The Political Realignment of 2024 and What It Means for the Future

The 2024 presidential election may be remembered as the moment Americans abandoned the issues that defined the post-Cold War era and formed new political coalitions based on class, some experts say.

President-elect Donald Trump solidified his hold on the working class in his second electoral victory, even as voters with higher incomes and education levels moved to the left. Whether those shifts will be permanent depends largely on how both parties respond to the emerging politics of class, according to analysts.

Some believe Democrats can recapture their historic working-class base by listening to the voters who have been drifting away from their party for a decade and crafting a new liberal vision based more on class than on race, gender, or social issues.

Republicans, on the other hand, might keep this new party configuration together if they deliver on the promises that won the majority while forming a governing philosophy based on Trump’s America First agenda without alienating traditional Republicans of the Reagan-Bush era.

Here’s what happened in 2024 and what it means for both parties.

Voters Moved in Both Directions

The composition of the major political parties has been shifting since 2012, but that shift reached a tipping point in 2024. The movement was seen most clearly in working-class voters, who supported Trump in even greater numbers than in 2016 and 2020.

Analysts commonly use education and income levels as indicators of class identity. By both measures, working-class voters across racial lines shifted right.

Education and Income

College graduates favored Republican candidates in every election from 1988 through 2004. That began to change in 2008 when President Barack Obama earned 50 percent of the college vote. The shift accelerated in 2016 when Democrats gained 55 percent of the vote among college graduates and held a majority for the next two elections. In 2024, 53 percent of voters with a Bachelor’s degree voted for Harris, as did 59 percent of those holding an advanced degree, exit polls showed.

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Over the same period, voters who never attended college, a traditional mainstay of the Democratic coalition, increasingly voted Republican. In 2016, 46 percent of voters having a high school education or less voted Republican, which was consistent with the two previous election cycles. By 2024, the number of Republican voters who never attended college had risen to 63 percent, the polls revealed.

A similar migration occurred in terms of income. In 2012, 60 percent of voters with household incomes less than $50,000 voted Democrat. By 2024, that number had dropped below half.

At the same time, a majority of voters from households earning more than $100,000 per year favored the Democratic candidate for the first time since the data was tracked in 1988. The Republican share from this group in 2024 was 46 percent, the lowest ever.

Race, Gender, Religion

Minorities’ support for Democratic candidates has been strong since the 1970s, reaching a high point in 2008 with the election of Obama. Since then, however, the dropoff has been significant, especially among black and Hispanic men.

Support for Democrats by black voters fell from a high of 95 percent in 2008 to 85 percent in 2024. The drop was greatest among black men, 77 percent of whom voted for the Democratic candidate in 2024, the same percentage as in 1972. Black women, the most reliable Democratic voters, voted 91 percent for Vice President Kamala Harris, 5 percent lower than for Obama in 2008.

Hispanic support for the Democrats hovered around 65 percent for over 40 years. In 2024, the level dropped by 13 percentage points. The decline was more pronounced among Hispanic men. Just 43 percent of them voted Democratic this year, a lower percentage than that of white women.

Asian voters supported the Democratic candidate by 73 percent in 2012. That number dropped steadily over the next three cycles, reaching 54 percent in 2024.

The Blue Wall of industrial states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, had been solidly Democratic in presidential elections from 1992 until 2016, when Trump won all three. Though President Joe Biden rebuilt that wall in 2020, Trump again carried those states again in 2024.

Trump also eroded Democratic support in traditional party strongholds like New York, New Jersey, and California. While Harris carried all three by a comfortable margin, she gained a smaller share of the vote than either Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In Wayne County, Michigan, home to Detroit, Harris drew about 38,000 fewer votes than Biden did in 2020. In Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, Harris received about 36,000 fewer votes than Biden had. In Queens County, New York, the deficit was nearly 165,000, and in Los Angeles County, California, it was 621,000.

“Harris, in Democratic strongholds in Michigan and Pennsylvania, simply underperformed Biden’s vote totals,” Ken Kollman, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, told The Epoch Times.

Though Harris still won those counties by a large margin, the erosion of support in traditionally strong democratic areas fueled Trump’s victory, according to Kollman.

According to William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the upshot of these shifts is that class has again become a powerful force in electoral politics.

This new reality undercuts assumptions that have informed both parties for decades, and experts say both will need to make adjustments before the next election.

Democrats: Listen, Reimagine

Self-reflective statements by Democrats in the wake of the election have centered on the need to listen to voters.

“The country wanted change, and the vice president’s campaign decided they would not offer that,” longtime Democratic strategist James Carville said in a PBS interview on Nov. 13.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian and Democratic commentator, focused on the need to reengage the people who have given the party its strength for generations.

“The most important thing that the Democrats have to take away from this loss is that they lost the working class base, and that’s been the foundation of the Democratic Party ever since FDR,” Goodwin said in a Fox News interview on Nov. 8. “I think the working class felt invisible. They felt forgotten.”

David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, told The Epoch Times that Democrats should talk to real working-class people.

“More importantly, go out and listen to them,” he said.

Economics Trumps Identity

A likely takeaway from those conversations, Schultz said, could be that identity politics seems less important to working-class voters than basic questions of economic survival.

“Hispanics, at the end of the day, are saying, ‘We want jobs. We’re not thrilled about illegal immigration, and we want higher wages.’” Schultz said, noting that this does not conform to the general perception of “Hispanic issues.”

Gabriel Sanchez, a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico, reached a similar conclusion.

“Overwhelmingly, the economy is what Latino men have actually been talking about for three election cycles in a row,” Sanchez said in the Nov. 12 panel discussion.

