How the 2024 election will change American politics

Trump has just done what Reagan did in 1980 – but the magnitude of the realignment will depend on what Trump does next.

The 2024 presidential election has the potential to change American politics as much as Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 did – but whether it does will depend on what happens during the next four years, not on what happened last Tuesday.

According to exit polls, the Republicans’ victory this month was due to the same forces that brought the Republicans into power in 1980. Voters said that their number-one concern was the economy – and for those who thought the economy was doing poorly, an overwhelming majority voted for Trump and for Republican congressional candidates.

In some ways it’s astonishing that the Democrats – the erstwhile party of the working class – walked into the same trap that ensnared George H. W. Bush in 1992. They failed to recognize the extent of the economic pain that many Americans were feeling. They greatly underestimated the ongoing anger over high prices. Even if prices were not rising as quickly as they were two years ago, they weren’t coming down – and for that reason, millions of voters would never forgive Joe Biden (just as they never forgave Jimmy Carter) for allegedly putting them in this economic squeeze.

Of course, the inflation of the early 2020s was not necessarily Biden’s fault any more than the Great Depression was Herbert Hoover’s fault or the recession of 1991-1992 was the fault of George Bush. But be that as it may, voters reacted as they have reacted in similar situations before: They voted the incumbent president out of office.

Trump’s election was very much like all other decisive presidential elections in moments of economic downturn: he received extraordinarily high support from his base (in this case, rural white Americans), brought in a new demographic (in this case, working-class Hispanics), and made gains with almost all other demographic groups, including African Americans and even suburban college-educated voters in Massachusetts.

Reagan did something similar in 1980: He carried his base in the Southwest by spectacular margins, but also won comfortable majorities across the suburban Sunbelt, held onto much of the Northeast, and made gains in most other regions of the region, including in the historically Democratic southern states that had supported Jimmy Carter in 1980.

That’s the nature of a decisive presidential election: The winning candidate picks up votes everywhere. And for the first time in Trump’s political career, his personal election victory was also a victory for his party in a way that could remake the political landscape; he brought Republican congressional candidates to victory throughout the nation.

That’s the biggest surprise of the election for me. I had expected a possible Trump victory, but I was sure that if he won the election, it would be a close race, given how polarized the country has been over the past few years. But the race was not close; Trump won every swing state, and Republicans won Senate races that were supposed to be Democratic.

Because of the sweeping nature of Trump’s election victory, it seems that this is the election that normalized Trumpism. In 2016 and 2020, Trump was a thoroughly polarizing figure who could sweep the rural white South and parts of the Midwest but lose spectacularly in multiracial, college-educated cities and towns. This year, he made gains everywhere; his percentage of the vote in the Bronx, for instance, was nearly twice what it was four years ago.

Not every Trump voter was casting a ballot for Trump’s style or ideology, to be sure. I suspect, in fact, that a large percentage were not. They were voting for someone they thought could fix the economy. But by choosing Trump over Kamala Harris – and the Trumpian Republicans over the anti-Trump Democratic congressional candidates – voters were normalizing Trumpism by implicitly declaring that Trump is not a danger to the nation (as the Democrats said) and that his rhetoric and policy positions were not antithetical to theirs.    

But now the burden on the Republicans is to keep their new majority. Will they? I think that depends on what happens to the economy in the next few years.

Most of the voters who put Reagan in the White House in 1980 were not committed conservatives. They were not devotees of supply-side economics. They did not necessarily share Reagan’s views on abortion or even on nuclear deterrence. Instead, they were disillusioned with Carter and hopeful that Reagan could fix the economy. When instead, during Reagan’s second year in office, the country plunged into the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, Democrats swept the midterm elections of 1982, and Reagan’s public approval rating fell to 35 percent. If the economy had remained in these doldrums, Reagan would have been a one-term president and his supply-side economics would have been thoroughly discredited.

But when the economy came roaring back, and when inflation fell to its lowest point in years, Reagan won one of the greatest landslide reelection victories in American history. More significantly, his commitment to free-market economics and low tax rates became economic orthodoxy not only for his own party, but even for the Democrats during Clinton’s presidency in the next decade.

If the economy does well for the next few years, Trump is poised to be as politically transformative as Reagan. He already has full control of his party; unlike in 2016, there are essentially no significant anti-Trump Republicans who remain in office. We would probably have to go back to Andrew Jackson to find an example of another president who has exercised such complete control over his party’s ideology. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan had to deal with plenty of dissenting members of their own party in Congress; Trump has virtually none.

Trump has also already achieved a class-based realignment of the parties that now works in the Republicans’ favor. By realigning the parties along educational lines – with the Republicans the party of the anti-establishment, non-college-educated – Trump has made the party more multiracial than it has been in more than half a century, and he has positioned the party to potentially be the long-term natural majority that Richard Nixon dreamed of making it in the early 1970s but could never achieve.

It’s now up to Trump to cement this majority by delivering on his promises. As long as he can do so, the Democrats’ likely path back to power may come only through moving their own party closer to Republican policy positions, just as the Republicans had to do in the 1940s and 1950s by accepting some of the policies of the New Deal and just as Democrats did in the 1990s by accepting the general premise behind Reagan’s tax cuts for the wealthy. If Trump’s policies appear to work, we can expect both parties to accept protectionist policies and both parties to support a retreat from America’s international commitments. We can expect both parties to move to the right on immigration (which, in fact, the Democrats already have). We may even find that both parties will eventually accept the current status quo on abortion – which is to keep the federal government out of abortion policy and allow states to set their own policies on the matter.

Perhaps most disconcerting of all, Americans might even accept some degree of anti-democratic shifts or increased measures of autocracy if the economy generally seems to be doing well.  

But there are reasons to suspect that Trump won’t be able to deliver on his promises. His winning coalition is defined mainly by its opposition to the establishment. It’s easy for Trump to be the representative of the anti-establishment when he’s out of office, but it will be much more difficult to pull that off now that the Republicans are the establishment in Washington. Voters who are angry against the “system” in 2026 or 2028 may be tempted to “throw the bums out” when they vote – and when they do, those “bums” will be the incumbent Republicans (just as they were in 2020, when voters threw Trump out of office after his first term).

Only if Trump is extraordinarily successful in making the economy work for the lower middle class will his party be able to continue winning strong majorities. Doing that will be difficult. Most economists believe that the high tariffs that Trump has promised will raise prices and make inflation worse. Trump is deeply skeptical of the very institutions – like the Federal Reserve – that will be needed to impose the fiscal or monetary discipline needed to keep inflation under control. If he drives the American economy off a cliff, Democrats may be able to come roaring back – just as they did in the early 1930s after Hoover’s landslide election victory was followed by the Great Depression, and just as they did in 2006 and 2008 when George W. Bush’s reelection victory was followed by the Great Recession.

Trump has gotten this far mainly by channeling voters’ anger and making promises that have little basis in reality – but now he’ll actually have to deliver. Making the economy work while keeping the nation at peace is likely to be the greatest challenge of his political career – and the odds are against him. But he has defied the odds before – and if he does so this time, the future of the nation’s politics may very well be in his hands.