The Upcoming Realignment

In this campaign of ideological flip-flopping, white-hot anger, and candidates’ views that shift seemingly (as in the case of Trump during Monday’s debate) within the course of a paragraph, we would expect the deep polarization that we’ve seen in the electorate. We would expect to see hardened ideological rallying cries, a shrinking of the middle ground so necessary to running a two-party democracy, and a collapse of civil discourse. All of those things are woefully true.

What hasn’t come to pass, however, is a clear divide between the candidates along easily predictable lines. To me, the most interesting, and a very under-discussed, aspect of the 2016 election is that the traditional battle lines along which the parties have been divided roughly since the 1960's have started to fray, and the fundamental question to ask in determining who a voter will choose is no longer the same as it has been for the past few decades.

Ever since the formation of the FDR-era Democratic Coalition in the wake of the Great Depression, the central question in American presidential elections has been “Do you believe government is good and should do more, or that government is bad and should be shrunk?” Asking this one question to a voter would yield fairly predictable results as to who he or she would end up voting for in a given race. Even if a candidate held policy views that directly contradicted a given voter’s interest (as many Reagan Democrats who voted for Obama in 2008 will admit), what drove them to the candidate was ultimately their shared ideological belief in the role of government given the era in which the election took place.

Today, however, in the US and in other developed democracies, the central question now seems to be “Should our country be outward-looking and globally engaged or inward-looking and nationalistic?” This is the unifying belief of the Trump campaign and explains the large and growing number of staunchly Republican national security officials who have endorsed Hillary Clinton. To the thousands, if not millions, of middle-class white workers who ardently support Trump, it clearly isn’t his conservatism that draws them to his candidacy (as Trump was, on many issues, actually the most liberal Republican to seek the nomination). It is their shared belief that trade, immigration, overseas intervention, and other global engagements have entangled the United States and left too many of its citizens behind, economically and otherwise.

Perhaps, then, this is why the Clinton campaign is having such a difficult time connecting with voters despite a popular incumbent president, an economy that is (at least on paper) humming along at a clip, and campaign promises that, far from radical, put the United States on par with essentially every other major democracy in the world. At heart, it is extremely difficult to vote based on others’ interests when you perceive your own to be at risk. In many cases, one wouldn’t do so even if their candidate received the endorsement of the KKK, openly attacked women and minorities, and presented the least-prepared appearance in the modern history of presidential elections. If you see yourself under threat, it’s hard to vote for a candidate you think (rightly or wrongly) will never help people like you.

Ryan Dukeman is a Wilson School major from Westwood, Mass. He can be reached at rdukeman@princeton.edu.