Political Realignment, Explained Clearly

Ever wonder why some elections change everything while others fade into noise? Henry Olsen joins us to map the hidden mechanics of political realignment—the moments when voter coalitions reorganize around a new set of priorities and lock in policy for a generation. We trace the through-line from 1800’s fight over federal power, through the New Deal’s 1932 transformation, to the Reagan recalibration of 1980, and then confront the unsettled present where no coalition has yet earned durable ratification.

We dig into how great questions drive party systems to reconfigure: whether the federal government should dominate or defer to states, how to balance producers and workers, and what America owes its citizens in times of crisis. Henry explains why the New Deal created an enduring center of gravity that even opponents had to respect, and how Reagan’s victories set limits on the growth of federal solutions without dismantling the state. The result is a clear picture of how majorities form, govern, and get re-elected when their answers fit the era’s needs.

Today’s turbulence—globalization woes, social tension, uneven growth, and a fraying international order—signals that voters are testing new answers. We show why recent presidents from both parties won big and then lost ground fast: they didn’t solve the core problems in a way broad enough to win again. What would it take to cement the next majority? Think reliable gains for working and middle-class families, competence over chaos, a balanced stance on global integration, and a social compact that lowers the temperature without demanding uniformity. If one side can deliver tangible, quickly felt results on those fronts, the next realignment isn’t just possible—it’s imminent.

If this conversation sharpens how you see the stakes of the next few election cycles, share it with a friend, leave a review, and subscribe so you don’t miss future deep dives. Your take: Which issue do you think can anchor the next durable coalition?

Beyond the Polls: An Election Podcast with Henry Olsen 

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Chapters

• 1:35 Meet Henry Olson
• 2:02 What Realignment Means
• 3:04 Why Realignments Matter
• 5:20 The 1932 New Deal Shift
• 6:54 How Big Questions Forge Parties
• 10:05 From Jefferson To The Civil War
• 12:29 The Reagan Era Realignment
• 14:14 Why A New Realignment Stalls

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:49

Welcome back, everyone. Today we're joined by Henry Olson, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a leading analyst of American politics and populism. A former Washington Post columnist, he is the author of The Working Class Republican and co-author of The Four Faces of the Republican Party, and is widely known for the accuracy of his election analysis. Henry, we are so happy to have you on the podcast today. We're talking about realignment. So political scientists use this term, political realignment. We hear it a lot. Can you tell us what that is?

SPEAKER_00: 1:35

So that one group of people switches from an old alignment to a new alignment, and that either produces a new partisan majority that sets the stage and the guidelines, if you will, for decades in the future of American political discussion, or it reinforces one group or reaffirms one group's dominance in the face of a challenge. And this happens periodically in American politics. It happens in other countries' politics as well. It seems to be a natural part of mass Democratic Republican elections.

SPEAKER_01: 2:18

So why are these so important to American democracy?

SPEAKER_00: 2:22

They're important to American democracy because what they do is ensure what the founders intended, which is that political power is exerted in accord with the will of the people, that they had no experience with mass voter democracy. And in fact, the early days of the republic had semi-mass voter democracy, which is to say they still had property qualifications for voting. But what we found very quickly in the American political development is that mass voter democracies express themselves through political parties. And that means that the coalitions that align behind one political party realign and reassert themselves in election after election after election. So what realignments do is ensure that the dominant political coalition reflects the priorities and to some extent actual policies, but certainly the directional movement of what the American people want. So, simply put, American democracy would be impossible to imagine without periodic voter realignments because no set of priorities remains unchanged. But human nature being what it is, people who are elected under an old set of priorities resist changing to the new ones. And that means the voters ultimately kick the most retalcitrant of those people out of office through the realigning process and get their way at the dollar box.

SPEAKER_01: 3:54

So can you give us an example of political realignment and how it changed our country?

SPEAKER_00: 4:00

Sure. The really best example is 1932. That prior to the election of 1932, the Republican Party had been the dominant political party in America, both in Washington, D.C. and in the vast majority of states where the vast majority of people and wealth was being created. The North, the Midwest, and many of the states in the then nascent and underpopulated West. And what that meant is that a certain set of policies were created, which included a relatively weak federal government, a strong role for state and local governments, an attempt to preserve constitutional limits on the role of the federal government, and a favorment towards industry and towards the producers of wealth as opposed to the workers or the consumers of wealth. Well, the Great Depression meant voters wanted to change. The Republican Party under President Huber Hoover did not change far enough and fast enough for the voters. And they elected Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats. That you went from a party that had barely won two presidential elections in the previous 36 years to one that never lost a presidential election in the next 20 years. The New Deal coalition was one that held sway for nearly 40 years and sustained strong influence over the next 40 years. And what it meant was the modern state that we see today, a dominant Washington, social welfare programs, economic regulation, and an essential removal of constitutional barriers and federal action. That was all the result of one voter realignment in 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt won by nearly 20 percentage points. That was then reaffirmed in election over election in the next few years and forced Republicans to agree that modern America was going to have a welfare state and a strong federal government, whether or not they wanted it.

