Toward a Political History of the Last 75 Years

New Year's Day is a good time to take a long look backward with a cautious eye toward possible futures. My guide here is RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende's 2012 book "The Lost Majority," whose bold thesis was unduly neglected by political scientists spinning tales of a permanent New Deal Democratic majority.

Trende's thesis instead was that Democrats' big 1930s majorities were not enduring. Their 1940s presidential victories owed more to Franklin Roosevelt's wartimes and Harry Truman's Cold War leadership than to big-government domestic policies, which no Congress elected between 1938 and 1958 supported.

Instead, the real majority-former from 1950 to 1990 was Dwight Eisenhower. He won twice, as did his vice president, Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan, whom Eisenhower admired and regarded as a suitable future president, according to amateur historian Gene Kopelson, in the 1980s carried even more states than Eisenhower had in the 1950s.

Eisenhower, who owed his national prominence to Roosevelt, regarded attacks on New Deal programs as imprudent despite the skepticism of big government he expressed after leaving office. Reagan, a four-time Roosevelt voter, coming to office when big government was popular, could oppose its expansion but not its elimination.

Seemingly permanent Republican control of one branch of government and Democratic control of another often led to constructive compromises. The parties' divergent historical heritages -- Democrats split between Southern segregationists and labor union militants, and Republicans between small-government localists and big-government internationalists -- allowed deft politicians of both parties to fashion careers even on unlikely turf.

In "The Lost Majority," Trende argues that Bill Clinton brought in a new partisan balance in the 1990s. Starting in that decade, old party loyalties started to fade, and long-established patterns of ticket-splitting were replaced by straight-ticket voting. Hitherto little-known politicians in their 40s upended four-decade political tradition.

Clinton ended the apparent Republican lock on the presidency in 1992, and Newt Gingrich ended the Democratic lock on Congress in 1994. College graduates, starting in 1996, moved toward voting Democratic, while white Southerners trended Republican.

In states and cities, starting with Republicans Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin and Rudy Giuliani in New York, followed by other Republicans and some Democrats, including Clinton, leaders cut welfare dependency and violent crime by more than half.

That removed problems that had helped Republicans in the suburbs (the worst thing a politician can do electorally is to solve the problem he campaigned on). Meanwhile, Republican efforts to make inroads among Black and Hispanic people by not opposing racial quotas and heavy immigration produced only small countervailing gains.

As a result, Democrats won five of eight presidential elections between 1992 and 2020 and carried the popular vote in two more, while Republicans won majorities in the House of Representatives in 10 of the 14 elections between 1994 and 2020. But Democrats' margins in presidential races were smaller than Republicans' margins from 1950 to 1990, while Republicans only once won more than the 243 House seats that were the minimum that Democrats won every two years from 1958 to 1992.

Now, this period may have come to an end with Donald Trump's reelection, according to a Christmas Day article by The New York Times' chief political analyst, Nate Cohn. "The three Trump elections," he writes, "look as if they have the makings of a new era of politics, one defined by Donald J. Trump's brand of conservative populism."

Certainly, there have been well-recognized shifts in political alignments since Trump descended that Trump Tower escalator in June 2015. College graduates began voting even more Democratic than during the Clinton, Bush and Obama years and in places previously untouched.

That movement in Atlanta and Phoenix suburbs pushed Georgia and Arizona into the Democratic column in 2020 and as key target states in 2024.

At the same time, Trump succeeded where previous Republicans had failed in attracting noncollege-educated white people outside million-plus metropolitan areas in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. Each voted for Barack Obama twice, and each voted for Trump in 2016 and, by wider margins, in 2024. And to the surprise and consternation of many analysts as well, Trump made perceptible gains in 2020 and 2024 among Black, Hispanic and Asian people, with spectacular gains among noncollege-educated Hispanic people in 2024.

What could be more important in the future is that Black and Hispanic people who did not turn out this past November seemed to be more likely to favor Trump than those who did. For years, it was assumed that high turnout, especially among minorities, helps Democrats. Now, it looks like it helps Republicans.

Voters had the unusual opportunity this year to compare two four-year administrations: one headed by the Republican nominee and the other by the Democratic incumbent vice president who declined to cite any differences she had with the incumbent president. Polling throughout the campaign was consistent: On economic, immigration and foreign policy, more voters preferred the Republican over the Democratic alternative.

They did so in the face of expert assurances that populists like Trump are irresponsible and dangerous. But here and abroad, that seems as dubious as all those assurances from Democrats and the media that Joe Biden is as sharp as a tack. As maverick economist Arnold Kling writes, "Meloni, Milei, and Orban seem to be doing much better than Trudeau, Starmer, Macron, and Scholz."

What voters conclude four years from now depends, of course, on events that have not yet happened and decisions that have not yet been made or, in some cases, even contemplated. But those of us who have qualms about greater economic redistribution, trade protectionism and foreign policy nationalism need to admit that such policies do not amount to Nazism and that their current advocates are not Hitlers. Fears that seemed reasonable to many when Trump was elected eight years ago seem unwarranted to most people today.

Trump, like Eisenhower and Clinton, was not seen as a plausible president a few years before he was elected to office. But once there, Eisenhower and Clinton, or so Trende argues, set in motion new political alignments that proved enduring for three or four decades. Whether Trump's accession will produce a realignment as consequential is impossible to say. But the potential is there.

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. His new book, "Mental Maps of the Founders: How Geographic Imagination Guided America's Revolutionary Leaders," is now available.

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