No Going Back for the GOP

It’s time for Republican consultants to accept that Trump’s working class realignment is here to stay

By Patrick Ruffini, founding partner at Echelon Insights

To understand the working-class realignment now reshaping American politics, it’s useful to go back in history, to Richard Nixon’s White House in May of 1970. 

The tumultuous events of that month—the incursion into Cambodia and the Kent State protests, culminating in skirmishes on the streets of New York between antiwar protesters and hardhat construction workers—were enough to make the Republican White House reconsider its political position. 

Since coming into office, Nixon had struck a careful balance, wanting to be seen as the ultimate peacemaker in Vietnam while not giving into the protesters’ demands for a precipitous withdrawal. A growing backlash against the antiwar movement, with polls showing the public approving of the New York hardhats, gave Nixon the confidence to position himself against the excesses of the protests. 

Buchanan urged Nixon to focus on solidifying a new core constituency: “the working men and women of the country, the common man, the Roosevelt New Dealer.”

Patrick J. Buchanan, a key Nixon advisor, recognized the significance of the moment. Reviewing the images of blue-collar New Yorkers going toe-to-toe with the protesters, he argued that Vietnam was unmooring the working class from the Democratic Party. Buchanan urged Nixon to focus on solidifying a new core constituency: “the working men and women of the country, the common man, the Roosevelt New Dealer.” He noted that these Americans were “better patriots and more pro-Nixon than the little knot of Riponers we have sought to cultivate since we came into office,” making the case that it was time to discard the GOP’s old-school liberals and turn in a new direction: to the patriotic, pro-America working class that had historically formed the backbone of the Democratic Party. 

Days after the events known as the “Hard Hat Riot,” Nixon welcomed a group of union leaders to the White House, where he received a hard hat with a Nixon campaign bumper sticker. The Nixon hard hat would become an emblem of the president’s 1972 reelection campaign. The contrast between Nixon and George McGovern, the antiwar movement’s id, would be enough to secure him a thumping reelection and winning the support of traditional New Deal strongholds—areas that would not vote Republican again until Donald Trump’s rise.

Buchanan was not a universally revered figure on the Right in the decades that followed, waging a lonely battle for economic nationalism and skeptical of foreign intervention in the wake of the triumphal Cold War struggle. He even waged a spoiler third-party presidential bid in 2000, edging out Trump for the Reform Party nomination. But his Nixon White House memos predicting a realignment would prove prescient, and he was a forerunner of the “America First” message Trump would repackage and use to great effect to breach the Midwestern “Blue Wall” in 2016. 

Trump’s Political Triumph and Its Critics

Donald Trump’s 2024 victory represented not only a personal success; it validated a strategy that doubled down on working-class support to secure a Republican win in the popular vote for the first time in 20 years. 

For the first time in modern history, Republicans won the lowest-income voters outright. That was a remarkable feat considering the images of the parties that hardened during the 20th century: Republicans for corporations and the rich, Democrats for the working class. Trump had, of course, decisively won the lowest-income white voters ever since his arrival on the scene. But in 2020 and 2024, the shift of nonwhite working-class voters his way made it so that this familiar historical alignment was now fully inverted. In terms of income and education, Kamala Harris’s 2024 coalition now resembled Bob Dole’s 1996 coalition more than “the rising American electorate” that delivered Barack Obama two decisive victories. 

In terms of income and education, Kamala Harris’s 2024 coalition now resembled Bob Dole’s 1996 coalition more than “the rising American electorate” that delivered Barack Obama two decisive victories.

The Republican Party has been handed a great gift: a detoxification of the party’s image as a narrow coalition of rich CEOs and aging white voters. But it doesn’t seem clear that the sherpas guiding the party’s candidates beyond Donald Trump know exactly what to do with this gift.

In the Republican consulting class, there is still considerable skepticism about the durability of this coalition and its applicability beyond Trump. This skepticism has implications for policy. After all, if one accepts that the GOP is now the representative of working-class Americans, that would lead to a different policy emphasis. 

