How did race, wealth, education and class contribute to the great realignment that brought us Donald Trump?

Over the past 25 years, the Republicans have mutated into a white workers’ party, one which yearns to return to the glory of yesteryear, real and imagined. The party of Abraham Lincoln is no more. By the same measure, the Democrats have become an upstairs-downstairs coalition of NPR listeners and urban Americans. Just decades ago, the party was the home of FDR, JFK and lunch-bucket voters. The election of Donald Trump is both a result and accelerant of our ongoing political realignment.

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Much ink has been spilled on how the US reached this inflection point, and two books published this year deserve attention: Bill Schneider’s Standoff, subtitled How America Became Ungovernable, and Alan Abramowitz’s The Great Alignment, subtitled Race, Party Transformation and the Rise of Donald Trump.

Standoff exudes confidence in the capacity of the electorate to self-correct, and presents a user-friendly prism for watching politics. The Great Alignment looks to the courts and the states to put a brake on the president, while over-emphasizing the role of race in Trump’s ascendance. It is implicitly pessimistic.

Schneider commented on politics for nearly two decades at CNN and is now a contributor at Al Jazeera. He contends, convincingly, that voters are buffeted by the competing forces of values and interests. In his telling, values roughly correlate with educational attainment and interests correspond to income, a shorthand borne out by recent elections.

The Democrats’ challenge is that liberal policies are more popular than the Democrats themselves

According to a recent Brookings Institution report, America’s Electoral Future Demographic Shifts and the Future of the Trump Coalition, the 2016 election “showed a sharp divide in Republican voting between white college graduates and whites without college educations”. In the November midterms, we saw more of the same.

College graduates voted Democratic by a three-to-two margin, with white four-year degree holders going Democratic by eight points, a historic development. The last time a Republican presidential candidate lost these voters was 60 years ago. Indeed, on the income side of the ledger, the Democrats fought to a draw.

America’s wealthiest districts are now overwhelmingly blue. A Fox and Associated Press exit poll showed voters with incomes north of $100,000 preferring the Democrats by 5%. The GOP is surrendering its claim as the party of upward arc. Grievance comes with a price.

Schneider also distinguishes between coalitions and movements. He explains that coalitions are generally organized around a particular outcome, and as long as a voter agrees with that single goal, such as opposition to Trump, she is welcome to enter the tent. Movements, on the other hand, are like religions. They expect believers to embrace a series of propositions as if they were creeds, with a special place in hell reserved for heretics and the theologically syncretic. Just ask Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee.

The GOP is surrendering its claim as the party of upward arc. Grievance comes with a price

Still, one would be hard-pressed to find a pro-life Democrat on a national ticket or in a Democratic cabinet. Likewise, pro-lifers were unwelcome at the 2017 Women’s March.

In both Schneider’s and Abramowitz’s narratives, Democrats were once an amalgam of white southerners, black people, Catholics, Jews and working-class urban ethnics. For the GOP, think northern rural Protestants, suburbanites and the wealthy. Among the latter grouping, chances are their ancestors fought to preserve the union during the civil war. In the aftermath of the 1960s, those alignments and allegiances gave ground in the face of the civil rights movement, Lyndon B Johnson’s Great Society and the Vietnam war.

Yet as the latest elections remind us, “class” matters too. The moms of Southern Methodist University and Scarsdale have much in common. Metaphysically, the distance between suburban New York and high-end suburban Dallas is short. Both sets of mothers generally hold at least a BA, if not a graduate degree, and spend a significant amount of time hauling their precious cargo to and from tutors and after-school sports. Life does not begin and end with Friday night lights.

As a corollary, these households possess little patience for the cultural red meat that the incumbent president serves to his white working-class base. Trump’s scatological shout-out to Adam Schiff, the incoming chair of the House intelligence committee, was a turn-off to these voters.

The place of race

Where Schneider is mindful of the roles of race and immigration in how our politics stack up, Abramowitz, a professor at Emory, gives them primacy of place without sufficient nuance and context. Rather, with an array of data, he argues that racial resentments undergirded Trump’s electoral college victory.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barack Obama and young Daniel Van Dusky eat at the Glider Diner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in April 2008. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

Abramowitz glides over the Great Recession and its aftermath. But on election day 2016, 700,000 fewer white Americans were employed than when the downturn kicked in. He also avoids a detailed discussion of the outsized role Obama-Trump voters played in places like rural Pennsylvania. His synoptic narrative misses too much.

During the presidential election in 2008, FiveThirtyEight reported that when one canvasser approached a home in western Pennsylvania, God and guns country, the husband yelled to his wife: “We’re votin’ for the African American!” Except he didn’t say African American. Such voters stood with Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama but resisted John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Said differently, The Great Alignment treats demographics as destiny without paying needed attention to external events. Clinton centered her efforts during the 2016 primaries on upscale and minority voters and wrote off a chunk of the electorate as irredeemably deplorable. Fast-forward to the 2018 midterms: the Democrats actually captured a majority (52%) of non-evangelical whites who did not possess a BA.

Backlash should not be characterized as racial resentment. Few people enjoy being kicked in the teeth, even figuratively

In other words, backlash should not be characterized as reflexive racial resentment. Few people enjoy being kicked in the teeth, even figuratively.

For 2020, back-of-the-envelope calculations based on the midterms show the Democrats prevailing with under 300 electoral votes. The same map, however, depicts Ohio and Florida as potential Republican firewalls, and one needs to go back to Jimmy Carter and 1980 to find a president ejected from office after his party held power for a single term. Absent a recession or national catastrophe, voters are reluctant to engage in buyers’ remorse after just four years.

Adding to the Democrats’ challenge is that liberal policies are more popular than the Democrats themselves. The party has its own cultural baggage.

This past election day, voters in Republican Idaho, Nebraska and Utah opted to expand Medicaid coverage. The last time any of those states went Democratic in a presidential election was 1964. Meanwhile, Missouri (red), Utah (red) and Michigan (purple) approved marijuana liberalization and Florida, the ground zero of electoral battlegrounds, said “yes” to restoring voting rights to ex-felons.

How the Democrats proceed remains to be seen. Calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) as some hopefuls have done is a surefire way to reassemble the Trump coalition. By the same measure, presidents who seek re-election usually endeavor to expand upon their base, something Trump is incapable of doing. Right now, he could win re-election without a plurality of the popular vote – another first – an outcome that would pose questions of personal and systemic legitimacy.

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