SPEAKER_01: 6:08

So how did these political realignments come about? You talked about the Great Depression. Is it always some big, you know, thing that happens that causes these?

SPEAKER_00: 6:17

Usually what happens is a political system organizes over disputes. Ireland's main two political parties from the founding of the free state in 1922 were based on how should we react to the end of British rule. One party said we should break off all connection with Britain formally and become a republic. The other said we should stay within the empire to some extent as a, if not a dominion, as what was called a free state. And these parties fought for the next 70, 80 years. They changed their emphasis, but they were formed in the heat of a big political question. America is no different. Our first political realignment was the election of 1800. There's fought over the question of power in Washington. Or are we going to have the Alien and Sedition Act, which would have pulled the First Amendment's protection of free speech and freedom of the press into question? Or are we going to have a strong federal government that tries to tilt towards manufacturing and merchant class interests, which is what the Federalist Party under Alexander Hamilton and John Adams wanted? Or are we going to have a small federal government that, if anything, is going to tilt in favor of agricultural interests but is largely going to let domestic policy be run by states and localities? The election of 1800 was won by Thomas Jefferson and the Republican, then we now call it Democratic Republican Party because it became the modern Democratic Party. And it then expanded its majority over the next few elections and became the dominant force in American politics for the subsequent 58 years. It was a great question that the people formed around. The political debate was taken around that question, and then they formed partisan majorities. And after a partisan majority is formed and is re-established in subsequent election victories, what happens is the whole political discussion changes. It wasn't until slavery became the overriding question, which destroyed the American Party system because the American Party system in the 1850s was built around ameliorating the slavery dispute to compromise rather than bringing it to a head as people in both the North, anti-slavery forces, and the South, pro-slavery and pro-expansion forces wanted. When that great question came, the political parties changed, new parties arose, new alliance arose, and that question was solved. So that's a long answer to a real question is that when great questions arise that are not solved by the overriding political party paradigms that the previous great questions resolution established, then we have realigning elections.

SPEAKER_01: 9:19

So are we going through a realignment now?

SPEAKER_00: 9:23

We are trying to go through a realignment now. I say trying to because there have been great unresolved questions. The last great realigning election we had was the Reagan election of 1980, which essentially put a stop to the ever-growing federal government. It didn't mean that the federal government was going to shrink, as Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform likes to say, shrink so that it was small enough so it could be drowned in a bathtub. But it did mean that the federal government was no longer going to be seen as the answer to virtually every social or economic problem. It brought the Republican Party back from being a minority party that had trifectas in only four states in 1976, small agricultural ones, to one that was at near parity for the next 30 or 40 years. And that's what allowed Republicans to win control of the House for the first time since 1952 in the 1994 election, and allowed them to have trifecta for an extended period of time for the first time since before the Great Depression. What's happened is that the world that Ronald Reagan helped set up, globalism and internationalism abroad, and some degree of moderate pace of social change at home, has failed. It has failed to bring peace abroad. It has failed to bring large-scale economic advances for everybody. Many people are winners, but many others have been stagnant or fallen behind. And it has not brought increased social peace, it's brought increased social tension at home. So the body politic wants to decide these new questions. And that's why our debates have become so acrimonious over the last 25 years. The reason why we haven't had a realignment yet is that no one has hit on a formula that has both won an initial election and then succeeded well enough to win subsequent elections. So you have Clinton who tries to bring in some sort of realignment and loses control of the House in 1994. You have George W. Bush, who, after the 2004 election, David Brooks writes in the New York Times how republicanism is, you know, looks to be the dominant philosophy. Two years later, they lose control of the House and the Senate in the 2006 election. President Obama openly tries to move beyond the Reagan era, passes Obamacare, moves the country not as far to the left as Progressive wanted, but much more farther to the left than Republicans wanted. And he gets a disastrous midterm result. And President Trump and Joe Biden have also seen their victories turn into dust within two years. So the debates are over these new issues, but no one has yet hit on the formula that can solve the issues in a way that they can be ratified by subsequent election victories. And when that happens, we will have a partisan realignment that will then dominate American politics for the subsequent 20 to 40 years. But it has not happened yet because of the failure of political leaders to address the great questions successfully that Americans want addressed.

SPEAKER_01: 12:44

Henry, thank you so much for taking, I feel like this really big topic of political realignment and breaking it down for us for our listeners. So whether they're teachers or students or somebody just on their way to work who wants to know more about this, we thank you so much for your expertise.

SPEAKER_00: 13:02

Thank you very much for inviting me.