Trump Is in Danger of Blowing His Chance at a Political Realignment

While claiming victory on Election Night (this time, credibly), Donald Trump was unrestrained in his interpretation of what it all meant: "We had everybody and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment, uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense."

As Lee Corso likes to say on College Game Day when one of his colleagues makes a confident prediction about how a football game will turn out: "Not so fast."

The more you look at the election returns — which are still evolving as millions of votes are counted in California — Trump's accomplishment remains impressive, considering his chronic unpopularity and the long comeback he pursued after his 2020 defeat. But "historic realignment" isn't the right word for a victory that could have been undone had Kamala Harris won a relatively small number of additional votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump's steadily declining national popular vote margin will wind up, according to Nate Silver's estimate, at around 1.4 percent (lower than Hillary Clinton's 2.1 percent in 2016), with his total votes at less than a majority and 3 percent more than he won in 2020. Again, that's good for someone with Trump's spotty record, but pretty clearly attributable to being the "change" candidate when the electorate was in an especially sour mood and angry about short-term trends in the economy and immigration.

As I observed in an earlier piece , Trump's much-ballyhooed gains among Democratic "base" groups were significant, but no better than those posted by George W. Bush 20 years ago before his party lost control of Congress and four years before Democrats reclaimed the White House in a near-landslide. So perhaps the best way to characterize the situation is that Trump will have the opportunity to build a durable GOP advantage in a country that has been closely divided between the two parties for much of this century. But there are serious questions as to whether he has a plan for pulling it off, or the self-restraint to avoid blowing up his coalition altogether.

As John Judis and Ruy Teixeira (who know a lot about premature realignment claims having made their own in a famous 2002 book called The Emerging Democratic Majority) point out in a New York Times op-ed , Trump's announced agenda isn't particularly well-designed to keep his 2024 coalition together, much less to expand it:

Or take tariffs. Mr. Trump's working-class voters who lament the loss of jobs to China have supported his trade initiatives, including his plan to slap as high as a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods. But Mr. Trump's first-term tariffs provoked retaliation from China, and angered Republican farmers and Senate Republicans. Much higher tariffs could meet with opposition from Mr. Trump's high-tech backers, who depend on the Chinese market, and from his financial donors, who still have investments in China. Unlike most Republican initiatives, tariffs, if successful, work by imposing short-term costs in prices in order to achieve long-term gains in jobs from otherwise endangered industries. It's the short-term costs — another round of inflation, this time imposed by Mr. Trump — that might endanger the Republican coalition.

There are other obvious pitfalls Trump faces, such as his "concepts of a plan" to replace Obamacare with some health care system that will likely shrink coverage and impose vast new costs on vulnerable people. As Judis and Teixeira note, Trump's allies want to do a host of unpopular things, from RFK Jr.'s desire to ban vaccines to the anti-abortion movement's hopes for banning abortion pills. Trump's own promises to demolish federal aid to education and gut civil service protections for millions of federal employees may please his MAGA "base," but not so much the new voters he temporarily attracted this year. And above all, there's the question of whether the 45th and 47th president, who has run his last campaign, really cares enough about the long-term strength of the Republican Party to rein in his and his closest supporters' more politically reckless tendencies. Judis and Teixeira discuss that factor as well:

The final obstacle to a strong realignment is Mr. Trump himself, who is consumed with the quest for power and self-aggrandizement, and appears eager to seek revenge against his detractors. Many of his difficulties during his first term stemmed from his own misbehavior, and he continues to revel in division and divisiveness.

It's worth recalling what happened in Britain to Boris Johnson and the Tories. After nearly a decade in power, they won an overwhelming victory in 2019 by detonating Labour's "red wall" of working-class support. It looked as if the Tories were on the verge of realigning British politics. Five years later, it's Labour that enjoyed an overwhelming victory, and Mr. Johnson himself, primarily because of his own misbehavior, is out of politics.