The United States faces elections viewed as illegitimate, skyrocketing threats against elected politicians and election officials, and hate crime rates that are now among the highest in this century. What is causing this turmoil, and how do the thousands of people and organizations working to advance democracy help the country get out of this cycle of distrust, hatred, and violence that is convulsing our political and civic life?

Our nation is testing the waters of a political realignment, as political parties see new opportunities amidst shifts in the country’s demography, economics, and public opinion. The peculiarities of America’s political system mean that this fight for new voters is incentivizing violence and electoral manipulation, just as earlier realignments did. Many on the left hope that the current crisis will end if a Democratic Party that is consistently committed to democracy and the rule of law wins decisively for a significant period of time, cementing a majority that is too solid to be undermined by the MAGA faction’s dirty tricks and threats. While necessary, that will not be sufficient. Violence and electoral suppression are likely to continue until the parties complete their realignment in such a way that stirring our nation’s core fissure of racial and ethnic hatred is no longer a useful way for Republicans to generate votes.

Today’s threats and suppressive activities are coming largely—but not entirely—from the right (although because the MAGA faction is trying to eliminate internal dissent from Republicans committed to democratic processes, targets are almost equally on the right as on the left). However, simply working for a decisive Democratic victory in November (often a sotto voce goal of democracy activism) is not a long-term pro-democracy strategy. America is a highly federalist country. States hold great power, and in 23 of them, Republicans control the governorship, both legislative chambers, and the offices of the attorney general and secretary of state. By our analysis, Republicans have held this level of consolidated control in 13 states since 2012 (including populous Florida, Ohio, and Texas). Meanwhile, the trend of the last decade suggests a growing group of states moving toward Republican domination. While one or two, like Georgia, may eventually move in the other direction, the gerrymandering at the state level is hard to overcome. And election maps drawn after the last census mean that this control is not declining anytime soon.

A right-leaning party is going to exist in America. Thanks to safe seats, that currently means that the authoritarian-inflected MAGA faction that has gained control of the Republican Party is going to have nearly complete political sway over many states. If pro-democracy activists align their fate with Democrats, believing that a national electoral victory for the Democratic Party is synonymous with democracy winning, they are accepting the consignment of the citizens of Republican-controlled states to a sort of Jim Crow-like existence, where their rights are abrogated in authoritarian enclaves that exist within a more democratic country.

Instead of simply focusing on electoral outcomes, pro-democracy activists need to consider how their work could support—or hinder—that inevitable right-leaning party becoming more inclusive and pro-democratic. The democracy scholar Daniel Ziblatt has looked at the history of successful and failed democratization since the 1800s. He convincingly argues that one death knell of democracy occurs when a major party believes that it cannot win power with a more inclusive electorate. Left-leaning parties usually try to expand the electorate to underserved groups as part of their ideology, so inclusivity naturally helps their electoral chances. Conservative parties, however, are generally the home of socially dominant groups. They thus have the most to lose when political, economic, and social power broadens to new demographics, and they are the most likely to throw a spanner into the works of democracy itself in order to maintain their dominance. Ziblatt looks at democracies still in early stages of expanding the franchise, but his argument can be applied to countries trying to continue the process of more inclusive democratization over time. For an ever more inclusive democracy to last, major political parties that represent currently dominant groups must be able to see a path under which they can hold power as the electorate expands.

Is there a scenario in which both major U.S. parties could realistically see a path to electoral success at the state and national levels through inclusive, broaden-the-tent politics and a commitment to the democratic process? And how could party insiders and pro-democracy activists help the country to get there, given that both sides currently fear political and social annihilation if the other side were to dominate? To answer those questions, we first need to understand why political realignment is driving current levels of political violence and suppression.

