After losing the Democratic nomination to former Vice President Walter Mondale in 1984, Gary Hart emerged as the Democratic front-runner in advance of the 1988 race. Commanding a double-digit lead over his primary rivals in early 1987, Hart, who was seen as a Kennedy-esque figure, was widely expected to clinch the nomination, and pose a considerable threat in the general election to the presumptive Republican nominee, George H. W. Bush. Hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most intelligent figures in contemporary American politics,” Hart represented change, and pushed a platform far ahead of his time. But the trailblazing politician’s bid for the White House was cut short when The Miami Herald published an article about a purported extramarital affair between Hart and a 29-year-old actress, Donna Rice. Hart ultimately withdrew from the race.

Hart, now 79, spoke with the Hive about how the political landscape has changed in the decades since his presidential bids. He reflects on how why young people have turned away from Hillary Clinton, how the parties have realigned, and why disaffected voters are turning to Donald Trump.

Before the Democratic nomination, in 1988, a poll previewing a general election showdown placed you 13 points ahead of George H.W. Bush. In his book and in a The New York Times Magazine article, Matt Bai has suggested that, were it not for your scandal, you might have impeded the Bush political dynasty. Do you believe that?

I will not elaborate on this except to say clearly the media has become more intrusive in people’s private lives and the loss of privacy on the part of candidates has caused an awful lot of people of quality to choose not to seek public office. And that is reflected in the decline in the caliber and quality of people in public service, unfortunately.

On your personal blog, you've written about the re-alignment of the Democratic and Republican parties. How do you see the shift?

This kind of re-alignment tends to happen every 20 or 30 years. It certainly happened massively in the Franklin Roosevelt era. It happened in the Johnson-Nixon era when the South, which used to be Democratic, shifted on racial issues to the Republican Party. It is largely a result of changing economics or shifting demographics, the rise of movements, the disappearance of movements; nothing really stays static forever in terms of ideologies and coalitions.

Both of our major parties in the United States are coalitions of one kind or another and the members of those groups that form those coalitions change. Whereas in some cases, people rise from poverty into the middle class, or from the middle class into wealth, they change their politics as they move. That is to say, if someone is prosperous and then suddenly—or not suddenly, but rather quickly, historically speaking—they lose that prosperity, their attitude toward politics and government changes. This happened to many blue-collar people in manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, 1980s, at the beginning of globalization.

What's fascinating is how, quite often, political leaders and those involved in managing political parties, fail to notice those shifts happening. I think that happened with the Democratic Party in the last 20 or 30 years in terms of the working-class base, which in many cases lost its economic income and became very angry at politics generally and traditional politics, in particular. And those people have been gravitating toward Donald Trump, who himself doesn’t represent any traditional Republican base that anyone can think of, but is simply opportunistic in putting together a Trump coalition.