The Patriot Post® · A Dramatic Political Realignment

Perhaps you’ve noticed: The Democrat Party has a new look.

No, we don’t mean candidate-wise. Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, James Clyburn — these people have always been Democrats. Instead, we mean affiliation-wise. We mean that the people who vote Democrat today are markedly different than the people who voted Democrat a generation ago.

“Dramatic realignment swings working-class districts toward GOP,” reads the headline at left-leaning Axios. And that’s it, really: The plumbers, the electricians, the factory workers, the coal miners, the middle-managers are now Republican, whereas the CEOs, the PhDs, the MBAs, the country-clubbers, the chardonnay-sippers, the electric-vehicle drivers are now Democrats. As Axios reports, “Nine of the top 10 wealthiest congressional districts are represented by Democrats, while Republicans now represent most of the poorer half of the country, according to median income data provided by Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s (D-Ohio) office.”

Why would a Democrat congresswoman share such information with Axios? Because she wants to sound the alarm bell. Kaptur, you see, is one of only five House Democrats who occupy districts that Donald Trump won in 2020. Only five. And guess whose districts will be heavily targeted by Republicans in next year’s elections? Yep, those five.

Nope, this ain’t your granddaddy’s Democrat Party. Just ask the folks at Tesla or at Anheuser-Busch. Axios continues:

The last several decades have ushered in a dramatic political realignment, as the GOP has broadened its appeal to a more diverse working class and Democrats have become the party of wealthier, more-educated voters.

“Republicans were the party of the country club, and they’re increasingly the party of country,” lobbyist and political analyst Bruce Mehlman told Axios. “We have seen an inversion of Democrat and Republican shares of the highest- and lowest-income districts — and the highest and lowest college degree-holding districts,” Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman told Axios. By the numbers: 64% of congressional districts with median incomes below the national median are now represented by Republicans — a shift in historical party demographics, the data shows.

And here’s the important part, at least insofar as power-hungry Democrats are concerned: The swing districts — the districts that tend to decide which way the country is going to lean in a particular election — are becoming increasingly working-class. “Increasingly, districts that make up the majority of the Democratic caucus don’t really reflect the middle-income districts where the House is won and lost,” Wasserman said.

Indeed, you need to win 218 congressional districts to win the House, and the Democrats are increasingly distributed among the urban centers and the wealthy plantation-type districts situated a safe distance away.

The Axios article doesn’t dwell on why this change has happened, but it’s not hard to figure out: The priorities of the Democrat Party have changed. No longer are the Democrats interested in protecting the border against an influx of cheap labor; no longer do they fight for union jobs — unless those jobs are in the public sector; no longer do they support the cops and the military. Instead, the Democrats are focused on climate change and race and sex.

“The protagonists of white suburban leftism,” wrote our Mark Alexander back in 2020, “are primarily inheritance welfare liberals, the effluent of generational wealth and privilege. While there are plenty of them in urban centers, most choose to live in the safety and comfort of suburbia.”

We too wrote about this shift just prior to the 2020 election in a piece titled “The Blue-Collar Billionaire.” It’s interesting to look back and see that those observations are even more true today:

Free speech and populism used to be popular among Democrats. Theirs was the party of blue-collar America, after all. Macomb County’s “Reagan Democrats” were, in fact, Democrats. Republicans? They lived in Grosse Pointe and in the tony northern suburbs, while the Democrats lived downriver. These Republicans thought “business casual” meant leaving the diamond cufflinks in the dresser drawer, and their elected representatives used Queensbury Rules to fend off a sucker-punching press. This doesn’t describe all Republicans, of course — far from it. But there’s no disputing that one of these two parties had a country-club reputation, and the other one didn’t.

Since then, the parties have done a switcheroo. Not a fake one, like the Democrats say happened in the Civil Rights ‘60s, but a real one with real consequences. The culture and the counterculture have switched sides, and there’s no denying it. Democrats are now the elites, the paternalists, the Chardonnay-sippers, the theater-goers, the media darlings, the foundation favorites, the advanced-degree types, and the party preferred by Wall Street. Republicans, on the other hand, have welcomed in the workers, the grinders, the hog butchers, the middle-managers, the guys and gals in the field and on the shop floor. The Republican Party is diverse, but the common thread is Patriotism. We love our country, and we don’t apologize for it.

Democrats? They tend to hate their country. And they teach our kids to hate it.

Even The Washington Post, back in 2018, recognized this political realignment. And it recognized the rookie politician who had understood it best and who had most effectively tapped into it: Donald Trump.

“It may seem odd,” the Post wrote, “for a billionaire celebrity real estate tycoon who lived in a gold-laden penthouse to lean so heavily on working-class appeals. Yet Trump’s rhetoric and use of blue-collar archetypes is not mere pandering. In fact, since the 1970s, such class-based political language and appeals to blue-collar identity have been at the heart of conservative efforts to win over working- and lower-middle-class white voters. Republicans have won the battle for these voters for 40 years by speaking to their blue-collar identity and values.”

Yep, even those on the Left see the switcheroo.

The Axios piece didn’t mention it, but it’s important to note that this realignment isn’t merely about a shift of working-class whites. The GOP has made notable inroads in recent years with working-class blacks and Hispanics. Think about it: These black and brown Americans have about as much in common with Lia Thomas and Dylan Mulvaney as we do.

Yes, yes, Democrats will point to the Axios article and crow that their party is increasingly the party of the well-educated. But so what? Yes, the Democrats are now increasingly the ones with the advanced college degrees, but that just means they know more and more about less and less.

Indeed, some of the smartest, most capable people we’ve ever met haven’t so much as set foot on a college campus.

These days, we have a word to describe those folks: Republicans.