The Trump Coalition in Historical Context, from Country Club to Cracker Barrel

Let me paint you two pictures, and I want you to notice that I am calling them pictures, not photographs. The first is the Republican gathering of the 1950s as the cartoonists drew it: a clubhouse with a green lawn, a bank president in a blazer, a corporate lawyer with a martini, a few well-fed Main Street merchants nodding along. The second is the Republican gathering of the 2010s as the same cartoonists drew it: a pickup truck outside a roadside restaurant with rocking chairs on the porch, a welder and a nurse's aide and a small-town sheriff arguing over the check. Same party. Different furniture.

Both pictures are caricatures, and both contain something true. The Republican Party is not a fixed thing. It is a coalition, which means a bargain among groups that need each other, and bargains get renegotiated. Here is my thesis in one sentence: the shift that brought working-class voters in large numbers into the Republican coalition is not a freak event, it is the latest in a long series of realignments, and understanding that history tells you which parts of the present bargain are sturdy and which parts need careful handling. Let me argue it in order.

First, define the terms

A coalition is the set of groups that vote together for a party, such as business owners, churchgoers, veterans, farmers. A realignment is a lasting change in which groups belong to which party. Political scientists argue about how many realignments there have been and exactly when, and I will not pretend there is a single settled list. I will stick to the shifts that historians broadly agree on, and I will note where the record is uncertain.

One more distinction, because it is the one every good debater insists on: there is the factual question, who actually votes for the party, and the value question, who should. This post is about the first. The second, which voters conservatism ought to be trying to reach, I will return to at the end.

1896: the business-and-industry coalition

The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln was founded in 1854 on opposition to the spread of slavery, and for a generation after the Civil War it was the party of national union and Reconstruction. By the 1890s it had become something different. In 1896, William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan. McKinley's coalition was industrial and commercial: factory owners, bankers, many industrial workers in the North and Midwest who believed the protective tariff and sound money protected their jobs, and a great many farmers in the Midwest as well. Bryan, the Democrat, carried the South and much of the plains and mountain West on a platform of free silver and a sharp complaint against eastern financial power. McKinley won 271 electoral votes to Bryan's 176. We compare the two campaigns in McKinley and Bryan in 1896 Compared as Two Ways to Run for President, and the tariff that held the whole structure together is the subject of Republicans were the tariff party first, from Lincoln to McKinley.

The result was a long period of Republican strength, from 1896 until the Great Depression, interrupted most notably when Theodore Roosevelt's third-party run in 1912 split the party and put Woodrow Wilson in the White House. Notice who is in that coalition: northern business and northern workers who shared an interest in the tariff. The party of country clubs and the party of the factory floor were, in 1896, the same party, and what held them together was an economic idea.

1932: the coalition breaks

Then came the crash. In 1932 Herbert Hoover carried just six states, and Franklin Roosevelt built the New Deal coalition: the white South, which had voted Democratic since Reconstruction, big-city machines, immigrants and their children, Catholic and Jewish voters, labor unions, and, increasingly, Black voters in the North who had been loyal Republicans since Lincoln. We tell that last part in Why Black Voters Left the Party of Lincoln for the New Deal, in Questions. In 1936, the Republican nominee won only Maine and Vermont. The party spent two decades in the wilderness, which our piece on The New Deal Coalition and the Twenty Years the GOP Spent in the Wilderness covers in detail.

What survived? A core of small-town and small-city voters, business owners, many farmers, and the more prosperous parts of the North. That is the base of what, in the 1950s, became the picture with the clubhouse. When Dwight Eisenhower won in 1952 and 1956, he did so with a broader appeal than the base itself, including voters in the suburbs and in parts of the South, but the party's core identity was the managerial, professional, Main Street Republican. Congress, meanwhile, stayed mostly in Democratic hands. A party can win the White House and still be a minority party in the country.

1964 to 1980: the party is rebuilt

The next rebuilding was slow and had several parts. I will take them one at a time, because they are often squashed together in the telling.

One. The conservative movement captured the nomination. In 1964 Barry Goldwater, a senator from Arizona, was the nominee. He lost forty-four states. But he won Arizona and five states in the Deep South, and he built a national network of volunteers and donors who would carry the movement for the next sixteen years. Our piece The 1964 Goldwater Campaign Lost 44 States and Won the Future tells the story. Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on constitutional grounds, a position that remains a matter of historical argument. The point for coalition history is that the 1964 map previewed a different geography.

Two. The working-class voter began to move. By 1972, Richard Nixon carried forty-nine states, appealing to what he called a silent majority, among them many union households and white ethnic voters in the industrial North. See Nixon's 1972 Landslide and the Birth of the Blue-Collar Republican.

Three. The South moved gradually, not suddenly. It is easy to say the white South flipped to the Republicans in 1964 or 1968. The record is more complicated. Republicans began winning Southern states in presidential races in the 1950s with Eisenhower, but Southern Democrats kept control of most state governments and many congressional seats for another generation. Republicans did not win a majority of the South's House seats until 1994. The sweeping claim that "the parties switched" tends to collapse the whole thing into one moment; we test it against the record in The Parties Switched Story Meets the Record and What the Evidence Shows.

