Modestly reduced the enormous Democratic edge in cities, thus undoing some of this packing of Democratic voters. Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who focuses on redistricting and demographic trends, argued in an email that “the country’s political geography is now less pro-Republican.” While “the conventional wisdom has it that Democrats are disadvantaged in redistricting because of their inefficient over-concentration in cities,” he continued, “the Trump era seems to have changed the country’s political geography in ways that are beneficial to Democrats.” But in 2016, it suddenly became strongly biased toward the Republicans, and 2020 added even more to that bias.Īt the same time, there are counter-developments more favorable to the left. Take the Electoral College: for most of the time from the 1950s until 2016, it was actually biased toward the Democrats. The ramifications of these developments, which predate Trump’s entry into presidential politics in 2015, “radiate throughout the electoral process in the United States,” Pildes argued: Similarly, in the 1940s, those with university degrees in the United States were twenty points less likely to vote for Democrats, while in 2000 there was no difference and by 2016, they were thirteen points more likely to vote for Democrats. By 2012, that gap had dropped to only an eight-point difference and in 2016, voters in the top ten percent had become eight points more likely to vote for Democratic candidates. In his email, Pildes noted that in the 1940sĭemocratic candidates received twenty-two points less support from voters in the top ten percent of the income bracket than from those in the bottom ninety percent. Now, Pildes continued, “we are witnessing the complete inversion of that pattern, and the question is whether this is a temporary or more enduring realignment of the political parties throughout the West.”

Since the New Deal in the United States and WWII in Western Europe, the base of the dominant parties of the left was less affluent, less highly educated voters the dominant parties of the right drew their primary support from higher income, more highly educated voters. Politics throughout the Western democracies is in recent years in the midst of the most dramatic reconfiguration of the political parties and their bases of support in seventy or so years. Richard Pildes, a law professor at N.Y.U., argued that On the flip side, the Republicans are the party of the associate degree (a two-year college degree), less educated than the Democrats but not exactly the proletariat. These trends prompted Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, to comment in an email that the DemocratsĪre mostly the party of the master’s degree - modestly advantaged economically but not exactly elite. The median household income in districts represented by Democrats was $66,829, which is $10,324 more than the median for districts represented by Republicans, at $56,505. Conversely, Republican members of Congress represented 54 of the 100 districts with the lowest household income. In 2018, according to ProximityOne, a website that analyzes the demographics of congressional districts, Democratic members of Congress represented 74 of the 100 most affluent districts, including 24 of the top 25.

(White voters make up 67 percent of the electorate.)

The support Trump received in rural communities and the animosity he provoked among well-educated suburbanites accelerated the ongoing inversion - on measures of income, education and geographic region - of white Democratic and Republican voters. Donald Trump’s dominance of the political stage for the past seven years galvanized what had been a slow-burning realignment, creating a profound upheaval in the electorate and in both the Democratic and Republican parties.

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