A realigning election, by definition, is the first in a series of presidential elections in which one party keeps coming out on top due to continued support from elements of the population that had previously voted for the other party. Republican William McKinley’s victory over Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896 was due in no small part to his winning a sizable share of white male urban workers who had not figured very much in previous Republican victories, even as Bryan staked out a claim for rural prairie populists. McKinley’s wasn’t a huge victory in the popular vote; he won just 51 percent. But enough of those urban workers (Protestants particularly) stuck with the Republicans for the next three decades to create a period of Republican hegemony, by which standard 1896 was very much a realigning election.
We can say the same about the elections of 1932 and 1968. The first New Deal coalition that flocked to Franklin Roosevelt’s banner in ’32 included an urban working-class electorate that had grown much more ethnically diverse since 1896, and by 1936, it also included huge majorities of industrial workers who’d seldom voted before. Richard Nixon’s 1968 victory marked the beginning of the end of that New Deal coalition, as a white backlash against the Democrats’ embrace of the emerging Black electorate, and the rise of urban disorder, prompted an array of white voters, from Southern Dixiecrats to working-class whites in racially diversifying cities, to abandon the Democrats in favor of Republicans talking tough on law and order. Both the elections of 1932 and 1968 established governing partisan regimes that endured through a number of subsequent elections.
So this Tuesday’s outcome certainly has the potential to become a realigning election. In itself, it marked a shift in voting patterns among working-class men. White working-class men had already become the anchor of MAGA Republicans; what was new was the level of support Donald Trump drew from Latino working-class men, which was particularly significant because Latinos are a growing segment of the electorate and Latinos are a predominantly working-class population. But this switch in allegiance has to persist in subsequent presidential elections, alongside Republicans’ success in getting significant support from other sectors of the electorate, for 2024 to be seen as a realigning election.