civil War and Reconstruction faded. Yet Republican William McKinley’s victory over Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 marked the culmination of a shift back to the Republican Party and a rejection of the Democrats’ populist, agrarian, Southern coalition. Republicans, however, were split in this era between progressive and laissez faire wings, with the laissez faire faction taking control of the party following World War I.
1932: With pro-business Republicans discredited by the onset of the Great Depression, Democrat Franklin Roosevelt defeated Republican President Herbert Hoover in a landslide. Roosevelt’s liberal New Deal Coalition consisting of union members, conservative White Southerners, urban residents, and intellectuals backed the development of a big-government welfare state. The Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth-century would place significant strain on the New Deal Coalition.
1980: Republican Ronald Reagan founded a new era of small-government conservative rule by defeating Democratic President Jimmy Carter. Reagan’s coalition drew strength from higher-income earners, Christian evangelicals, socially conservative blue-collar workers, defense hawks, and White voters. Some argue this realignment actually occurred in 1968, when Republican Richard Nixon defeated a Democratic Party that had fractured over the War in Vietnam, civil rights, and the countercultural impulses of the 1960s.
As you can see, each of these party systems tended to last about two generations, so it seems we’re due for a realignment.
You may have also spotted a pattern in the way these realignments and party systems have developed, particularly over the last two realignment cycles (although we shouldn’t assume two instances create a pattern):
They begin with the election of a president (FDR, Reagan) who takes office with a clear ideological governing mandate that is confirmed by an even larger majority four years later and results in an uninterrupted period of one-party rule that lasts longer than two presidential terms (FDR-Truman [1933-1953] and Reagan-Bush [1981-1993].)
At some point, either external circumstances or internal party fissures weaken the dominant party, allowing the opposition party to claim the presidency. These presidents [Eisenhower, Clinton] tend to be moderates within their parties, however, and accept the established governing paradigm (Eisenhower did not seek to abolish Social Security; Clinton “ended welfare as we know it” and declared “the era of big government is over.”)
The dominant party regroups and returns to power (Kennedy/Johnson, George W. Bush) and enacts major long-standing policy goals (LBJ’s Great Society programs, Bush’s tax cuts) before a crisis of its own making undermines the public’s trust in its leadership (Vietnam and the encroaching cultural liberalism of the 1960s; Iraq and the Great Recession.)
The opposition party again returns to power (Nixon, Obama) and is tasked with cleaning up the dominant party’s mess. While these presidents do not break decisively with the prevailing ideological orthodoxy (Nixon signed a number of liberal bills; Obamacare is based on a Republican health care proposal) their rhetoric taps into a shift in the nation’s political temperament.
Finally, the dominant party stitches its aging coalition back together one more time (Carter, Trump; you could include Hoover here as well) with its presidential nominee promising not to pursue an agenda built around a spent political ideology but to simply manage the affairs of government. Some of their policies even appear borrowed from the opposition party (Hoover actually did increase government spending in response to the Great Depression; Carter pursued a fiscally conservative agenda and ended détente; Trump’s trade, tariff, and immigration policies drew from the populist, blue-collar Democratic playbook.) It turns out, however, that the party is fractured beyond repair and struggles to manage external crises (the Great Depression; the Iran hostage crisis and the energy crisis; the COVID pandemic.) Its governing mandate discredited, voters reject the party at the polls once and for all and banish it to the political wilderness. The cycle then repeats.
Again, we should not expect history to follow a similar pattern. In fact, realignments do not even necessarily result in the opposition party replacing the dominant party; as we see in the transition from Jeffersonian Democracy to Jacksonian Democracy and in the transition from the Civil War-era Republican Party to the early-twentieth-century Republican Party, the dominant party instead reinvented itself. But if we did expect this presumably impending realignment to mirror the previous two realignments, we might have anticipated Biden emerging as the next FDR or Ronald Reagan. Obviously, that didn’t happen. It may not have even been in the cards for the 81-year-old “bridge to a new generation” president.
The fear for Democrats now, however, is that Trump’s re-election may signal the creation of a new Republican majority. The populist Trump coalition consists of non-college-educated voters, evangelical Christians and cultural conservatives, rural Americans, and fringe voters ranging from White supremacists to conspiracy theorists. It is predominantly White and male, although it also attracts working-class minority voters, particularly Latinos. “Country club conservatives”—the Republican ruling class during the Reagan era—are no longer in charge of the GOP but continue to support it as the nation’s more business-friendly party.
So does Trump’s re-election signal a political realignment?