First, there is the critique that the new coalition is an unreliable one, there for Trump, or in high turnout presidential elections, but not for the midterm and special elections that determine control of Congress and the statehouses. Most political consultants make their bones on such races, so they are naturally primed for this argument. 

They point to the Obama-era Democrats as a cautionary tale: success at the top of the ticket, devastation downballot. Related to this point is the idea that the coalition is inefficiently distributed, concentrated in big blue cities that punch below their weight in the Electoral College and don’t advance the party’s cause in Congress. Finally, they argue that the shift is likely personal to Trump, that other Republicans can’t replicate it as well, so they should focus simply on getting the core base vote out and doing better with suburban voters, not changing much about who they campaign to or campaign about. 

Those in the business of winning campaigns are not an overexuberant group, having seen the political tides turn more times than they can name. But this skeptical view underestimates the staying power of this realignment—and the opportunity it presents. 

Though extremely low-turnout special elections have emerged as a concern, overall Republicans are not in danger of becoming a “low-turnout coalition.” Their turnout rates remain higher across the board because, for the moment, minority voters with the lowest turnout rates remain a Democratic group. Should these groups ever flip, it would be “a good problem to have,” since the party would be in an even stronger position politically than it is today. 

Though extremely low-turnout special elections have emerged as a concern, overall Republicans are not in danger of becoming a “low-turnout coalition.”

The critics are overly dismissive of success at the top of the ticket. The presidency sets the direction of politics and influences the tone of culture. It was a problem that Republicans lost 7 of the previous 8 elections in the popular vote. We likely wouldn’t be seeing the incoming Trump administration given more running room than it got in 2017 and corporate America changing its tune on censorship and DEI policies had Trump not come out on top in the popular vote. 

The fact that Republicans in Congress haven’t done as well with this vote is due to the well-established phenomenon of “downballot lag.” Shifting groups change their votes for president before they do so downballot. The South took a long time to turn over politically, with Democratic legislative majorities into 2010, decades after the region had become reliably Republican at the presidential level. And the evidence is that party loyalties are shifting faster now than they did in the South: If you compare the performance of downballot Republicans to that of two, four, or six years ago, you see improvements roughly on the same trajectory as Trump’s. 

But will this all last? There is a strong argument that it will—even if it doesn’t mean outright Republican victory in every election. 

A Lasting Realignment

The reason to focus on the historical antecedents dating back to the Nixon era is that what we are seeing is not new. It is a continuation of a tectonic reshaping of political allegiances that has been under way in Western democracies for the last 60 years. This realignment had its doubters before, but they were proven wrong. 

In the paper, “Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right,” a group of scholars including Thomas Piketty show a basically unbroken pattern of parties of the left in Western democracies coming to represent high-income, high-education voters, while parties of the right gather more votes from the working class. The U.S. was a laggard in this respect through 2010, lacking a strong “populist right” until Trump brought us back on trend with the rest of the West. 

In this view, these shifts would’ve happened anyway, but Trump was an accelerant. Even if future Republicans don’t represent the populist coalition quite as well as he does, the cautious, professional-class members of the Democratic bench do not feel poised to recapture it, and we are likely not going back to anything closely resembling the 2012 coalitional lines. 

Realignment is often used to describe a singular era of party dominance, like FDR’s New Deal majority. We are right to be skeptical that we are in a period of such realignment. But by another definition, who the parties represent has changed in a clear and lasting way. 

In every election from 1952 to 2004, writes political scientist Matt Grossmann, the number one positive association with the Democratic Party was that it was the party of the working class, while the main negative association with the Republicans was that they were the party of the rich. Since 2004, this is no longer as clear cut: Democrats are now identified as the party representing “marginalized groups,” defined in social and racial terms rather than economic ones, while the image of the GOP as the “party of the rich” has slowly receded. 

Books like Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? seized on this seeming disconnect in the George W. Bush era, wondering how low-income rural voters could vote with Republicans against their economic self-interest. “For us, it is the Democrats that are the party of workers, of the poor, of the weak, and the victimized,” wrote Frank. “Understanding this, we think, is basic; it is part of the ABCs of adulthood.” 

