After most presidential elections, we hear pundits proclaim that the winning party will dominate for a long time to come and that the losing party is on the precipice of extinction, or at least rump status. I am approaching my mid-forties and have lived long enough to see both parties deemed all but dead on more than one occasion--I can even recall the 1989, 1990, and 1991 claims that there would never be another Democratic president after the GOP won its fifth presidential election out of the previous six in 1988.
In "The Lost Majority," author Sean Trende offers compelling evidence that, however it may seem in the aftermath of any single election, neither party can ever assume it will dominate the other for decades and that decades-long realignments as they are commonly discussed by political scientists do not really exist.
Trende illustrates his thesis by walking the reader through American political history of much of the last century--with great arguments and abundant maps, graphs, and tables, the author discusses many of the phantom coalitions and real coalitions of the past. He shows that the New Deal coalition lasted nowhere near as long as is nearly always posited and that other coalitions, such as the Eisenhower and Clinton coalitions, are not even acknowledged by many but were fairly robust in their day.
One of the chief calumnies that Democrats use to scare swing voters away from the GOP holds that the South swung to the Republicans after the 1960s because of race, but Trende provides definitive evidence for anyone willing to be convinced (and, sadly, there are vast legions of those out there who simply are not) that the South began to break away from the Democratic Party toward the end of the 1930s and did not fully complete its journey to Republican bastion until the 2000s--and that economics, not race, was the prime mover.
The author shows which types of coalitions are especially prone to dissolve, including the Obama coalition of a few years ago. Following the 2008 election there were analysts who honestly thought that Democratic losses in the 2010 midterms would be minimal, but Trende notes the tensions between parts of the Obama coalition and lists the events of 2009 and 2010 that caused the coalition to come apart. Also examined are the youth, Latino, suburban, and white working-class vote and how those groups might vote in the future.
Perhaps the best analogy that Trende uses to describe coalitions is that of a water balloon--when one portion is pressed, other parts are stretched. Actions parties take to attract certain voters cause other voters to exit. This concept of shifting coalitions is fundamental to American politics and one of the most important checks on tyranny, as James Madison stated in his famous Federalist 10.
One of the most astonishing facts reported in "The Lost Majority" illustrating the phenomenon of shifting coalitions is that each party has held about 300 of the 435 House seats during the last twenty years, something I certainly didn't know before reading the book. Also, one need only look at the maps of the close elections of 1976 and 2000 and see how dissimilar they are to see that today's swing state can within a relatively short time become a stronghold of one of the parties or vice versa.
Because political coalitions are fragile, the White House is within reach for both political parties in any given election, depending on conditions in the country (something also asserted by Allan Lichtman's
Keys to the White House
, another must read for political junkies).
Despite those who think that one candidate or another is a lock more than three years out, this is true for 2016 as well. If the economy has a more robust recovery, ObamaCare suddenly becomes popular when fully implemented, the scandals of recent months fizzle, and all is quiet in foreign affairs, a Democrat will likely be elected to succeed President Obama. But if ObamaCare remains unpopular, the scandals reach deeply into the White House, the sharp economic contraction that many expect to arrive before the end of 2014 makes its unwelcome presence felt, and the current administration allows Iran to get nukes, the GOP nominee will win handily, carrying states that have not gone Republican since the 1980s.
As many have stated, Sean Trende is an honest broker as well as a great number cruncher and psephologist. In "The Lost Majority" as well as in his regular columns, he produces truly striking insights, such as his comparison of West Virginia to Montana to name one example. This is an outstanding book, and I hope Trende stays in this line of work--I hope to be devouring his columns for numerous election cycles to come.
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