A Realignment Must Mean Something
The Trump-Vance admin should beware the lessons of European conservative-populist coalitions
By Henry Olsen, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and host of the Beyond the Polls weekly podcast
The Trump-Vance administration takes office next week with an ambitious agenda and united Republican control of Congress. It is also the political leader of a new Republican Party, one that is rightly labeled as multi-racial and working-class.
That labeling, though, is only partially correct. It is true that the party’s newest voters—the ones that made it the majority—are disproportionately non-white and working class. But these new voters sit aside the old, traditionally conservative voters who have backed the GOP for decades.
This conservative-populist coalition does not march in lockstep. The new voters mostly backed President Barack Obama twice, and remain more moderate and supportive of robust government action. The old voters have surely shifted on issues like free trade, but these McCain-Romney backers remain more economically and socially conservative.
Baked in the afterglow of triumph, Trump’s initial agenda will likely make all factions happy. Governing, though, doesn’t stop after the first bills are passed. Events always bedevil even the best politicians, and something is sure to arise over the next four years that will force Trump to choose between these two groups.
When that time comes, Trump should look to what others faced with similar choices have done. For he is not the first leader of a conservative-populist coalition. Two others—Sweden’s Fredrik Reinfeldt and Britain’s Conservative Party—have tried to do what he now attempts. Both failed to meet the test when it came, destroying their new coalition in the process.
Both failed for the same reason: when push came to shove, the leaders chose the old base rather than the new converts. In so doing, they drove the new voters away, irrevocably splitting their coalition and allowing their leftist adversaries to regain power.
Trump must do the opposite when the time comes, leaning into the new realignment by choosing the new voters’ desires over the old base’s wants. Only in this way can he cement their loyalty and truly build a new, lasting coalition that will endure and transform America.
Reinfeldt was the first modern leader of a leading center-right party to consciously try to peel working-class voters away from their traditional support for the center-left. Relabeling his Moderate Party as “the new Moderates,” he moved it away from a reliance on broad-based tax cuts and deregulation. Instead, he adopted targeted tax cuts and labor market restructuring designed to put Swedes back to work.
This rebranded “Swedish Workers’ Party” won the 2006 and 2010 elections. Indeed, in 2010 it won 30.1% of the votes, its highest since the introduction of universal suffrage in Sweden. Indeed, it came within a whisker of winning the most votes of any party (it formed a government because it, along with its coalition partners, had the most parliamentary seats). Had they succeeded in doing so, it would have been the first time a party other than the Social Democrats finished first in the era of universal suffrage. Reinfeldt looked like a genius.
Then came the events that triggered his fall: the Libyan crisis and the Syrian Civil War. Millions of refugees streamed to Europe, and Sweden was among the most liberal in admitting them. Over 115,000 migrants were admitted in 2012 to the small nation of roughly 9.5 million people. That is equivalent to nearly 4 million people coming to America.
Reinfeldt continued to keep the doors wide open even as polls showed the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats rising by virtue of their position on this issue. More immigrants came in 2013 and even more in 2014. Yet Reinfeldt still held his course, arguing that Sweden’s future was as a “multi-ethnic society.” As the 2014 election approached, he told Swedes they should “open their hearts” to the refugees. Supported by the party’s traditional business class, Reinfeldt was willing to die on the hill of large-scale immigration.
Politically, he did. The Moderates lost power in that vote, dropping to 23.3%. Their losses were especially large in the southern regions of Skane and Gotland where they had ripped away traditional Social Democratic working-class voters in 2010. But those people didn’t just return to the old Left; many voted for the Sweden Democrats, who got a then-record high 12.9% of the vote.
The Moderates have never recovered. While their leader, Ulf Kristersson, became Prime Minister after the 2022 election, Reinfeldt’s party only got 19.1% of the vote. The Sweden Democrats are now the largest non-socialist party in Sweden, winning 20.5% that year. They finished ahead of the Moderates in every constituency in the country except those in the four largest cities, the Stockholm suburbs, and one tiny island. The Moderates sit on the throne, but the populist Sweden Democrats are the power behind it. Reinfeldt’s error still reverberates.
The voting shift that brought the populists to power eerily mirrors the geographic voting shift that brought Trump to power, too. The Social Democrat-led government won in 2018 mainly by winning the largest cities—Stockholm, Göteborg, and Malmo—and adding their votes to those in their historic, more rural, working-class areas. In 2022, the leftist coalition gained votes in the cities and their surrounding suburbs, just as Democrats have in the Trump era. The populist-right coalition won because they gained more votes everywhere else, including in historically left-leaning, working-class areas. Britain’s Conservatives looked like they had solved Reinfeldt’s problem when they won the 2019 election. With a populist leader in Boris Johnson and their staunch support of Brexit—the populist-led effort to take the country out of the European Union—they leaned into the class-based realignment that had been roiling British politics for nearly a decade. With 365 seats in the House of Commons and 43.6% of the vote, the Tories had their best election since the Thatcher era.
The type of votes and seats they won were even more important than their overall level. Working-class seats that they had never won before suddenly flipped. The “Red Wall”—the historic heartland of the Labour Party—was breached.
This was fueled by a reversal of Britain’s historic voter demographics. For the entire history of polling, the Tories were strongest among the best educated and richest Britons and weakest among the least wealthy and least educated. The YouGov post-election survey, however, found that the Conservatives were strongest among the lowest social classes and weakest with the best off.
