A Realignment Must Mean Something


Published January 15, 2025

Commonplace

he Trump-Vance administration takes office next week with an ambitious agenda and united Republican control of Congress. It is also the political leader of a new Republican Party, one that is rightly labeled as multi-racial and working-class.

That labeling, though, is only partially correct. It is true that the party’s newest voters—the ones that made it the majority—are disproportionately non-white and working class. But these new voters sit aside the old, traditionally conservative voters who have backed the GOP for decades.

This conservative-populist coalition does not march in lockstep. The new voters mostly backed President Barack Obama twice, and remain more moderate and supportive of robust government action. The old voters have surely shifted on issues like free trade, but these McCain-Romney backers remain more economically and socially conservative.

Baked in the afterglow of triumph, Trump’s initial agenda will likely make all factions happy. Governing, though, doesn’t stop after the first bills are passed. Events always bedevil even the best politicians, and something is sure to arise over the next four years that will force Trump to choose between these two groups.

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Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies and provides commentary on American politics. His work focuses on how America’s political order is being upended by populist challenges, from the left and the right. He also studies populism’s impact in other democracies in the developed world.

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