Political Realignments and Violence

Political realignments in America tend to be bloody. The advent of the Republican Party in the 1850s was marked by guerilla warfare in Bleeding Kansas as pro-slavery forces attacked abolitionists who were trying to make Kansas a “free” state while the abolitionists fought back against violent raids, voter fraud, and election malfeasance. The move from mostly Republican rule during the Gilded Age through the 1920s to a long reign of Democratic control starting in the 1930s was characterized by violence against core Democratic groups—strikers, miners, and others pushing to move power toward the working class—as well as a resurgence of the anti-immigrant and racially violent Ku Klux Klan. (The Klan supported political campaigns in the North and West as well as the South in the 1920s because this realignment led to openings for its ideology to gain power within both parties.)

The last U.S. political realignment was spurred by the civil rights era, and it similarly led to the country’s last sustained rise in political violence and hate crimes. For decades prior, the Democratic Party had relied on a base that fused three disparate groups: party machines in big cities that disproportionately drew on impoverished recent immigrants and ethnic whites; the Northern, unionized working class; and Southern whites committed to a racist social order. But as President Truman desegregated the military, a left-leaning Supreme Court desegregated the schools, and national Democrats voiced more progressive views on race, Black voters and supporters grew in the ranks of the big city machines and the North, while the so-called Solid South eroded. Lyndon B. Johnson may have backed the Civil Rights Act because it was the right thing to do, but he also realized it was getting too hard to straddle the divide: The party had to choose. It would either have to double down on the Southern whites who had split off to become the Dixiecrats in 1948, or let them go and rebuild on a base of Black voters and a broader, younger, more heterogenous Northern constituency.

The policy choices that spurred this realignment took place from 1948 to 1965. During that time, Southern Democrats resorted to violently suppressing Black voters to maintain their political power. A wave of hate crimes surged across the South with no repercussions—this was the era of Emmett Till’s murder, among many others. Black and white activists working to organize African Americans to vote faced assassinations intended to stop them and deter others, including the murders of NAACP leader Medgar Evers, Reverend George Lee, Lamar Smith, Herbert Lee, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Henry Schwerner, Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer, and others. As violence became normalized as a political solution, assassins took the lives of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy in the few years between 1963 and 1968.

By the late 1960s, Southern whites and other whites for whom race was salient were fleeing the Democratic Party. Many couldn’t bring themselves to join the party of Lincoln, and so they became independents. Retributive violence spread from the right to the left under the eye-for-an-eye ideology of Malcolm X and broadened to many left-leaning causes before petering out over the course of the 1970s.

The civil rights era marked a 20-year span in which the social dominance of an established group was threatened by a more inclusive democracy. Since that time, the United States has undergone a slower, but even more massive, shift in demographic power. In 1860, the country was 86 percent white; by 1960, that number had actually increased to 89 percent, due largely to racialized immigration restrictions. But by 2020, people who identified solely as white composed just 62 percent of the country, thanks largely to the lifting of those restrictions. The shift in dominance is not confined to race: Women have gained power, and so have ethnic, religious, and sexual and gender minorities. A country where a white, male, and native-born majority was dominant has given way to a far more complex tapestry. Protestant Christians were once the overwhelming norm. Now, Protestants comprise just a third of Americans, and one of the biggest religious groups are people who check “none of the above.” And while evangelicals are growing slightly, it is arguably becoming a political rather than a religious category: More than a quarter don’t even regularly attend church, and some Muslims, Hindus, and Jews now classify themselves as evangelical on surveys.

No large democracy has ever successfully displaced the power of its majority population at the national level and remained a democracy, so the breadth of these changes was always likely to trigger a backlash. But tinder needs a spark, and it came thanks to a triumvirate of causes.

First, Democrats swung sharply to the left in the early 2010s. Several high-profile police shootings and other instances of publicized racial violence, amplified by a social media and social movement storm, quickly shifted white Democrats to the left of Black Democrats on questions of race. Other social trends pushed them further to the left on gender. Movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and the ideological growth of the “identity synthesis”— a set of beliefs that emphasize racial, sexual, and gender identity as providing a unique standpoint of greater validity and more value than other forms of thought—increased the salience and visibility of these underlying demographic changes, putting a spotlight on the shift in power that had been going on for some time. At the same time, the Democratic Party began to emphasize issues like immigration and identity in ways that appealed to the most educated voters, and deemphasized the kinds of policies, language choices, and just plain organizing that made working-class and rural voters feel seen.

