In his victory speech last week, Donald Trump declared that a “historic realignment” in American politics had occurred. His claim has been echoed by Republican intellectuals. In a podcast the day after, Michael Needham, the chairman of American Compass, said, “We are seeing the realignment come to mind.”
As writers who once made an argument for a potential emerging Democratic majority, we are especially curious when a new one comes up — and because of our own experience, we treat claims by Mr. Trump and others of a durable Republican realignment with some skepticism.
There are two meanings for a realignment claim. The first is that the parties’ coalitions have changed. This is undeniable, but the changes really began during the period from the 1970s through 1994. During that time, portions of the white working class began their journey from the Democratic to the Republican Party. They were originally called Reagan Democrats.
Alternately, many college-educated voters began leaving the G.O.P. for the Democrats. Geographically, the South, once solidly Democratic, came to lean Republican, while Northern states, once dominated by liberal or moderate Republicans, became more Democratic.
That process has continued. In the last decade, we have seen a significant slice of Hispanics vote Republican. In 2024, the AP VoteCast survey found that Mr. Trump won 43 percent of the Hispanic vote and 48 percent of Hispanic men. He also got 16 percent of Black voters and 25 percent of Black men. He got 33 percent of the vote from minorities who had not graduated from college. These figures suggest that the Republicans’ working-class support cannot be described as just white.
Democrats in turn have begun to build support not just among professionals but also among broader swathes of the college educated. Kamala Harris, like Joe Biden in 2020, carried college-educated white voters. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost these voters.
These two coalitions have been roughly equal in size, and the parties have alternated in power according to the effectiveness of the campaigns and the salience of certain issues. In 2020, Mr. Biden benefited from Mr. Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. In 2024, Mr. Trump benefited from Ms. Harris’s identification with the inflation and high levels of illegal immigration under the Biden administration.
There is, however, a stronger meaning of “realignment.” That is not only when the party coalitions change, but also when one party’s coalition comes to dominate American politics. It becomes an enduring majority party the way the Republicans did in 1896 and the Democrats did in 1932, controlling over more than a decade, with only a few interruptions, the presidency and both houses of Congress. This is probably what Mr. Trump had in mind when he boasted of a “historic realignment.”
There are reasons to doubt that what happened on Nov. 5 is that sort of realignment.
Realignments depend on several conditions. The opposing party must be in disarray, as the Republicans were in 1932. The Democrats are certainly in a funk, but they were also in a funk after 2016 and came back to win the House in 2018 and the presidency in 2020.
More important, the majority party must be able to enact policies that benefit and hold together the party’s diverse constituencies, as the Democrats’ New Deal did. Franklin Roosevelt provided economic assistance to workers and white farmers in the South, the urban North and the rural West.
Mr. Trump’s and the Republican Party’s coalition consists of the working class (primarily but not exclusively white); traditionally Republican small-business people, including farmers; upper-level private-sector white-collar workers; and a wealthy donor class drawn from finance and real estate, fossil fuels and most recently, high technology. The donor class is important. In Mr. Trump’s campaign this year, according to Open Secrets, about 70 percent of his contributions came from large donors.
As a candidate, Mr. Trump possessed a striking ability as a shape-shifter, able to take several positions at once on a variety of topics and still inspire aspirations from a range of people. In the context of a campaign, he is a highly talented political entertainer, a sort of conjurer.
But stepping into the White House and governing is a very different context. What Mr. Trump is promising for his second term — the actual choices he will have to make about policy — and the makeup of that coalition do not appear to be the building blocks of a durable majority coalition. Combined, they appear to have great potential for a crackup.
Some proposals could unite elements of the coalition. For example, immigration policy. Some of business supporters depend on a growing immigrant labor market, including undocumented workers, but Mr. Trump can potentially satisfy them by enlarging guest worker programs.
Mr. Trump can also maintain support of his coalition by opposing climate-change regulation, a stance that unites many blue-collar workers and businesses, including farms, that depend on petroleum-based products. One of Mr. Trump’s principal backers, Elon Musk, gave Mr. Trump a pass on removing the subsidies for electric vehicle purchases that Mr. Musk seems to think would hurt legacy car companies and not his own.
But there are plenty of issues that could fracture this coalition. Even immigration cuts both ways. He might try to carry out his promise of deporting millions of illegal immigrants, a project that could not just wreak havoc among families and in communities but also cause economic chaos.
Or take tariffs. Mr. Trump’s working-class voters who lament the loss of jobs to China have supported his trade initiatives, including his plan to slap as high as a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. But Mr. Trump’s first-term tariffs provoked retaliation from China, and angered Republican farmers and Senate Republicans. Much higher tariffs could meet with opposition from Mr. Trump’s high-tech backers, who depend on the Chinese market, and from his financial donors, who still have investments in China. Unlike most Republican initiatives, tariffs, if successful, work by imposing short-term costs in prices in order to achieve long-term gains in jobs from otherwise endangered industries. It’s the short-term costs — another round of inflation, this time imposed by Mr. Trump — that might endanger the Republican coalition.
On health care, some Republicans still want to repeal Obamacare. JD Vance has talked about reforms that could remove important protections for many Americans with pre-existing conditions. As Mr. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress found out in the 2018 midterms (when the G.O.P. lost control of the House), potentially imposing hardship on the working-class base through policies that threaten its access to health care — or education or child care — is not a winning electoral strategy.
Many business backers of Mr. Trump and his congressional allies are hostile to any labor regulation, including for health and safety, and to conventional environmental regulation. They would be unhappy with a significant increase in the minimum wage. In Mr. Trump’s campaign, he promised a raft of tax exceptions for workers and Social Security beneficiaries, but some congressional Republicans are already expressing skepticism about the costs of these promises.
To hold his coalition together, Mr. Trump and whoever aspires to succeed him also need to retain a modicum of public approval outside of what are currently Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters. To do that, he has to marginalize what could be called the “kooks.” Ronald Reagan succeeded in keeping his coalition together and winning re-election at least in part by consigning a single representative of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority to a junior position in the Education Department. Mr. Trump was not successful in doing this during his first term, and he may prove even less successful in his second term.
Robert Kennedy Jr. is already promising that Mr. Trump will push to ban fluoride in water. There is talk of banning or restricting vaccines. These would not be popular measures. Think tanks housing Mr. Trump’s allies have been talking about banning the abortion pill from the mail, gutting the Department of Education, censoring books and ideas, and the dismantling of what is called the administrative state.
The final obstacle to a strong realignment is Mr. Trump himself, who is consumed with the quest for power and self-aggrandizement, and appears eager to seek revenge against his detractors. Many of his difficulties during his first term stemmed from his own misbehavior, and he continues to revel in division and divisiveness.
It’s worth recalling what happened in Britain to Boris Johnson and the Tories. After nearly a decade in power, they won an overwhelming victory in 2019 by detonating Labour’s “red wall” of working-class support. It looked as if the Tories were on the verge of realigning British politics. Five years later, it’s Labour that enjoyed an overwhelming victory, and Mr. Johnson himself, primarily because of his own misbehavior, is out of politics.
Or take the Democratic Party and the notion of an emerging Democratic majority. Political observers saw the foundations of that majority in the coalition of Barack Obama. Not so many years later, that aspiration is shattered. The same could happen to Mr. Trump and the Republicans.
If Mr. Trump fails to achieve a realignment, it would mean, in 2028 and beyond, the continuation of the unstable equilibrium that has plagued American politics for decades. Democrats’ dream of an enduring majority may have died with Ms. Harris’s defeat. But Mr. Trump’s dream of a historic Republican realignment may not survive his second term.
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