Their manifesto was as much a reason for their victory as their support of Brexit because it spoke most directly to the needs and priorities of working-class Britons. It pledged to dramatically increase spending on the National Health Service, build 40 new hospitals, and hire 50,000 new nurses. The Tories said they would also hike spending on schools and not raise taxes, including the National Insurance Contribution (NIC), Britain’s version of our Social Security Tax. Most famously, they said they would spend to “level up” Britain, focusing public resources on the working-class communities left behind in the preceding 20 years.
The Tories also pledged to reduce the number of migrants coming into Britain, as Britons had been upset about the competition they faced for jobs from immigrants from the much poorer countries in the European Union. For these voters, Brexit was mainly about stopping that influx and giving them a fair shot at an increasing standard of living.
Conservatives had a special reason for wanting this shift to succeed: they had nearly been wiped out of existence just a few months before their triumph. They had been in power since the Brexit referendum in 2016, yet they had not delivered. The party was riven with infighting, as Prime Minister Theresa May proved unable to deliver a Brexit deal with the EU that serious Brexit backers could support. When Nigel Farage started a new political party—the Brexit Party—in April, Tory support nosedived.
Conservatives finished fifth in the May 2019 elections for the European Parliament, winning only 9% of the vote. The Brexit Party won the vote, garnering over 31%. By early June, the Brexit Party led British polls with the Conservatives running a weak fourth. Only their rapid shift to elect Johnson as the new PM turned their fortunes around.
The complete failure to deliver is baffling. In power, the Tories presided over an increase in net migration, not the decrease they promised. In fact, it skyrocketed under Conservative government to record highs.
Other promises were never delivered on, either. NHS spending went up, but the promised new hospitals never materialized. The new Labour government now says fewer than half of those planned will be permitted to continue. Fewer than half of the promised new police officers were hired, and the crime rate remained about 40% higher in England and Wales in 2024 than it had been in 2015.
The Tories also failed on their core competency: economic management. They broke their pledge not to raise the NIC, hiking it by 1.25%. They backed down from their plans to boost housing construction in the face of opposition from wealthy suburbs. “Levelling up” never really took place, as projects were curtailed or never launched.
These missteps were exacerbated by a sharp move to pacify the Tory base after Johnson resigned as prime minister. His successor, Liz Truss, proposed a “mini budget” that cut taxes for the rich—and caused financial markets to panic. The rise in interest rates and severe drop in the value of the pound was a calamity, forcing Truss to resign after a mere six weeks in office.
The political impact of this disaster was immediate and lasting. Johnson’s missteps had already pushed the Tories down to around 31% in the polls, roughly 10-12 points behind Labour. Truss’s swerve to the economic right drove them down to the low 20s by the time she resigned, over 30 points behind Labour.
Conservatives suffered their worst general election loss in their history last June. They won only 23.7% of the vote, a 19.9-point decline from 2019. They dropped 251 seats, winning a mere 121. They lost every single Red Wall seat they had gained while also getting pummeled in their traditional upper-income suburban base. Calling it a shellacking is an understatement.
Their abandonment of their new working-class supporters also created space for a new challenger actually interested in working-class concerns: Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. Reform came from virtually nowhere to capture five seats and 14.3% of the vote. It drew its backing from the lower social classes, running about even with the Tories among the C2 and DE voters (the bottom two social classes in Britain) whose 2019 defection from Labour fueled the Tory triumph.
Reform has gained significant ground in the last few months while the Tories have stagnated. Polls taken this year show Reform are up to 22% on average, and the last two polls show them narrowly ahead of the Conservatives.
These cases make clear that Trump and Vance cannot rest on their victory. New coalitions can be quickly undone, particularly when leaders make decisions that hearken back to the old political divisions that had previously caused newly acquired voters to oppose the old center-right.
Trump needs to lean into the realignment if he wants it to stick. That can mean a host of specifics, depending on what the precise clash is. But whatever the specific debate, he needs to clearly take his new voters’ side and face down a revolt from his old base—particularly the Old Guard of the GOP—if he is to prevail over the long term.
That likely means he will need to resist conservative budget cutters’ cries to put debt reduction ahead of spending that is clearly directed at the working class. It could also mean accepting tax hikes on the rich to pay for tax cuts for workers, like Trump’s proposal to make tips tax-free. Again, we can’t know in advance what the specific battle will be about. We can only know that, to preserve the new conservative coalition, he should choose the economic preferences of his new, often non-white voters over those of the old donor and activist classes.
This holds true for social issues, too. Trump won because he captured a much larger share of voters who are more supportive of abortion and aren’t particularly religious compared to other Republicans. He did that by moving away from old GOP dogma, often to the chagrin of the old base. He must not fall prey to the temptation to swerve back on a high-profile issue to mollify them, else he risks losing the new voters who are the crucial element of his majority.
It’s incredibly difficult to create a new political coalition. Both Newt Gingrich and President Obama failed to do that when both put the concerns of their old base (budget cutting and Obamacare, respectively) ahead of those of their new voters. Trump and Vance have done something that few thought possible a decade ago: they have made a working-class, multi-ethnic coalition that has pushed the GOP ahead of Democrats in partisan identification in a presidential election for the first time since 1928. They have given us a majority. Now all they have to do is keep it.