Outside an October 13 Trump rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona. Photo: Rebecca Noble/Getty Images As the much-discussed Catalist take on 2024 confirmed, Republicans from Donald Trump on down the ticket won in large part because of surprisingly strong performance among voter groups that usually lean strongly or even overwhelmingly Democratic, notably young and non-white voters, and especially Latinos, with men in almost every category leading the trend. Does that mean that we are witnessing a MAGA realignment of American politics?
Or is that overstating the case? Echelon Insights’ Patrick Ruffini is one very partisan Republican who uses data, history, and reason to back up his claims, and his latest analysis of what happened in 2024 is worth reading and pondering. His piece in The Atlantic offers a credible explanation of the pro-Republican trend among nonwhite voters that would suggest it’s more than a flash in the pan caused by dismay over Joe Biden’s age or post-pandemic inflation.
Ruffini accurately notes that the ideological realignment of the two major parties is the overriding phenomenon that has been shaping our politics since at least the 1960s. To put it simply, the Democratic and Republican coalitions of the late 19th and much of the 20th century were as much based on race, ethnicity, and religion and local and regional traditions as on any coherent set of policy positions. As late as the early 1960s, liberals were as likely to be found in the Republican Party as in the Democratic Party, and conservatives likewise were very likely to be Democrats.
As late as 1960, about a third of Black voters (where they were allowed to vote) supported Richard Nixon over future civil-rights icon John F. Kennedy. The civil-rights revolution that overturned Jim Crow a few years later began the realignment toward a more ideological attachment to the parties, with the sudden transformation of what had been for a century a solid Democratic South into a competitive and then heavily Republican region. Cultural issues and the sheer dislocation of old habits led to additional realignments as (for example) white Catholic voters moved right and Yankee descendants of the old elites moved left.
In the most recent elections, however, the era of realignment reached its logical end as two of the more obdurate group loyalties, that of Black voters and especially of Latino voters, to the Democratic Party finally gave way, notes Ruffini: In 2020 and 2024, the realignment came for nonwhite voters. A basic tenet of the Democratic Party—that of being a group-interest-based coalition—was abandoned as the party’s ideologically moderate and conservative nonwhite adherents began to peel off in a mass re-sorting of the electorate. The Democratic analyst David Shor estimates that Democrats went from winning 81 percent of Hispanic moderates in 2016 to just 58 percent in 2024.
And these voters were now voting exactly how you would expect them to, given their ideologies: conservatives for the party on the right, moderates split closer to either party. Ruffini moves from data to argumentation in asserting that, once “realigned,” these voters “aren’t going back” (absent some major change in the Democratic Party). But his description of how rapidly and completely South Texas Latino communities went from heavily Democratic to heavily Republican rang true to me as a native of the Deep South, where much of the white rural population, along with local political institutions, flipped from D to R without a whole lot of friction.
My home state of Georgia was among the last to flip, but when it did, it was emphatic: For 16 years the state was governed by former Democrats whose conservatism didn’t need to change much when they left the old party. In many small towns and exurban communities, all but overnight local governments were went from all Democratic to all Republican (typically with the same office-holders), and the Republican primary replaced the Democratic primary as the place to influence state and local policies. So Ruffini is within his rights to argue that tectonic plates may be shifting again in the Trump era: In an era of nationalized politics and growing polarization, the social basis for Democratic majorities is looking more and more tenuous.
Yes, the particular appeal with which Trump was able to attract Hispanics and young Black men may last for only an election cycle or two, but the fact that those communities are realigning to a party that matches their views on issues, particularly on cultural issues such as gender, means that many are likely to stick around. But Ruffini’s “end of history” take on this latest stage of realignment remains suspect. Georgia, after all, is again a competitive two-party state, as are several others that seemed to be permanently lost to Democrats as recently as the early years of the 21st century.
The two party coalitions are closer to equipoise than Republicans would like, and it’s possible that more ephemeral factors (e.g., unhappiness with the incumbent party that happened to inherit a global wave of inflation and migration) pushed the Republican team from defeat to victory — a victory that could soon be reversed. The great thing about ideologically based party coalitions is that ideology can be adjusted much more easily than ancient group attachments. And the triumphant Trump GOP is working overtime to give Democrats rich opportunities for sowing doubts among Republican-trending voter groups, including Blacks, Latinos, young voters, and even culturally conservative white working-class voters.
If they are smart and nimble enough to exploit them, then this latest projection of an emerging Republican majority may be as premature as many other proclamations of a partisan promised land. Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world. Email This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
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