American party realignment

America’s two major political parties are realigning. College-educated voters are switching to the Democrats while the working class is consolidating in the Republican Party. These shifts raise new questions about the parties’ economic and social policies.

Analysis

America’s Two-Party System Is Out of Date

The United States Capitol in Washington DC
The United States Capitol in Washington DC (Shutterstock/Orhan Cam)

Frank J. DiStefano argues in The American Interest that America’s two-party system is going through a period of transformation.

American politics have been dominated by two parties from the start, but those parties, and their coalitions, have changed over time.

The current Democratic-Republican duopoly emerged from the Great Depression and the New Deal, when Democrats formed a coalition bewteen ethnic and working voters in the North and white voters in the South and Republicans split into moderate and conservative wings. Read more

Opinion

Trying to Turn Republicans into Liberals Is Now Hopeless

View of the Washington Monument from the General Ulysses S. Grant Memorial in Washington DC, July 3
View of the Washington Monument from the General Ulysses S. Grant Memorial in Washington DC, July 3 (DoD/Reese Brown)

David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, argues in The Atlantic that the Republican Party should become the party of liberalism in the United States.

As the Democrats move to left on economic policy, there is room for a party that defends free markets, free trade, limited government and personal liberty.

I agree, and before Donald Trump I was optimistic that the Republican Party could move in this direction. I called it Republican Party 2.0.

On the eve of the 2016 election, when I was still confident Hillary Clinton would win, I even urged Republicans to purge Trump’s insurgents and return the party to its pre-Newt Gingrich center-right bearings.

But then Trump won and now Republicans have surrendered to him and his philosophy. Read more

Opinion

Three Reasons Liberals Need to Look Left, Not Right, for Allies

View of the Washington Monument from the General Ulysses S. Grant Memorial in Washington DC, July 3
View of the Washington Monument from the General Ulysses S. Grant Memorial in Washington DC, July 3 (DoD/Reese Brown)

Leonardo Carella, an expert on Italian politics, argues that, strategically and policy-wise, pro-market liberals now have more in common with social democrats than they do with conservatives.

I think he is right, for three reasons: Read more

Analysis & Top Story

New Figures Argue Democrats Should Target College Graduates in Suburbs

Aerial view of a suburb of Austin, Texas
Aerial view of a suburb of Austin, Texas (Shutterstock/Roschetzky Photography)

Amy Walter reports for The Cook Political Report that a Pew Research assessment of the 2016 electorate belies some of the insights we thought we had gleaned from that year’s exit polls:

  • Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump didn’t actually split the white college-educated vote. Clinton bested Trump by 17 points.
  • They did split the white women’s vote, 45-47 percent. Exit polls suggested Trump was more popular with white women.
  • The exit polls probably overestimated the electorate’s share of white college graduates.

The revised figures argue that Trump hasn’t lost support from college-educated whites and white women. Fewer supported him to begin with.

The exit polls and Pew’s data do agree that Trump has lost support from white voters without a college degree: from 66-64 to 57 percent. Read more

Analysis

Midterm Elections Likely to Deepen Blue-Red Divide in America

View of the United States Capitol at dusk, December 8, 2011
View of the United States Capitol at dusk, December 8, 2011 (Architect of the Capitol)

Ronald Brownstein reports for CNN that the congressional elections in November are likely to deepen the divide between “blue” and “red” America:

Democrats seem likely to emerge … with a clear upper hand in highly urbanized House seats that are racially and religiously diverse, disproportionately white-collar and secular and connected to the globalized information economy. Republicans, in turn, could remain dominant in districts outside of urban centers that are preponderantly white, heavily blue-collar, more religiously traditional and reliant on manufacturing, agriculture and resource extraction.

Read more

Explainer

How and Why Americans Switch Parties

Visitors at the de Young museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, California, October 16, 2005
Visitors at the de Young museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, California, October 16, 2005 (Thomas Hawk)

13 percent of Americans switched parties in the last five years. Economic anxiety had little to do with Democrats changing sides to support Donald Trump.

Those are some of the more surprising findings of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. Read more

Opinion & Top Story

Lessons for Democrats from Europe

German Social Democratic Party leader Martin Schulz and the French Socialist Party's Benoît Hamon deliver a news conference in Berlin, March 28
German Social Democratic Party leader Martin Schulz and the French Socialist Party’s Benoît Hamon deliver a news conference in Berlin, March 28 (Facebook)

How can Democrats win back working-class voters who have switched to the right?

The obvious solution is to become more populist. Less Hillary Clinton, more Bernie Sanders. Tax the rich, spend more on welfare, make health care universal and oppose new trade deals.

Except we have seen social democrats try this in Europe and it didn’t work.

When left-wing parties cling to a shrinking working-class electorate, they end up neglecting middle-income supporters — and satisfy neither. Parties that takes sides are more successful. Read more