Four. The religious vote arrived. In the late 1970s, evangelical and other religious conservatives, many of whom had been politically less active and some of whom had voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, organized in response to a series of cultural and legal fights. By 1980 they were a major part of the Republican base. See How Evangelical Voters Became Republican Voters Between 1976 and 1984.

Five. Reagan assembled the pieces. In 1980, Ronald Reagan won forty-four states, and in 1984, forty-nine. He united economic conservatives, defense conservatives and social conservatives, and drew the "Reagan Democrats," blue-collar voters in places like Macomb County, Michigan, who had voted Democratic for decades. That story is in The Reagan Democrats of Macomb County and the Voters Who Changed Sides. The famous image for this was a three-legged stool, and it held up for a long time.

2016: the latest shift

Now we come to the 2010s. What was new? Political scientists have documented a long trend, with a clear direction: over several decades, voters with a college degree moved toward the Democratic Party, and voters without a degree, especially white voters, moved toward the Republican Party. In the 1950s the educational pattern ran the other way, with college graduates more likely to be Republican. I will not quote you a number because the numbers differ by survey and by year, and I would rather you look at the published studies than take my word.

In 2016, Donald Trump's campaign pressed this trend further than any recent Republican nominee. He did especially well in parts of the industrial Midwest, such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states that had not voted Republican for President in decades. We unpack the arithmetic in How Donald Trump won the three states Republicans had lost for a generation. His message mixed several themes. Trade policy that put American workers first. Tighter immigration enforcement. Skepticism about foreign wars and foreign entanglements. A cultural message aimed at voters who felt looked down on by the country's institutions. None of those themes was invented in 2016. Tariff politics are as old as the Republican Party. Immigration restriction has a long history. The scorn of the elite is a populist staple that goes back to Bryan and beyond. What was new was the packaging and the voter it reached.

The strongest objection

Here is the best case against my thesis, and I will state it as strongly as I can. It goes: You are describing one man's personality as a historical trend. A realignment is a permanent change in what groups vote for which party. But elections turn on candidates, the economy and events. Take away this candidate and the coalition goes with him.

I take that seriously, and I have three answers.

First, most of the movement predates the man. The movement of non-college white voters toward Republicans was underway in the Nixon and Reagan years. Rust Belt counties had been drifting for decades. The Tea Party of 2010 The Tea Party Wave of 2010 Explained from Santelli to the Statehouses was the same voters, angry about a different thing. So the personality accelerated a trend, he did not create it.

Second, realignments are only visible in hindsight. In 1896, nobody called it the start of a thirty-six-year Republican era. In 1932, nobody called it the start of the New Deal order. And I will add a caution of my own: in the mid-2000s, commentators confidently predicted a permanent Republican majority, and it did not last. Anyone who tells you with certainty how long this will hold is guessing.

Third, even if the objection is right, the lesson stands. The party has to keep both the new voters and the old ones to win.

What fits comfortably and what needs care

That is the central question for the family at the kitchen table, so let me lay it out in a plain verdict.

Fits comfortably:

• Faith and family voters and the rural and small-town voters with a long tie to the party.
• Veterans and military families, who have supported a strong defense for generations.
• Small business owners and tradespeople, who benefit from lower taxes and lighter regulation and who also see themselves as working people.
• Working-class voters who care about jobs, the border and crime, who have a natural interest in the party's message on those subjects.

Needs care:

• Trade. The 1896 party was protectionist. The Reagan party was largely free-trade. Business owners who rely on imports and working-class voters who fear competition both vote Republican, and tariffs divide them. A leader cannot please both on every issue.
• Entitlements. Older working-class voters rely on Social Security and Medicare. A fiscal-reform wing wants to restrain their growth. This is the same argument we saw in Compassionate Conservatism, No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D, and no one has solved it.
• Immigration and labor. Some employers want a larger pool of workers while many voters want fewer entrants. The Republican answer is enforcement plus a legal system that works, and the details are where coalitions break.
• Suburban, college-educated voters. Many of these voters once formed the backbone of the 1950s party. They tend to agree on taxes and regulation and to disagree on tone and certain cultural questions. Losing them is a real cost, and winning them back does not require surrendering the principles that attract everyone else.

Who is looking out for the working family?

The Republican Party was a party of owners in 1896 and a party of professionals in 1956. It is, to a large and growing extent, a party of workers now. That brings an obligation. A party that asks working families for their votes has to deliver for them: lower costs, safe streets, good jobs, a school that teaches their children to read. It is not enough to say you are on their side. The coalition will last only if the families inside it can see a benefit at their kitchen table.

The bottom line

• The Republican Party has been rebuilt before, in 1896, in the New Deal collapse of the 1930s, and in the Goldwater-to-Reagan years. The 2016 shift of working-class voters is the latest chapter, not the first.
• Do not rely on caricature. Neither the country-club picture nor the pickup-truck picture is the whole party.
• The pressure points are trade, entitlements, immigration and the suburbs. If you are a candidate or a county chairman, plan for those arguments instead of hoping they go away.
• No one can say how long any coalition lasts. Be wary of anyone, in either party, who calls a majority permanent.
• If you want to understand your own county, look at the history of its vote. The library has the old election returns, and your county clerk has the recent ones.