A realignment — if Trump can keep it: 2024 results signal a new political era

Donald Trump’s victory, combined with Republicans regaining the Senate majority and keeping control of the House, made 2024 a bad year for Democrats.

Signs suggest it could be something even worse: a historic defeat that puts Republicans in the political driver’s seat for a generation or more.

That’s because the exit poll showed that more voters said they were Republican than Democrat — for the first time in a presidential election since 1928.

Such a result hasn’t happened since talking pictures were new and Babe Ruth clobbered homers in the original Yankee Stadium.

No one alive today has ever voted in a presidential race where this has occurred.

Certainly, Republicans had won elections in the nearly 100 years that have passed since then. But they were always fighting uphill.

They had to convince voters who leaned toward the Democrats to give Republicans a chance.

That’s why winning candidates like Dwight Eisenhower called themselves “modern Republicans” and pledged to keep the welfare state that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal had created.

That’s why the two Bushes campaigned as “kinder, gentler” candidates who were willing to expand government.

Even Ronald Reagan made sure to tell his fans that he had voted four times for FDR.

His famous “there you go again” quip to President Jimmy Carter helped him win, but few recall that he said it in response to Carter’s accusation that Reagan opposed Medicare and would threaten the popular program.

Reagan’s comment emphasized that he had never been opposed to the principle behind the massive entitlement program and would not try to repeal or seriously change it.

Each of these men knew they needed Democratic votes to win. And getting those votes meant they had to concede important policy points that more partisan Republicans strenuously opposed.

Republicans forgot that fact at their peril.

Newt Gingrich’s historic 1994 victory gave Republicans control of the House for the first time since 1952. Polls even showed the GOP tied with Democrats in partisan identification.

It wasn’t fanciful for Gingrich to think he could break Democrats’ stranglehold on power — but he threw it all away with a budgetary strategy that relied on cuts to popular programs like Medicare.

President Bill Clinton fought back, saying “the era of big government was over” while promising to protect those social programs.

By early 1996, after two government shutdowns failed to budge Clinton, Gingrich was defeated. Polls showed Democrats had regained their historic role as America’s favorite party.

But in recent years, the Democrats’ swift movement leftward has undermined their historic position.

Coupled with President Biden’s incompetence and failure, only 31% of Americans called themselves Democrats this year — down from 37% in 2000.

More voters, 35% in the exit poll, said they were Republicans, with the remainder calling themselves independent. 

This meant that all Trump needed to do was hold his base and keep his margin with independents close.

Harris did what Democrats have done for a century: She rallied her base, winning 95% of Democrats, and even won independents by 3 percentage points.

In any other election since the Great Depression, she would have won.

But in an America that tilts Republican, running the old Democratic playbook isn’t good enough anymore.

Harris had to woo Republicans to win, and her pathetic use of former Rep. Liz Cheney to do so shows she and her high command had no clue how.

This result gives Trump an historic opportunity.

If he can expand the GOP’s lead over the next four years, he will have initiated the first realignment since Ronald Reagan brought the two parties to near parity in the early 1980s.

A world where Republicans lead Democrats by 8 to 10 points in partisan preference is one where Republican preferences and priorities prevail.

Like the GOP in the last century, Democrats could win only by running as “me too” candidates, offering a slightly less bold version of the Republican agenda.

This isn’t set in stone, though: Trump needs to have a successful term.

If the economy tanks, or illegal migration continues, or Trump goes to war with China or Russia, voters will flee from the GOP like rats off a sinking ship.

Trump could also mess up by prioritizing issues he didn’t run on.

George W. Bush did that in 2005, when he tried to reform Social Security without first getting a mandate to do so.

Barack Obama, too, in 2009 and 2010, when he made passing Obamacare his focus even after running as a centrist.

Trump could make either or both mistakes. Failure and fecklessness will be punished.

But imagine if he doesn’t.

Imagine an America in 2028 that’s at peace, with illegal immigration virtually ended, the woke tsunami broken and the economy humming.

That’s an America whose voters will want to reward the party that gave them what they wanted.

And that reward would put Republicans in the political pole position for the first time since Henry Ford’s Model T was all the rage.

Henry Olsen, a political analyst and commentator, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.