How to Prosper During the Coming Partisan Realignment: Lessons from the 1896 Election

Political parties in the United States have never been stable ideological entities. And even though there have been parties called “Republicans” and “Democrats” since 1856, these names do not mean the same things from decade to decade. In our political system, a “party” is a brand name for a large coalition of interests, and these coalitions shift. When they do, we get what political scientists call a “realigning election,” or an election in which the organizing logic of the parties changes and the resulting coalitions recombine to create a new party system. It is like shuffling a deck of cards.

The last major realignment of America’s political systems started in the 1970s and was completed in the Congressional elections of 1994. This is when the coalition between conservative Southern Democrats and liberal Northern and Western Democrats fell apart. The South became reliably Republican, and Evangelical Christians, business conservatives, and right-leaning libertarians across the country signed up for the new Republican coalition. Republicans got more conservative, and Democrats, freed from their Southern coalition partners, got more liberal.

This version of partisan politics has dominated American elections for the last quarter-century, with enough swing voters and…