Will Revulsion Toward Trump Create a Political Realignment?

The election of Barack Obama  in 2008 was hailed as proof that a political realignment was taking place.  The prediction proved premature as the existence of a black president cause the forces of hate and bigotry on the right to rally, first in the form of the Tea Party and then in the form of Donald Trump base of support made up of racists and Christian extremist. Nearly four years later revulsion towards Trump - and most of what his base stands for - may be the fuse needed to make the missed realignment of 2008 become a reality.  Several factors are at play: (i) the shrinking of the pool of older white voters, (ii) the much enlarged pool of younger voters, (iii)the revulsion of moral conservatives - this does not include evangelicals - and (iv) growing numbers of older voters waking to the reality that Trump's/the GOP's response to the Covid-19 pandemic represents a threat to their very lives.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the dynamic.  Here are highlights:

You might fairly conclude that political analysts predicting realignments are not much different from stock market touts whose absolute — and mistaken — certainties about coming bull or bear markets lose a lot of people a lot of money. Since the rise of Ronald Reagan in 1980, many more realignments have been forecast than actually materialized.

But there is another way to look at those 2008 predictions: They were not wrong, they were just premature. As a result, a 77-year-old Democratic presidential nominee may be the unlikely instrument of a new generational alignment.

Why now and not in 2008? The most important reason is the obvious one: The backlash against Trump is the driving factor in this election so far — and there could be no better representative of the politics of the past than the current occupant in the White House. He is stubbornly out of touch with the country’s attitudes on many questions, and especially so on racial justice.

Far from adjusting to different times, Trump is betting — as he did in 2016 and as the tea party did in the Obama years — that the leftover right-wing slogans from the 1960s (see: “LAW AND ORDER!”) and a defense of Confederate “heritage” will win him the overwhelming majorities among older white voters that he needs to carry battleground states.

But this isn’t working, and not only because former vice president Joe Biden is an older white guy who is rather hard to tar as an agent of the revolutionary left. It’s also failing because many older voters are petrified of what Trump’s astonishingly inept handling of the coronavirus pandemic means for their health and their very lives.

But more importantly for the long run, the 2020 electorate is not the electorate of the tea party wave, or even of 2016. The new generations that Obama realignment enthusiasts acclaimed 12 years ago are, at long last, the dominant groups in the electorate.

As a Pew Research Center study showed, members of Gen Z (born after 1996) couldn’t even vote in 2012 and made up just 4 percent of the 2016 potential electorate. But they will account for 1 in 10 eligible voters this year. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) will constitute 27 percent of this year’s eligible voters. In combination with Gen Xers (born 1965 to 1980), more than 6 in 10 of this year’s electorate will be younger than 55.

Three things are true: (1.) The post-boomer generations are more diverse than the rest of the electorate. (2.) Younger whites are more liberal than their elders on matters of racial justice — as a Washington Post-Schar School poll showed this month — and on social issues. (3.) The share of millennials who vote will be higher than in Obama’s elections simply because they are older than they were in 2008 or 2012.

The 14-point lead Biden enjoyed over Trump in the New York Times-Siena College poll released last week reflects all these factors. Biden is splitting voters over 50 roughly evenly with Trump and then overwhelming the president among registered voters under 35 (59 to 25 percent) and those 35 to 49 (53 to 30 percent).

Nor did Biden’s margins depend solely on the diversity of the younger cohorts. Among whites under 45, Biden led Trump 52 to 30 percent.

Thus could a president who rose to power by exploiting the fears and anxieties of the aging part of the country find himself brought down by the rising generations who have had enough of the past. The United States of Trump’s imagination may simply no longer exist.

Trump’s Sour Virginia "Cocktail"

The low population areas are the GOP strongholds

While Donald Trump is a case unto himself in many ways, he embodies a growing problem for the Republican Party in Virginia.  As the demographics of Virginia have rapidly changed, as with Trump, the Virginia GOP focuses its policies on the aging white population with an attitude of "to Hell with everyone else."  The approach works in the carefully gerrymandered districts for the House of Delegates, but is a bust when it comes to state wide elections.  Now, Trump is exacerbating the problem through his racism, vulgarity and extremism - all things that could have been avoided but for Trump being Trump - as noted in an op-ed in the Washington Post. Here are excerpts:

Political arguments are rarely gentle or polite anymore, so it was a gift to see two Republicans who passionately disagree about what Donald Trump means for our nation hash out their differences with grace. Their exchange helps explain the mess Trump has made of his campaign.

One clear indicator: Trump, who campaigned in Fredericksburg on Saturday, has handed Hillary Clinton a substantial lead in this former bulwark of conservatism. He is thus speeding along a process by which Virginia, a state that voted for Republicans in every election from 1968 to 2004, finds itself on the verge of becoming reliably Democratic in presidential contests.

My window into the intra-Republican split came courtesy of a lunch here with Russ Potts, a genial moderate Republican legend who spent 16 years in Virginia’s state Senate, and his friend and business protege Zach Franz. Potts, 77, is president of his own sports marketing company; Franz, 33, serves as senior vice president. They have been through the business wars together, but they have very different views of 2016.

Potts speaks with pride of his time in the Virginia legislature — “the oldest continuous legislature in the free world,” he says, reflecting a devotion to the past that is very Virginia — and this has endowed him with a certain attitude toward politics. “I love the decorum and the history and the civility.” None is a word associated with Trump.

“He doesn’t make the cut for a lot of reasons,” Potts says, and he ticks off a comprehensive critique of Trump in bullet-point style, including references to the nominee’s disrespect toward the parents of a fallen Iraq veteran and a disabled journalist: “Character; six times he resorted to bankruptcy; and numerous times he cheated these poor souls who did his drywall or fixed his restaurant, plumbers and electricians. . . . Also, it really bothers me about the way he has treated the Muslim family, the way that he embarrassed the New York Times reporter.”

Potts plans to vote for Clinton, only the second time in his life he has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. The last time was in 1964, when he voted for Lyndon B. Johnson in the landslide that buried Barry Goldwater.

[T]hat is where Trump finds himself. And Virginia is a state in which he cannot afford to offend so many upscale voters. His coarse rudeness will never go down well here. In a telephone interview, Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat from Northern Virginia, cited an adage: “Virginians will vote for someone they feel comfortable having in their home for a cocktail party.” Trump, he says, doesn’t make the cut, adding: “All the defects of Trump hit home most securely with people who are smart, educated and sophisticated.”

Rep. Gerry Connolly, another Virginia Democrat from Washington’s suburbs, says such voters have revolutionized Old Dominion politics. North of the Rappahannock River, Connolly says, “Virginia looks more like a Mid-Atlantic state than a Southern state.” The vast suburban vote near the nation’s capital was key to President Obama’s ability to carry it twice and to what Connolly sees as a nearly insurmountable lead for Clinton this year.

That an alliance between suburban voters and African Americans is turning Virginia presidentially blue is especially alarming to Republicans because the same pattern is repeating itself in North Carolina and is making Georgia close. 

Trump could help Clinton solidify a great transformation in the geography of American politics.