Are we experiencing a realignment?

Folks are noticing that there is a potential realignment regarding American political parties. The Republican coalition is becoming a little less white, less educated, and probably a little poorer. Put that more positively, it is becoming more working class. Conversely, the Democratic coalition is becoming whiter, more educated, and probably a bit richer. The typical Republican is getting a little hard to define, but the typical Democrat is rapidly becoming a wealthy, white, suburban, college-educated professional along with African Americans.

Realignment in general is defined as a deep and sustained shift in party loyalty. The shift is deep: it isn’t just a few people deciding that, for instance, they are now Democrats not Republicans, but a whole booming bunch of them. It is also sustained: it isn’t just one particular election where unique circumstances might cause various party loyalists to vote for the other party, but instead it is a permanent switch (or as permanent as anything in politics gets).

Traditionally realignments were said to center around “critical elections.” There is some debate as to which elections count as “critical,” but there is some consensus around 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, and 1932. In a traditional realignment, as represented by these elections, we have seen one dominant party replaced by another or a significant shake-up of party loyalties. The thirty years or so between those critical elections caused some to argue that there was a predictable cycle in American party politics.

Such a cycle was upset in 1968. In 1969 Kevin Phillips famously argued that there was an “emerging Republican majority” as a new Nixonian Republican coalition was replacing the tired, fading Democratic Roosevelt coalition. This was roughly on schedule for the thirty-year cycle. Such a Republican majority never emerged for two reasons. The first was the Watergate scandal. The corruption surrounding the Nixon presidency so poisoned the Republican brand that the 1974 election proved not a solidifying of Republican dominance but instead ushered in an entire generation of congressional Democrats. While Republicans could win the White House (Reagan, George H.W. Bush), they seemed to be a permanent minority in Congress, especially the House.

The second reason why the Republican realignment never happened is a significant change in how our parties governed themselves. The rise of the primary election (as opposed to caucuses or nomination by central committee) and significant campaign finance reform in 1974 greatly weakened political parties. The post-Watergate era was a time not of realignment but of what political scientists call dealignment. Instead of a bunch of people switching from one party to another, we had a lot of people changing from identifying with one of the two parties to identifying with neither. In short, this was the rise of the political independent.

I have argued elsewhere that our partisanship and polarization is not a result of parties that are too strong but, rather, from our parties being too weak. In brief, as the result of finance laws and primary elections, parties have little to no say as to who runs under the party label and are severely restricted as to how they can help fund candidates. This has given rise to a personalized, plebiscitary politics that rewards demagogic candidates. Such candidates succeed by generating spectacle and controversy, rather than the boring, old-fashioned coalition building and legislating that was once the ticket to political success. In addition, left to themselves to organize and fund their campaigns, our current system rewards candidates who are already celebrities or wealthy businesspeople. These candidates come with preexisting name recognition or with sufficient personal wealth to purchase it. Also, candidates, no longer able to count on party organization to run their campaigns, turn for money and organization to interest groups that are almost by definition more extreme than the general public.

We make a distinction between party in government (PIG) and party in the electorate (PIE) (yes, feel free to make a “PIG eating the PIE” joke). People sometimes challenge the assertion I made above about weak parties by saying, “If parties are so weak, how come nearly everyone who gets elected is a Republican or a Democrat?” It’s quite simple. While PIE is weak, PIG is still strong. For all sorts of electoral reasons (mostly due to the winner-take-all, single-member-district elections that typify American politics), it is very difficult for minor parties to succeed electorally in America even though the electorate is disgruntled with the two major parties.

So, we have a system where people are continually and increasingly frustrated with the two major political parties while having no realistic alternative. In 2012 Ruy Teixeira and John Judis borrowed from Kevin Phillips in predicting an emerging Democratic majority. Their thesis was essentially that the rising racial and ethnic diversity spelled a death knell for a dominantly white Republican party. The greater diversity of the Democratic party would take advantage of the fact that whites are a decreasing percentage of the population, ultimately leading to the realignment that had eluded the country since the dealignment of the early 1970s.

The Teixeira/Judis thesis has not been realized. There is some dispute as to why this is so, but the most basic reason is that the Hispanic vote has proven more unpredictable than originally believed. The Hispanic vote is largely an immigrant vote (here we are talking only of legal immigrants, of course). The immigrant vote is historically unstable because second and third generation immigrants tend to assimilate and their identification with their immigrant culture weakens. This has happened with Germans, Irish, Italians and other immigrant groups. While the Hispanic experience is somewhat different in that it is easier for most of them to remain in contact with the “home country,” nevertheless the prediction that Hispanics would join Blacks and progressive Whites as part of a Democratic majority has so far not been fulfilled. Also, Teixeira and Judis did not anticipate the Democrats’ weakening hold on the white working class.

The landscape of American politics and our electoral mechanisms make a traditional realignment a near impossibility. While the makeup of our two parties may shift, we are unlikely to see the emergence one dominant party. In other words, we are stuck with narrow elections and the bitter politics that come with such narrow margins. Still, a system that gave party leaders a greater say over who runs under the party label and allowed parties to provide substantial campaign help to candidates would likely decrease the demagogic nature of our politics and help us elect more competent public officials. Such reforms make so much sense that I can guarantee they won’t happen.