That may be, in part, because Hispanics are a diverse group comprising a mix of national origins and cultures. As a result, “they do not have nearly as strong a sense of linked fate,” Aaron Dusso, a professor of political science at Indiana University Indianapolis, told The Epoch Times, referring to the sense of common identity and interests that characterizes some demographic groups.

The sense of linked fate is more pronounced among black Americans, according to Dusso. Yet an increasing share of black men voted Republican in the 2024 presidential election—for a fourth consecutive time. And that was despite direct appeals to black men from both Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, to vote for Harris based on their identity.

One explanation for that shift may be that younger blacks seem less concerned with the civil rights issues of a previous generation and more concerned with economic opportunity.

Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit-area pastor who spoke at the Republican National Convention, said his decision to support Trump was rooted in disappointment with the economic results of Democratic leadership for the black community.

Noting that many are routinely forced to choose between paying rent, repairing their car, or paying child support, Sewell told the Epoch Times, “We’ve had Democrats running this city for 56 years. I’m not saying Democrats are wrong. I’m just asking, ‘Where’s the change?’”

Yet in the presidential contest, Harris drew the smallest share of the women’s vote, 53 percent, since 2004. Trump, with 45 percent, received the highest share of the women’s vote by any Republican since President George H.W. Bush.

“It’s a clear indication to me that, ultimately, the Dobbs decision is not going to have a political effect,” Dusso said.

New Messaging

According to Schultz, Democrats must reformulate their vision for a different coalition to regain lost ground. This coalition must include both the higher-educated, upper-income voters who have entered the party and working-class voters.

“I think they’ve got to temper college-educated suburbanites, who are well-off enough to not have to worry about [the cost of staple goods] and say, ‘This is the coalition we have to form,’” Schultz said.

That may involve decentering issues of identity politics, not because they are unimportant but because the first objective in politics is to get elected, he said.

Democrats might recapture the working class by returning to the liberal vision that energized their base decades ago, Dusso said. That means less messaging around government programs or tax incentives, which has fallen flat. Instead, he thinks Democrats should articulate a bigger vision of economic justice and closing the wealth gap between the upper and lower classes.

“Young individuals are really attracted to messaging that’s much more like what Bernie Sanders has been saying over the last decade … an economic populist message that is grounded in a working-class,” Dusso said, adding that in addition to young people, he thinks “it would resonate with the blue-collar worker.”

Republicans: Deliver, Unite

Republicans face a similar challenge in reverse, analysts say. To capitalize on this election, they must deliver on their promises to the working class while uniting traditional Republicans around a different vision than that which has animated the party since 1980.

The complication is that some of Trump’s America First policies, which drew working people into the party, conflict with the pillars of Reagan-style Republicanism: moral conservatism, interventionist foreign policy, and free-market economics.

For example, Evangelical Christians, who account for a broad swath of the Republican coalition, hold conservative views on LGBT issues and abortion. Yet Trump has softened his views on some of these issues, attracting a wider audience.

Richard Grenell, a gay man who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany and acting director of national intelligence during the first Trump administration, was invited to speak at the Republican National Convention in July.

“Donald Trump doesn’t care if you’re gay or straight, black, brown or white, or what gender you are,” Grenell said in his remarks. “He knows that we are all Americans and that it’s time to put America first.”

Trump has repeatedly referred to himself as the most pro-life American president and as instrumental in the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Yet he has said the regulation of abortion should now be left to the states, and the 2024 GOP platform omitted a call for a national ban for the first time in years, disappointing some pro-life Republicans. Trump referred to Florida’s ban on abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy as a “terrible mistake,” angering others.

Trump campaigned on a promise to restore American strength on the world stage, saying that involves rebuilding this nation’s military and calling on allies to contribute more to global defense. Regarding Ukraine, Trump said at a CNN town hall in May 2023, “They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done—I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”

As for free trade, Trump has said since his first campaign began in 2015 that his priority is on correcting imbalances in U.S. trade with other nations.

“We need fair trade. Not free trade. We need fair trade. It’s gotta be fair,” he said on an episode of “60 Minutes.”

Yet many traditional Republicans have remained in the Republican fold despite their disagreements with Trump.

Former President George W. Bush did not endorse Trump. Neither did Vice President Mike Pence, who said that on Jan. 6, Trump had placed himself ahead of the Constitution. Yet neither endorsed Harris nor signaled a break with the party.

Only 4 percent of those identifying themselves as Republicans voted for Harris in 2024, while 5 percent of those who identified themselves as Democrats voted for Trump.

In the end, delivering economic results for the country may be the strongest unifying force, according to Schultz.

“This was an election about milk, bread, and eggs,” Shultz said. “If people feel like, in four years from now, they can afford milk, bread, and eggs more than they can now, and if they connect that to Trump, I think [the movement] survives.”

2028 and Beyond

Some experts warn against overstating the impact of the election despite the multi-cycle shift among some voters.

“We should not over-interpret this. It is not a 1980 realignment election,” Carville said. “It was a bad night.”

In Kollman’s view, the election was very close, and the outcome turned on a small percentage of votes in a handful of swing states.

Others say the economy was likely a decisive factor in voters’ minds.

“This election was lost two years ago when inflation started going crazy,” Dusso said.

Regardless of what drove the class shift in this election, the next four years will determine its duration.

“I describe 2024 as potentially a critical realignment,” Schultz said. “And 2028, depending on how both the Democrats and Republicans respond to how the electorate shifted, could make it permanent—a realignment that could last another 25 to 30 or years.”