Was 2016 A Realigning Election?

First, a primer: A realigning election, generally speaking, is one in which the country as a whole seems to dramatically shift in its political leanings. The media often talks about wave elections, where one party or another does significantly well across the board in certain years—as Democrats did in 2008, and Republicans did in 2010 and 2014. A realigning election is more significant than even that—an election that rewrites the electoral map, sees party coalitions change, and ushers in a new era of politics as it is generally understood. The 1860 election, which saw the election of Abraham Lincoln, the rise of the Republican Party, and ultimately the beginning of the Civil War, is generally considered to be such an election. The election of 1932, which heralded FDR’s election as President and the rebirth of the Democrats as the major liberal party in America, is another.

Sean Trende, a skeptic of the realignment theory, laid out what are generally considered to be the major hallmarks of realigning or critical elections, in his 2012 book The Lost Majority: “sharp and durable” voter changes; the emergence of new issues; spiking voter turnout; turmoil at conventions; and a strong third-party showing. The 2016 election indisputably had most, if not all, of these factors:

·         “Sharp and durable” voter changes: The relationship between working-class white voters and the Democratic Party has been increasingly strained for years, if not decades, but this year the tensions finally broke into the open, flipping three states (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan) that had been reliably blue at the presidential level since the 1980’s. Working-class whites are to Democrats now what Hispanics were to Republicans following the 2012 election. The changes in party coalitions this year, and the resultant changes in the electoral map, were sharp; only time will tell if they become durable.

·         Emergence of new issues: In 2016, trade became an important campaign issue for the first time since at least the 1990’s. Immigration was even more important, becoming perhaps the biggest defining issue in a campaign dominated by personal attacks. The traditional major issues of national campaigns, national security and the economy, meanwhile played no major, defining role for the first time in years.

·         Spiking voter turnout: This factor is less impressive. Turnout was down slightly from 2012 (from 54.9% to 54.6% of eligible voters), and overall was the lowest since 2000, presumably because of the nasty and seemingly never-ending campaign.

·         Turmoil at conventions: Um, yes. Trende argues that since the rise of the national primary process, and the concurrent decline in importance of the conventions themselves, extended primary battles are the best modern way to measure this factor. Either way, 2016 had it all: convention drama and brutal primary fights on both the Republican and Democratic sides.

·         Strong third-party showing: There was no single groundbreaking third-party candidacy, as in the mold of Ross Perot or George Wallace, but the third-party vote was far from dormant, as I discussed here. One third-party candidate got 20% of the vote in Utah, and had a very realistic chance at winning the state outright. Two others combined for almost six million votes between them, although neither came close to winning almost a single state. Polling showed that had a strong independent or third-party candidacy emerged, that person would have been a legitimate threat to win, no small feat in modern American politics. I would argue that these respectable showings from several less-than stellar third-party presidential candidates underline what could have been, if a single, stronger candidate had decided to take the plunge, and the failure of third parties to make more of an impact hinges more on the personal decisions of a very select group of people than on the political climate of the country as a whole.

By my estimate, the 2016 elections satisfy at least three, and possibly four, of the five main criteria for determining pivotal realigning elections. The question then becomes whether one believes in the overarching realignment theory, a subject much too broad for this post. But I find many of the arguments in favor of it compelling, if some proponents of the theory to go somewhat overboard in their attempts to ram every national election into a narrow framework of cycles and “deviating elections”. And if one accepts the overall theory, then the evidence seems clear that we have just witnessed such a realigning election.