Did We Just See an Electoral Realignment?
A realigning election, by definition, is the first in a series of presidential elections in which one party keeps coming out on top due to continued support from elements of the population that had previously voted for the other party. Republican William McKinley's victory over Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 was due in no small part to his winning a sizable share of white male urban workers who had not figured very much in previous Republican victories, even as Bryan staked out a claim for rural prairie populists. McKinley's wasn't a huge victory in the popular vote; he won just 51 percent. But enough of those urban workers (Protestants particularly) stuck with the Republicans for the next three decades to create a period of Republican hegemony, by which standard 1896 was very much a realigning election.
We can say the same about the elections of 1932 and 1968. The first New Deal coalition that flocked to Franklin Roosevelt's banner in '32 included an urban working-class electorate that had grown much more ethnically diverse since 1896, and by 1936, it also included huge majorities of industrial workers who'd seldom voted before. Richard Nixon's 1968 victory marked the beginning of the end of that New Deal coalition, as a white backlash against the Democrats' embrace of the emerging Black electorate, and the rise of urban disorder, prompted an array of white voters, from Southern Dixiecrats to working-class whites in racially diversifying cities, to abandon the Democrats in favor of Republicans talking tough on law and order. Both the elections of 1932 and 1968 established governing partisan regimes that endured through a number of subsequent elections.
So this Tuesday's outcome certainly has the potential to become a realigning election. In itself, it marked a shift in voting patterns among working-class men. White working-class men had already become the anchor of MAGA Republicans; what was new was the level of support Donald Trump drew from Latino working-class men, which was particularly significant because Latinos are a growing segment of the electorate and Latinos are a predominantly working-class population. But this switch in allegiance has to persist in subsequent presidential elections, alongside Republicans' success in getting significant support from other sectors of the electorate, for 2024 to be seen as a realigning election.
The future of the Latino vote was already a much-discussed topic when I joined the as its political editor in 1989. Mexican poverty and the civil wars in Central America had already greatly increased the Latino population of Southern California by then, but most of those immigrants were not yet citizens, and those who were had yet to begin voting in numbers that would prove decisive in most elections. At the time, the Republican establishment argued that the cultural traditionalism of Latinos meant they'd end up as Republicans, while Democrats argued that their vote would reflect their racial-minority and working-class identity. When California Latinos did begin voting in large numbers in the 1990s, they flocked to the Democrats' column. This was partly the result of an epochal Republican blunder when, taking a huge nativist turn, they backed a measure to deny all public services (including the right to attend K-12 public schools) to undocumented immigrants. And it was partly the result of Democratic smarts, as the Southern California labor movement, newly led by strategically savvy Latinos, created an enduring labor-Latino alliance that so boosted the Democrats that it transformed California from a purple state into a blue one.
But looking at how California Latinos voted on a host of ballot measures over the years made clear that their support for the Democrats was chiefly based on bread-and-butter issues for themselves and their children. Their support for ballot measures that raised the minimum wage, strengthened union rights, and funded more schools exceeded even the high levels of support those measures won from Black voters. And one reason why there are more Latinos who voted Republican in this week's election is surely that this still largely working-class constituency was struggling with higher rents and food bills, and blamed the Biden administration for the persistence of these problems.
But I suspect there are two other reasons for this shift as well. The first requires us to look at the gender gap between Latino men and women, which was a gaping 16 percentage points (53 percent of Latino men backed Trump; just 37 percent of Latinas did), well in excess of the gender gap for whites (7 percentage points) or Blacks (13 percentage points). While most polling suggests that Latinos don't vote based on the kind of culturally conservative concerns that Republicans hoped they would (e.g., abortion), it's clear that Trump's protestations of hypermasculinity directed at economically vulnerable working-class men combined with Latino machismo to create the largest of the gender gaps in the exit polls.
The second possible reason for this shift in Latino voting takes me back to a discussion of nearly 40 years ago, when pundits were speculating as to whether Latinos would end up voting like Blacks or Italians. A brief history is required here: When immigrants from Italy began arriving in the U.S. in large numbers in the 1880s, there were many white Protestants who viewed them—Catholics with darker skins than those upstanding Protestants—as a subspecies of Blacks and treated them nearly accordingly. (Eleven Italian immigrants were lynched by a white mob in New Orleans in 1891 for a crime they had nothing to do with.) In time, most Italian Americans found a political home in the Democratic Party and the New Deal coalition, but as rising numbers of Blacks came to Northern cities, often to neighborhoods that had been predominantly Italian (see: films of Spike Lee), racial animus grew and Italians moved heavily into Republican ranks (see: Long Island elections since 1970). For some number of Italian Americans, acculturation into the white American mainstream also meant embracing much of that mainstream's racism—particularly since their fathers or grandfathers had been viewed as people of color, with whom they sure as hell didn't want to be associated.
Is a similar dynamic now playing out among some Latinos? Could be.
So: Does all this add up to a realignment? Ask me in 2028.
