Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: American Party Realignment

America’s political parties are realigning. College-educated voters in affluent Sun Belt states are switching to the Democrats. Many working voters in the industrial Midwest voted for Donald Trump in 2016.

  • Race Is a Poor Predictor of How Americans Will Vote

    Miami Florida
    Skyline of Miami, Florida (Unsplash/Ryan Parker)

    For years, it looked like Republicans were becoming the party of white, left-behind America and Democrats the party of upper-class whites and racial minorities.

    Tuesday’s election hasn’t upended that narrative, but it has put a dent in it.

    If you had to pick one characteristic to predict party affiliation, it would be education. The better educated Americans are, the more likely they are to vote Democratic.

    Gender is another fair predictor. Women historically vote more Democratic than men. But relatively fewer men voted for Trump this year than in 2016, according to exit polls. (more…)

  • Education Has Become the Dividing Line in American Politics

    Cleveland Ohio
    Downtown Cleveland, Ohio (Shutterstock/Pedro Gutierrez)

    America’s two major parties continue to trade voters based on education.

    An analysis by Pew Research of the 2018 electorate found that one in ten voters have switched parties since the election.

    Of the 2018 Republicans who now call themselves Democrats, most are college-educated. Of the 2018 Democrats who have become Republicans, most are not.

    This reflects a longer-term trend of white Americans sorting into the two parties according to their educational attainment. (Education is less predictive of party affiliation for voters of color.) (more…)

  • Romney-to-Clinton Voters Prefer Biden

    Joe Biden
    Former American vice president Joe Biden campaigns in Des Moines, Iowa, August 8 (Gage Skidmore)

    In the six states that could decide the outcome of the 2020 election in America, Joe Biden outpolls his Democratic rivals, in particular among minority voters and white voters with a college degree.

    The New York Times reports that middle-income voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin prefer the relatively centrist former vice president over the more left-wing Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

    The head-to-head figures against Donald Trump are mostly within the margin of error and probably not predictive a year out from the election.

    But they do give Democratic primary voters vital information as they make up their minds about whom to nominate. (more…)

  • America’s Two-Party System Is Out of Date

    United States Capitol Washington
    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. (more…)

  • Trying to Turn Republicans into Liberals Is Now Hopeless

    David Frum, formerly a 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. (more…)

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

    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: (more…)

  • New Figures Argue Democrats Should Target College Graduates in Suburbs

    Austin Texas suburb
    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. (more…)

  • Midterm Elections Likely to Deepen Blue-Red Divide in America

    United States Capitol Washington
    United States Capitol in Washington DC, January 15, 2017 (DoD/William Lockwood)

    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.

    (more…)

  • How and Why Americans Switch Parties

    de Young Museum San Francisco California
    Visitors of de Young museum in San Francisco, 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. (more…)

  • Lessons for Democrats from Europe

    Alexis Tsipras Martin Schulz
    Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras and European Parliament president Martin Schulz answer questions from reporters in Brussels, February 4, 2015 (European Parliament)

    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. (more…)

  • Trump Is Taking Over Republican Party, Making Realignment More Likely

    Donald Trump
    Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, October 29, 2016 (Gage Skidmore)

    Donald Trump is splitting America’s Republican Party in two — and his side is winning.

    NBC News and The Wall Street Journal asked Republican voters if they consider themselves to be a supporter of the president first or a supporter of the Republican Party. 58 percent said Trump, 38 percent the party.

    The Trump supporters are more likely to hail from rural areas and to be men while Republican Party supporters are more likely to be women and residents of the suburbs.

    CNN found a similar divide: Trump’s support is strongest among old white voters without a college education. Republicans under the age of fifty with a degree are disappointed in him.

    These trends portend a realignment of America’s two-party system in which the Democrats become the party of the affluent and the optimistic and the Republicans a coalition of the left behind.

    Before such a realignment can happen, though, the Republicans need to break up. (more…)

  • Democrats Should Look to the Middle, Not to the Left

    Hillary Clinton
    Former American secretary of state Hillary Clinton gives a speech in Chicago, Illinois, March 14, 2016 (Hillary for America/Barbara Kinney)

    Since last year’s presidential election, the American left has been calling on Democrats to adopt a program of economic populism in order to lure back working-class voters.

    This would be a mistake.

    A lurch to the left may not bring back working-class whites but would disappoint middle-class voters who have been joining the Democratic Party in far greater numbers. (more…)

  • Resistance to Trump Is Making Strange Bedfellows

    Democrats in the United States are heaping praise on Republican senator Susan Collins for taking a stand against her party’s health reforms.

    The praise is deserved. Collins, a centrist Republican from Maine, refused to support a plan that would have taken health care away from millions of low-income Americans while making it cheaper for the wealthy.

    But it’s too bad the left doesn’t extend the same gratitude to conservative purists who joined her.

    None of the other supposedly moderate Republicans in the Senate supported Collins in her fight against the rushed effort to replace Obamacare. They all caved to right-wing pressure.

    Mike Lee of Utah, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Jerry Moran of Kansas and Rand Paul of Kentucky held firm. (more…)

  • Democrats Need Not Obsess About the White Working Class

    Donald Trump
    Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, October 29, 2016 (Gage Skidmore)

    Democrats in the United States have obsessed about winning back working-class whites since these voters left the party to elect Donald Trump last year.

    Even Ruy Teixeira, the author of the “emerging Democratic majority” thesis which holds that ethnic minorities, women and postindustrial workers will ultimately shift the balance of power away from the white working class, tells New York magazine that Democrats cannot ignore the group.

    They may be a shrinking demographic, but he points out they still hold power. If Democrats can’t retain a reasonably solid, if minority, level of support among low-income whites, their electoral arithmetic falls apart, Teixeira warns. (more…)

  • Arizona or Ohio? Two Paths for Democrats

    Cleveland Ohio
    Downtown Cleveland, Ohio (Shutterstock/Pedro Gutierrez)

    NBC News has a longread about what went wrong for Democrats in 2016 and how they can become competitive again nationally.

    The report, written by Alex Seitz-Wald, touches on many of the issues we have written about since Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election in November: how the white working class in big industrial states abandoned Democrats; how the concentration of liberal and progressive voters in cities and coastal states has made it harder for them to win majorities in the Electoral College and the Senate.

    Seitz-Wald argues that, unless they decide to muddle through, Democrats must choose whether to take what he calls the “Ohio path” or the “Arizona path” to address these problems. (more…)