Some will look at the Trump coalition and note that while it may constitute a near-majority today, its constituent parts (except for its minority voters) represent shrinking (yet highly motivated) demographic groups or (in the case of male voters) are outnumbered by a related group that tends to support Democrats. These don’t seem to be ascendant groups but rather factions fending off political decline. Yet the Democratic coalition consisting of college-educated voters, minority voters, women, and urban residents seems stressed by economic dissatisfaction and out-of-sync temperamentally with middle-of-the-electorate voters, which could limit its ability to counter the strength of Trump’s coalition. Neither coalition seems like an emerging majority, but Trump’s coalition at the moment seems to have more potential to siphon votes away from the Democratic coalition (although that may be the red afterglow of the election speaking.)
As far as policy goes, it’s also unclear the Trump coalition has a mandate to enact its agenda. A near-majority of the American people appear to have endorsed Trump’s protectionist, anti-immigrant, anti-woke agenda, but his prescriptions—i.e., heavy-handed, inflation-inducing tariffs; mass deportation—are not popular. I still think for the most part that Democrats have a more popular policy agenda, but what matters more in what may be a post-policy era is that Democrats appear to be defending an unpopular political-economic system while Trump promises to take a wrecking ball to it. Neither coalition seems close to claiming a national consensus on policy, but the nation’s populist mood may lead most voters to favor Trump’s hard-charging approach.
Perhaps the results of the election provide the clearest clue. Democratic doom and gloom with the 2024 election is justified given Trump’s autocratic inclinations and the potential damage his administration could inflict on the nation. However, all that anguish and catastrophizing within the media over the results overlooks just how close this election actually was. There are still a few million votes left to count, but it appears Trump will win the popular vote by right around two percentage points. (The New York Times currently has the difference at 50.1% to 48.2%, while the Cook Political Report has Trump slipping below 50%.) As a matter of perspective, Biden won in 2020 by a larger 3.5% margin; no one is arguing that election represented a realignment. Trump improved on his 2020 performance by about two million votes, while Harris underperformed Biden by a little over eight million votes, hinting Democrats’ problem wasn’t necessarily a surge by Trump but a failure to get their own voters to the polls.
Moreover, most of that decline occurred in non-competitive Democratic-leaning states that were not the focus of Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts. Trump won the “Blue Wall” states (can we please retire that term?) by more than he did in 2016, but the margins in 2024 were still close: 0.9% in Wisconsin, 1.4% in Michigan, 1.8% in Pennsylvania. Harris’s totals actually came close to matching Biden’s totals in the battlegrounds; the problem in those states was that Trump got 1-3% more people to vote for him this time than last. That other metric of the national mood—the race for control of the House of Representatives—reveals Trump had no coattails: Republicans will retain their slender majority with roughly the same number of seats.
What this suggests is that while Trump and the Republicans improved slightly on their 2020 performance, there was no decisive shift to the Right and, therefore, no realignment. All it would take for Democrats to regain the presidency is a modest swing back in their favor. Still, Democrats need to analyze those sagging Blue state numbers to figure out if that represents an unmotivated electorate (the battleground results suggest Democrats can easily fix that problem) or a disillusioned electorate (which would require more introspection.) Trump’s victory could simply be attributed to voters’ frustrations with the party-in-power during a period of inflation rather than an ideological realignment; if that’s the case, it would not be unreasonable to flip the question everyone’s been asking Democrats these past two weeks on its head and wonder why Republicans didn’t perform better.
Yet as far as realignments go, there is something Democrats need to be concerned with: Geography. Over the past two elections, there have been seven reliable toss-up states (including North Carolina, which has consistently backed the GOP.) If there is even a small shift toward Republicans nationwide that turns those battlegrounds the slightest shade of red (while also turning reliably Blue states like Minnesota, New Hampshire, Virginia, and New Mexico purple) Democrats could find their path to 270 electoral votes blocked. Furthermore, there is no obvious state in Red territory other than Texas (which still went for Trump by 14 points this year) that Democrats could conceivably win even if the nation shifted a few points to the Left. In fact, no uncontested Red state even had a margin in the single digits this year! Unlike the Blue states, some of which are beginning to become more competitive, the Red states all seem to be trending more Republican. For this reason, Democrats should be worried that it would only take a small rightward shift in the electorate for a Republican realignment to occur.
The good news for Democrats, however, is that those battleground states are still very much in play. As far as the prospects for a realignment are concerned, it feels like the nation remains in a state of flux. Republicans like the look of the electoral map and feel if they can just continue to improve their standing with working-class voters that they could tilt the balance of power in this country toward themselves for the next generation. Democrats are convinced Trump represents the last gasps of the Reagan coalition rather than the first breaths of a new populist Republican coalition and that they just need to shore up their standing with their working-class base to become the nation’s preeminent party. It will take until at least 2028—and possibly even longer—to see which party is right.
Signals and Noise will return soon.
Exit Music: “Back to Me” by Kathleen Edwards (2005, Back to Me)
Cleveland served as president from 1885-1889 and then again from 1893-1897. Cleveland also won the popular vote in 1888 but lost the electoral college vote to Benjamin Harrison.