Since Donald Trump’s lopsided victory in the 2024 presidential election, there has been much talk – happily on the right, hauntingly on the left – of whether we have just witnessed a seismic event that rarely occurs in politics: a genuine and durable realignment of the electorate. While that term is based on art as much as science, just the fact that such a discussion is taking place among politicians and pundits suggests that this was arguably the most significant election in our lifetime – not just because the two candidates presented such opposite worldviews, but due to Trump’s sweep of all seven swing states that were up for grabs. The past and future president has almost single handedly forged a breathtaking reversal of party identities. Republicans, once viewed as the pro-war party of wealthy elitists, are now the anti-war party of the working class. Democrats, meanwhile, have become the pro-war party of the wealthy and heavily educated.
As stunning as this reversal has been, the first thing to understand about political realignments over the course of history is that they are not considered as such until more than one election demonstrates that a critical mass of one or more demographic groups has shifted their support from one party to the other. While Trump enjoyed overwhelming support from everyday Americans who once favored Democrats, on top of a significant increase in backing from black voters on November 5, the group that has triggered the discussion about realignment is Hispanic voters.
Complicating the matter of realignment is that Hispanics of varied nationalities hardly vote in lockstep. They come in all shapes and sizes. Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and natives of multiple countries in Central and South America have distinct cultures. Cubans infuriated by the tyranny of Fidel Castro have traditionally been strong supporters of the GOP. Other groups of Latinos have, until this election, favored Democrats. The question is whether their support for Trump will prove to be durable, or if this year was a one-off in response to inflation and the porous border, both of which are unlikely to dominate the conversation in 2028.
But one thing is clear. The Democrats’ identitarian appeal to Hispanics on the issue of immigration and their ill-conceived pandering exemplified by “Latinx,” a term has been widely rejected by those to whom it was designed to appeal, has blown up in their faces. A critical mass of immigrants who respect the law and waited years to become legal have expressed fury over the millions of illegals who charged the border and cut in line. Unless the left stops pandering and realizes that Hispanics vote on the same “kitchen-table” issues as whites and blacks – the economy, safety, and security – they are likely to continue their downward spiral with this crucial voting bloc.
Realignment May Have Started Eight Years Ago
Another harbinger of political realignment is when the rising party flips states thought to be safely in the grasp of the other. Trump appears to have bulldozed the “blue wall” – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – that was safely in the Democrats’ column for almost three decades. That wall has turned red in two of the last three presidential elections. These states have voted in lockstep since before the dawn of the 21st century. Whether Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 – and close calls in 2020 – represent a sea change in this northern tier of battlegrounds is still unclear, but it will no longer be debatable if the GOP captures this trio of states in 2028.
At the same time, Florida and Ohio, long considered swing states, have turned bright red. Trump won Florida by a whopping 13% this year, a huge margin compared to his victories by less than 2% in 2016 and 3% in 2020. And the 45th/47th president won Ohio by 12% this year after winning there by 8% in each of the last two elections. On the flip side, Colorado, long considered a battleground, has turned heavily blue, with Harris winning there in 2024 by 11 points. But in the exchange, Republicans have added 47 safe electoral votes while Democrats have added just 10. Democrats no longer have the huge built-in advantage they enjoyed for decades due to the combined 101 electoral votes in deep blue California, New York, and Illinois.
The most unmistakable sign of realignment is when one or more safely blue or red states turn heavily one way or another. But no safe states for either candidate were flipped this year, meaning the conversation about whether we are in the midst of a realignment will continue for at least another four years.
A Brief History of Political Realignment
In the years leading up to the 20th century, Republicans had built a durable urban coalition that led to the presidencies of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover – interrupted only by eight years of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. But in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt won the first of his four straight overwhelming victories, dominating the big cities and producing the so-called New Deal coalition, a multi-racial bloc which dominated American politics for more than four decades. By the time Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, it had all changed with the passage of civil rights legislation that transformed the South, previously the dominion of Democratic segregationists, into a Republican stronghold.
It appeared that after winning two landslides in the 1980s on the strength of his appeal to conservative “blue dog” Democrats, Ronald Reagan had built a lasting center-right coalition, but with patrician George H.W. Bush following Reagan with his appeal to become a “kinder, gentler” nation, the coalition evaporated with his resounding defeat for re-election at the hands of Bill Clinton, who won back many of the voters who had supported Reagan and served in the White House for eight years. The subsequent two-term presidency of George W. Bush was followed by the polar opposite, eight years of Barack Obama, and then the voters pulled another 180 with the shock election of Donald Trump in 2016.
It has been 50 years since the last genuine realignment of the American electorate. And though some informed observers through the years of the 21st century contemporaneously predicted emerging majorities for both parties at various junctures, the discussion of whether we are now in the midst of another sea change has serious people on both sides of the aisle admitting that it is certainly possible, and we may just be one election away from receiving the answer.
Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.
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