But the more meaningful question is: Who do the parties ultimately represent? When they campaign, who are they campaigning to? Who are they delivering for when in office? The answer for the Republican Party, more clearly now than ever before, is the working people of the country regardless of racial or ethnic background.

It’s impossible to answer the question of whether one party will have a lasting advantage in this new political alignment. But the more meaningful question is: Who do the parties ultimately represent? When they campaign, who are they campaigning to? Who are they delivering for when in office? The answer for the Republican Party, more clearly now than ever before, is the working people of the country regardless of racial or ethnic background. 

From Conservatism to America First

If the way that Republicans win national elections has changed, so too have the internal dynamics of the coalition. The upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s ended up unleashing a conservative political revolution that would ultimately result in the election of Ronald Reagan. Before Reagan, it was possible to get nominated as a Republican of almost any ideological persuasion. After Reagan, one had to present oneself to Republican voters as a conservative. 

A generation after Reagan left office, this political model had become a spent force, vulnerable to disruption by something new. When the unthinkable happened in the 2016 primaries, it shook conservative elites to their core. Unlike Reagan and his acolytes, Donald Trump did not seem to be “one of us.” He was not well read in the conservative classics. He seemed to govern by instinct more than principle. 

But what Trump represented to the Republican voter was more similar to Reagan in his heyday than it was different.

Republican elites remember a Reagan who upheld conservative thinking on all fronts, the so-called “three legs of the stool.” He valiantly stood up to the communists, unleashed the American economy with tax cuts, and brought social conservatives front and center. 

But in terms of the new voters brought into the coalition in these early years, then as now, cultural issues played a central role: the social fissures over Vietnam, urban crime, the aftermath of civil rights, the sexual revolution. Such issues speak to voters’ fundamental values, immune to fluctuations in the economy and assessments of the direction of the country. Once working-class voters became culturally estranged from the Democrats, it was difficult for them ever to go back. Rick Perlstein’s books on the period between Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan are hardly charitable to American conservatives, but they accurately depict the role of conservative cultural populism in Reagan’s ascendancy. In 1966, the main issue Reagan addressed himself to in his winning bid for the California governorship was disorder on the Berkeley campus. 

Layered on top of this was a growing sense in the 1970s that the country was in decline, both economically and globally. Against this backdrop, Reagan projected confidence as a leader who would stop this decline and take the initiative both in the Cold War and with bold economic policies at home. This allowed Reagan to appeal to a broader set of voters and build national majorities, not just rearrange who was in and out of the Republican coalition. 

In Donald Trump, many who were disciples of Reagan saw another muscular figure who had come to reverse American decline, with the main challenges upon his arrival being immigration and the hollowing out of America’s industrial base. The political impulse was the same, even if elites would characterize the men as representing polar opposites within the Republican Party. 

And so “conservative” became a word that could cover up all manner of political sins. Primary candidates vied to be the truest conservative in the race, with the most endorsements from conservative movement groups with 202 and 703 area codes.

After Reagan’s departure from the scene, the ideological cohesion he ushered in gave conservatives a false sense that this alone was the key to political victories moving forward. And so “conservative” became a word that could cover up all manner of political sins. Primary candidates vied to be the truest conservative in the race, with the most endorsements from conservative movement groups with 202 and 703 area codes. 

This impulse remains strong in the party today and the most likely alternative to the Trump political model once he passes from the scene. But the rise of Trump shows it to be a flawed model. 

Consider that Donald Trump almost never calls himself a conservative or endorses others on the basis of their being conservatives. Yet his most loyal supporters are the GOP voters who tell pollsters they are the most staunchly conservative. Like Reagan, he vanquished a more moderate establishment, but he did not do so on the basis of ideological rigor. 

