Donald Trump “has reordered America’s political divide both geographically and demographically,” the New York Times conceded this past May. The map accompanying the paper’s exploration of the new political landscape showed the United States with a surfeit of crimson arrows all pointing right. The scale and durability of the electorate’s red shift were still in doubt. America’s political realignment was not.
In a similar initiative for The Atlantic, the pollster Patrick Ruffini identified the series of political conversions that Trump had engineered during his decade in politics in their various stages. First, the “midwestern white working class” sorted themselves into the president’s camp. Then came the “nonwhite voters once at the center of Barack Obama’s coalition, especially working-class Hispanics.” And because these shifts are predicated as much on cultural identity as ideology, they may be permanent. “Absent a big change in how these voters perceive the Democratic Party,” Ruffini wrote, “they aren’t going back.”
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