Is a new electoral realignment coming in American politics?

The Democrats have reshaped before. Could Trump's chaos spark their next big reset? By J Brooks Spector

- By J Brooks Spector

The last two electoral realignments in American politics came in 1932 and 1968. Thereafter, Democrats have struggled with whether economic policies or identity politics were the key to success.

Is the wave of President Donald Trump's disruptive trade and economics policies, the smashing of much of the government bureaucracy and the chaos of his administration giving Democrats a new chance to reset the country's electoral balance?

Since the Democrats' electoral embarrassment in 2024, when Maga-cult-supporting Republicans' votes meant Trump could gain a modest but winning electoral margin in the presidential race and party control of both houses of Congress, they have been licking their electoral wounds and wondering what they must do to forestall political irrelevance.

There are several competing schools of thought or visions about what Democrats must do from here on. But so far, there has been no clear answer from senior office holders about what their clear challenge to Trump must be in order to regain political relevance at the national political level.

Among themselves and in the media, their leadership in Congress and leading governors are being excoriated for failing to deliver definitive positions beyond saying "No!" to whatever Trump is proposing or doing. Or, worse, the party has been articulating a multiplicity of sometimes conflicting ideas about what it stands for or about how it must frame its opposition to a wild and crazy Trump administration.

Much of this paralysis stems from the party's inability to reconcile effectively some rather different ideas of what being a Democrat actually means for the 21st century. This actually has its distant origins in the great realigning election of 1932 that came in the midst of the Great Depression, and then the quadrennial elections that followed it on into the mid-1960s.