In the 2016 primaries, the initial impulse was to outflank Trump from the right, pointing out his apostasies on abortion and other topics. This was Ted Cruz’s theory of the case. But this quickly ran into the problem that the market for conservative ideological purity was limited to around 30 percent of the primary electorate. A decent chunk of the electorate was “establishment” and split among many different candidates, while a crucial plurality was vibes-based, going along with whoever seemed strongest, in this case, Trump. 

When it briefly looked like there was a window to dethrone Trump in the 2024 primary, Ron DeSantis picked up where Cruz left off, seizing upon Trump’s non-conservative actions in office, from Covid lockdowns to rising spending. Our polling briefly showed DeSantis leading among the most ideologically consistent voters, as defined by their views on individual policy questions. But a much larger group of voters were the 40 percent who called themselves “very conservative”—regardless of their views on individual policy questions—and among these voters, Trump dominated.

Trump almost never labeled himself as a conservative, but he understood at a basic political level that “conservatism” was really a form of ultra-patriotic, anti-Left identity more than a litany of consistent policy positions. 

Trump almost never labeled himself as a conservative, but he understood at a basic political level that “conservatism” was really a form of ultra-patriotic, anti-Left identity more than a litany of consistent policy positions.

What is it that the conservative Republican primary voter wants, if not ideological consistency? When we polled this, just 22 percent of Republican voters said that “being the most conservative candidate in the race” was absolutely necessary to win their support in a primary. This ranked far behind items like “won’t back down in a fight with the Democrats” (49 percent), “supports the Trump, America First agenda” on immigration and trade (45 percent), “is outspoken against woke, progressive ideology and cancel culture” (37 percent), and “takes on the media as an extension of the Democratic Party” (28 percent). 

Each of the issues mentioned may define conservatism in the age of Trump, but voters want to hear specifics, not broad platitudes about being a conservative, and they want to know that a candidate is a fighter. Adherence to a specific set of policy positions defined by the conservative establishment in D.C. is completely incidental to whether or not a candidate will emerge victorious.

The Return of the Street-Corner Conservative

What is notable about the 2024 shifts is that they are in many ways a throwback to the shifts we saw at the outset of the realignment, back when Pat Buchanan was penning his memos to Richard Nixon. In 2024, Donald Trump’s largest gains were in big cities, among the most Democratic of voting blocs. These were exactly the gains visible in the early 1970s, with one crucial difference. Instead of the Italians, the Irish, and the Polish being the groups that moved, now it is Mexicans, Dominicans, and Koreans. When you look at the political geography of big cities, it makes sense. These new ethnic groups now occupy the same homes on the same blocks as the old white working class that Buchanan wrote about. 

William Gavin, an aide to Senator Jim Buckley, termed these “street-corner conservatives,” ethnic and religious New Deal voters in cities who weren’t up to date on the latest proceedings of the Mont Pelerin Society but nonetheless voted for Nixon and Reagan against the counterculture Left. In Gavin’s words, these Americans were “conservative, but not a conservative.” This is an apt description of Biden-to-Trump or first-time Trump voters in 2024. These are hard-working, patriotic, common-sense voters who want safe streets and for their kids not to be indoctrinated in radical ideologies alien to the traditional societies they came from. 

At the same time that politics is becoming polarized by dueling ideological instincts and sensibilities, allowing old racial bloc voting patterns to be broken, the Republican Party itself is becoming less doctrinaire and polarized around the issues that defined it in the Reagan era. Trump has led this non-ideological turn, earning the fealty of almost all people in America who make up “the right” broadly construed while presenting himself as more moderate on abortion and gay rights and breaking with the party’s old message on trade and entitlement reform. 

That should prompt a broad reassessment among the party’s policy and political elites, who might think they can go back to some version of “normal” after Trump. Ideological flexibility is the price to be paid for building majority coalitions, something that was always true but is often overlooked. Ignoring this led the old establishment to dismiss issues like immigration and de-industrialization that captivated a potential new majority, because these issues did not fit neatly in or ran contrary to the old “three legs of the stool” orthodoxy. As the GOP faces the future, it should be clear-eyed about who its voters actually are and what they believe.