The Lost Majority:
Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs-and Who Will Take It
By Sean Trende
Palgrave Macmillan,
272 pages

There is a familiar story about the last century of American politics. The election of President McKinley in 1896 began a Republican era that lasted until 1932, when the nation “realigned” itself in favor of Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats. That era ended in 1968 or maybe 1980, starting a new period of either Republican rule or “de-alignment,” depending on the interpreter. The great hope of liberals in 2008 was that Barack Obama’s election would realign the country yet again.

Sean Trende, a writer for the website RealClearPolitics, reinterprets this history in the service of arguing that there is less to realignment than meets the eye. The New Deal coalition, on his telling, dominated American politics for a very short period, ending with FDR’s failed purge of conservative Democrats in 1938. Much more longlasting was the Eisenhower coalition, which built a formidable majority by adding suburbanites, working-class Catholics, and Southerners to the existing Republican base.

In what is almost an aside, Trende disputes the story often told about Southern voting behavior. Far from having left the Democrats over civil rights starting in 1964, Southerners had been voting for Republican presidential candidates a little bit more in almost every presidential election between 1932 and 1960, he argues. They were responding both to the Democrats’ leftward movement and their own increasing prosperity.

Trende sees Ronald Reagan’s presidency not as the dawn of a Republican era but the twilight of the Eisenhower coalition. It was succeeded by a Clinton coalition that brought suburbanites, Catholics, and even some Southerners back into the Democratic fold. He notes that the 1952 and 1992 elections fit the political scientists’ criteria for realigning elections better than the more familiar examples of 1968 and 2008. Both the Eisenhower and Clinton elections showed “sharp and durable” changes in the behavior of specific groups of voters: Southerners in the first case, suburbanites in the second. Both saw large spikes in voter turnout. Nixon, on the other hand, won mostly in the same areas that Eisenhower had, and Obama where Clinton had.

Obama’s winning coalition in 2008, Trende argues, was a demographically and geographically narrower version of Clinton’s. The former Democratic strongholds of Appalachia fled the Kerry-Obama Democratic Party, but Obama made up for those defections with stronger support from traditional Democratic groups, such as African Americans. “Obama won only 28 percent of the nation’s counties, the smallest percentage of counties carried by a victorious candidate since John Quincy Adams in 1824.” Even with extremely favorable circumstances, Obama won a smaller share of the two-party vote than had George H.W. Bush in 1988 or Clinton in 1996.

Based on Trende’s analysis, the Democratic Party faced three risks going into 2010: The geography of its coalition made it difficult to win a congressional majority; its demographic composition made it unusually vulnerable to defections, as from the white working-class voters who embraced Obama only after the financial crisis hit just before the 2008 election; and the siren song of realignment made the party oblivious to these dangers. In the midterm elections, all three dangers became manifest. Democrats pursued a sweeping federal overhaul of the health-care system even after receiving multiple warnings that the electorate disliked it. Voters who moved toward the Democrats in the late Bush years swung back hard to the Republicans, and the ranks of Democratic congressmen were decimated, especially in Appalachia.

Two themes recur in Trende’s story. One is the importance of contingency and choice. FDR won the New York governorship by 0.6 percent of the vote during the Republican sweep of 1928. What if he had lost? None of his leading rivals in 1932 had appealed at once to the South, the cities, and progressives. Trende also speculates on what might have happened if Hitler had waited a year to attack Poland: The Republicans would probably have won in 1940, and the Democrats might then have soured on New Deal politics.

His other theme is the difficulty of maintaining large coalitions. The plight of Al Gore in 2000 illustrates this point: “When he appealed to moderate professionals, his positions looked elitist to the white working class and Jacksonians; when he tried the populist route to bring the white working class on board, he lost suburbanites.”

Not surprisingly, then, Trende is not among those who project the inexorable triumph of one party or the other in the future. He is bullish, perhaps too bullish, on Republican chances in 2012. He rejects arguments that the Democratic Party will inevitably make gains because they have demographic momentum on their side. He argues that Latinos are likely to vote more Republican as they become richer and more established in this country. He also notes that young voters often change their allegiances as they grow older. George McGovern did relatively well among voters aged 18 to 29, but the same age cohort became George W. Bush’s strongest in 2000.

How well the Republicans do will depend on whether they avoid taking positions on immigration that alienate Latinos. It will also depend, Trende writes, on “style.” He mentions Kelly Ayotte’s successful run for the Senate in swing-state New Hampshire in 2010. She held down-the-line conservative positions but “didn’t act as though there was a conservative majority” in her state. Other candidates were more reckless and lost their races.

Trende is persuasive in debunking realignment theory, especially the version of it that holds that a pivotal election must occur every 32 years or so, which sounds akin to a political scientist’s version of numerology. But the old story about our political history has more power than Trende allows, at least if the focus shifts from party politics to ideology. The 1932 and 1980 elections really were more important than the 1952 and 1992 elections in their effects on the country’s policies and political philosophy. Eisenhower largely governed within a consensus formed by the New Deal, as Clinton did within one formed by Reaganite conservatism.

Yet on his main subject, the zig and zag of party politics, Trende is wholly convincing. He has a fine sense of exactly which item to select from his vast store of data to make his case. For example: “In 1912, two candidates who competed for the mantle of Progressivism combined for almost 70 percent of the vote. In 1924, the two conservative candidates shared over 80 percent of the vote.” It’s this sort of sudden change that makes straight-line punditry so frequently wrong. In American politics, every majority is in time a lost majority.