Trump-ism’s staying power

If Donald Trump can’t erase Hillary Clinton’s lead in the presidential race, the Republican Party will cross an ominous milestone and confront some agonizing choices. Democrats have won the popular vote in five of the six presidential elections since 1992. (In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral college and the White House to George W. Bush.) If Clinton maintains her advantage in national and swing-state polls through election day, Democrats will have won the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential campaigns.

That’s unprecedented since the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, which historians consider the birth of the modern two-party system.

Partisan advantages that last across many presidential elections don’t happen simply because one side nominates more attractive candidates or develops better campaign techniques. Establishing a durable edge requires the allegiance of critical — and usually growing — voting blocs. “It means there is a fairly stable coalition that is aligned with the dominant party,” said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz.

For Republicans through the late 19th century that meant dominating the growing mainline Protestant northern states, first as the party of union, and later as the champion of urbanization and industrialization against the Democrats’ agrarian populism.

During the Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt famously fused growing northern big-city ethnic populations, evangelical white Southerners and African Americans into his durable New Deal coalition. Republicans, behind Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, sheared off many in the first two groups with cultural wedge issues like crime and abortion starting in the 1960s.

Those coalitions have produced several sustained periods of popular vote dominance — but none that would match the Democrats’ current run if Clinton wins in November.

Jackson and his Democratic successors mostly controlled American politics before the Civil War, but it took them eight elections, between 1828 and 1856, to win the presidential popular vote six times. It also took Democrats eight elections, from 1932 until 1960, to win the popular vote six times with FDR, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy.

With candidates William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, Republicans achieved similar successful runs from 1896 to 1924 and 1900 to 1928. While the GOP won the electoral college for seven of the eight elections from 1860 to 1888, they carried the popular vote only five times during that period. Republicans also won the presidential popular vote five times in six elections from 1968 to 1988.

In some ways today’s Democrats have fallen short of those precedents. In their five popularvote victories since 1992, Democrats have captured an absolute majority only in President Obama’s two wins. With Libertarian and Green Party candidates showing appeal, even if Clinton prevails, she might not reach 50% of the popular vote either. In earlier dominant runs, the winning parties captured presidential majorities more often than Democrats now. And importantly, Democrats haven’t controlled Congress nearly as consistently as was the case during earlier White House streaks.

As in earlier periods of oneparty domination, Democrats now have consolidated support from growing groups in the electorate: in this case, minorities, millennials and whites who are college-educated, secular or single (especially women). This “coalition of transformation” is knit together by a shared embrace of the demographic and cultural changes reshaping America.

With his confrontational posture toward Muslims and immigrants, and his locker-room language about women, Trump has defined the GOP this year in opposition to those changes. His nomination represented a triumph for the conservative voices who said the GOP didn’t need to court growing minority groups to recapture the White House, but instead could revive itself by increasing both turnout and its margins among the blue-collar, religiously devout, non-urban whites who are most anxious about social change.

Trump’s struggle to push much past 40% in national polls during the general-election season has exposed the limits of that “coalition of restoration.” He has tacitly acknowledged those limits with his belated outreach to minority voters, and yet, even that is likely aimed mostly at reassuring the white-collar whites who, polls now show, largely view him as racially biased.

Clinton continues to struggle with questions over the Clinton Foundation and the private email server she maintained as secretary of State, and Trump’s message has grown relatively more focused and disciplined with recent speeches on the economy and the failures of Washington.

If after running a campaign focused on culturally alienated whites Trump loses, it will only underline the GOP’s need to be more inclusive. But the primaryseason appeal of Trump’s message also shows how many Republican partisans will resist building such a party. If a defeated Trump launched a media outlet with his allies, former Fox chief Roger Ailes and Stephen Bannon of Breitbart News, he could create a powerful institutional force for his racially barbed populism — right after an election that may reveal its electoral deficiencies.

Those dynamics send Republicans a sobering message: It will be hard, as Abramowitz says, “to put Trump-ism in the rear-view mirror.” That’s likely to remain true even if Trump steers the GOP into a new record for electoral failure this fall.