Party Realignment, Ineluctable

[schmidlap]

Some folks. particularly hyper-partisans, have an irrational proclivity for casting political parties as immutable, yet any historical perspective readily attests to their mutability over time.

Today's Democratic or Republican Party is not your father's Oldsmobile, let alone his progenitor's one horse shay.

Over the 20-year period from 1970 to 1990, white people, especially those without college degrees, defected en masse from the Democratic Party. In those years, the percentage of white working-class voters who identified with the Democratic Party fell to 40 percent from 60...​

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Now, three decades later, the Democratic Party continues to struggle to maintain not just a biracial but a multiracial and multiethnic coalition — keeping in mind that Democrats have not won a majority of white voters in a presidential election since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964.​

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[T]he Democratic coalition has adapted from its former incarnation as an overwhelmingly white party with a powerful Southern segregationist wing to its current incarnation: roughly 59 percent white, 19 percent Black, 13 percent Hispanic and 8 percent Asian American and other groups.​

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An organized national multiracial political constituency is needed for the development and implementation of ​

policies that will help reverse the trends of the rising inequality and ease the burdens of ordinary families.​

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Black support for the Democratic presidential nominee fell by three percentage points from 2016 to 2020, and Latino support fell by eight points over the same period, from 71 to 63 percent.​

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At the same time, white people with college degrees continued their march into the Democratic Party: “The trends all point in the same direction, i.e., a substantial portion of this constituency moving solidly toward Democrats in the Trump era.” Among these well-educated white voters, the percentage voting for the Democratic nominee rose from 46 percent in 2012 to 50 percent in 2016 to 54 percent in 2020. ​

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These gains were especially strong among women: “White college-educated women in particular have shifted against Trump, moving from 50 percent Democratic support in 2012 to 58 percent in 2020.”​

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Even as Biden held on to a majority of Hispanic voters in 2020, Trump made gains among this group overall. ​

There was a wide educational divide among Hispanic voters: Trump did substantially better with those without​

a college degree than college-educated Hispanic voters (41 percent vs. 30 percent).​

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Biden, according to Pew, made significant gains both among all suburban voters and among white suburban voters: “In 2020, Biden improved upon Clinton’s vote share with suburban voters: 45 percent supported Clinton in 2016 vs. 54 percent for Biden in 2020. This shift was also seen among white voters: Trump narrowly won white suburban voters by 4 points in 2020 (51-47); he carried this group by 16 points in 2016 (54-38).”

Crucially, all of these shifts reflect the continuing realignment of the electorate by level of educational attainment or so-called learning skills, with one big difference: Before 2020, education polarization was found almost exclusively among white voters; last year it began to emerge among Hispanics and African Americans.

Opinion | Democrats Can’t Just Give the People What They Want

Nor would that be totally advisable.

www.nytimes.com

Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
'Cause the battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times, they are a-changin'!

The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast
The slowest now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now will later be last
'Cause the times, they are a-changin'​

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