America’s political realignment is catching Democrats flat-footed

By Fareed Zakaria

The primary predictor of party affiliation is education, not economics.

Last week’s cover of the Economist — a special report on the American economy — featured a rolled-up dollar bill taking off like a rocket ship into the skies. The headline: “The Envy of the World.” Yet the strongest economy in the world has not paid off for President Joe Biden, who had the second-worst third-year average approval rating of any modern president. Nor is it giving Kamala Harris a commanding lead in the polls. It is yet one more powerful signal that our politics are in the midst of a great upheaval, as economic issues give way to cultural ones.

The economic paradox is even more profound when you consider that the Biden administration’s policies have been specifically designed to benefit the working class, made up largely of men without a college degree — and they have disproportionately benefited this group. And yet Harris is on track to receive the lowest share of this group’s votes in decades, with a deficit 9 points worse than Biden’s in 2020, according to New York Times polls. Add to this consistent polling that shows that Black and Hispanic men are moving away from the Democratic Party in historic numbers. What is going on?

In my latest book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present,” I argue that decades of revolutionary change — the massive expansion of globalization, the information revolution — have upended our politics. We are seeing a realignment in which the old categories of economic status and race are giving way to new categories such as social status and cultural divides around gender. We are likely at the beginning of this transformation of the political landscape.

It used to be relatively easy to predict a person’s voting pattern based on economics. The rich and upper middle class voted right, the poor and working class voted left. Race was another durable factor after the civil rights movement. White people disproportionately voted for Republicans, people of color largely voted Democratic. But today, there seems to be a more prominent divide than race: Americans with college degrees appear far more likely to vote for Harris and blue-collar working-class voters have become the new base of the Republican Party.

The great divide in America today is not economic but social, and its primary marker is college education. The other strong predictors of a person’s voting behavior are gender, geography and religion. So the new party bases in America are an educated, urban, secular and female left and a less-educated, rural, religious and male right.

These new divisions are even overwhelming that deepest of divides: race and ethnicity. More and more Black and Hispanic men are finding themselves comfortable with the Republican Party — and it’s especially pronounced with young people. A recent GenForward survey showed one-quarter of young Black men and 44 percent of young Latino men are planning on voting for Donald Trump. Hulk Hogan tearing off his shirt at the RNC might hold more appeal than talk of unisex bathrooms and gender-affirming treatments. On the other hand, Harris, a biracial woman, may yet receive more of the White vote than did Biden, an old White guy. Professional White women see themselves represented by Harris because social class and gender trump race.

Democratic elites have been slow to understand this shift. They have persisted in believing that the working class is deluded or has been conned by the right into voting against its own interests. That’s why the party under Biden has made a broad shift to the populist left on economic policy — from tariffs to manufacturing subsidies. And yet, it hasn’t wooed back the working class. In fact, polling has often shown that Bernie Sanders and his economic policies are much more popular with the educated elites in the Democratic Party than with working-class voters.

The Democratic elites do not want to believe that their problem is not that they moved too far right on economic policy but rather that they moved too far left on social and cultural issues. For them, economic policy is a matter of choice — practical decisions that can easily be changed. Social issues are a matter of core rights; to be against them is to be a bad and bigoted person. And so even when Democrats quietly shift policy, as they did on immigration, they cannot bring themselves to articulate why.

The right has its own problems. It is in thrall to the personality cult of Trump, whose extreme positions and rhetoric turn off many voters. With the most economically vibrant parts of America trending left, Harris has far outraised Trump in recent months, including by a more than 3 to 1 margin in September. For Democrats, the problem is that non-college-educated voters still make up the majority of the electorate, about 65 percent of registered voters in 2020, and they might feel alienated by some of the Ivy League liberalism. Whether Harris or Trump wins, this new cultural landscape will define American politics for decades to come.