NYT:
The realignment
If Mr. Trump wins big, we should have seen it coming all along.
On paper, this election should be a Republican victory. After all, President Biden’s approval rating is stuck in the upper 30s, voters are convinced that the country is heading in the wrong direction, and they don’t think the economy is in good shape. These are losing numbers for the president’s party, and ruling parties have been toppled in election after election all over the world.
The signs of a Republican victory have been building for years. For the first time since 2004, the highest-quality polls show Republicans with an advantage in party identification. The party registration figures have also trended significantly toward the Republicans, with registered Republicans poised to outnumber Democrats in the November electorate in every battleground state with party registration: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.
While Democrats have fared well in recent lower-turnout elections, it’s mostly been because of their support among high-turnout voters. Mr. Trump’s more disengaged base is likelier to show up in this high-turnout election. And indeed in state after state, the early vote is far more Republican than it was in the past. Democrats hope to counter with a stronger turnout on Election Day than in recent cycles, but if they do not the election could quickly become a rout.
No, the polls don’t show a Trump blowout, but what could be less surprising than the polls underestimating Mr. Trump, just as they did in 2016 or 2020? The pollsters never found a convincing explanation for what went wrong, and the simplest one is that they just can’t reach enough of Mr. Trump’s less engaged supporters. Despite their efforts over the last eight years, there may simply be no fix for this problem.
In this scenario, Ms. Harris’s apparent strength among white and older voters, or her resilience in the Midwestern battlegrounds, is nothing more than another polling mirage — in exactly the same states where the polls got it wrong four and eight years ago. Add in Mr. Trump’s gains among young, Black and Hispanic voters and you end up with a decisive victory for him. It would mark the beginning of a new era of politics.
Is “realignment” too strong a word? If we’re talking strictly about 2024, then yes. It might be fairer to call a decisive Trump victory a “change election,” like 1992 or 2008.
But if the three Trump elections are viewed collectively, the “R” word ought to be in the conversation. The rise of Mr. Trump’s brand of conservative populism has transformed American politics. It redefined the basic political conflict between the two parties. It led to major demographic shifts, first with Mr. Trump making huge gains among the white working class and now with nonwhite voters, while Democrats gained among white college graduates.
If the shifts endure after Mr. Trump, historians might well look back and say that the 2024 result was the culmination of the populist realignment he unleashed a decade ago.
It has long been clear that Mr. Trump’s rise destroyed the Republican Party as we knew it. This scenario would reveal the extent that it destroyed the Democratic Party as we knew it, too.