Second: Seeing a window of opportunity swing open, Donald Trump pulled it off its hinges. Trump and his strategist Steve Bannon saw a chance to attract grievance-filled voters who were uncomfortable with the changing power relationships in the country and disliked Democrats’ greater focus on elite and minority issues. The base that propelled Trump over more traditional Republicans in the 2016 primary stood out among all voters for their particularly strong belief that true Americans were people who were white, Christian, and native-born. A majority of these were people who had voted in the past for both Republican and Democratic candidates, and their affinity for Trump started the modern realignment dynamics. (Remember that mid-twentieth-century realignment that pushed whites with exclusionary racial views to be Independents? Some are still voting, and many had kids.) In 2016, Trump managed to marry this new, intense base of support to the traditional Republican fusion of social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and libertarians cemented by Ronald Reagan.

But these former swing voters, who have now formed Trump’s base for three cycles, were not an easy fit with Republican orthodoxy. Although they were to the right of most other Republicans on social issues, a near-majority had positive views of Hillary Clinton in 2012, and they had often previously voted for Democrats because they held redistributive economic views that were distinctly to the left. As a Democracy Fund analysis uncovered, Trump’s most rabid supporters, who made up about a fifth of Trump voters in 2016, did not support the low-tax, small-government economics that had united libertarians and fiscal conservatives within the Republican Party. Like the base of populist parties in France and other European countries, they wanted more government help for their group (which explains their past support for Democrats) and less given to “undeserving” others.

Third, the Republican Party itself changed rapidly in response to Trump’s ideological flexibility, these new voters, and the threats that accompanied the rise of a new internal faction. The GOP could have rejected these new voters and gone back to its traditional base—after all, Trump supporters’ ideological predilection for conspiracy theories and culture wars was not a vote winner among swing constituencies during the 2022 midterms, and the party had rebuffed Pat Buchanan’s earlier overture of a similar nativist and racist vein. Instead, a mix of sycophantic servility and MAGA threats caused the party to cave: Traditional Republicans could adjust to this new political temper, or they could leave the party. Ideologically flexible and riding a COVID wave of government largesse, the MAGA faction showed itself willing to woo the working class with populist economics and rhetoric against corporations. The Trump campaign is attempting to hold onto its corporate money pot through backroom promises of tax relief, regulatory dismemberment, and crony giveaways. However, the rhetoric has changed the party itself, moving Republican sentiment distinctly against corporations.

A System Built for Bloodshed

Similar demographic, economic, and cultural changes are also giving rise to populist and extreme-right parties in Europe. But the United States has an election system designed to incentivize democratic transgressions in tight races. In political systems that allocate seats based on the percentage who vote for a given party, parties gain little by moving 1 or 2 percent of voters. But when races in winner-take-all districts (like those in the United States) are close, reducing the chances that a handful of people can vote has the potential to flip an entire district. A winner-take-all structure thus incentivizes suppression, violence, threats against the referees—from election officials to certifiers—and other dirty tricks.

The pressure is even greater now because just a few seats will determine who controls Congress. Throughout most of American history, one party was so dominant that a few seats made little difference. But for the past three decades, congressional power has been on a knife’s edge in nearly every election. On top of that, the increasing number of “safe” congressional seats almost certain to be won by one party means that only a few districts are actually at play, leaving it to a small number of voters to determine who wields the vast power of the House and Senate. With just a few states determining the outcome of the presidential election, in particular—and in reality, only a few counties within those states—the incentives for violence and suppression are even stronger.

The last time the United States faced a Congress that could go either way in every election, as well as parties that were highly polarized due to a reduction in the social dominance of a powerful group, was during the political realignment that ended Reconstruction. With the sudden enfranchisement of Black voters, the Republican Party tried to consolidate its base. A series of violent elections soon followed as Confederates tried to wrest back their lost majority. In April 1867, the Tennessee Democratic Party’s nominating convention perfectly coincided with the time and place that the Ku Klux Klan was holding an organizing convention, at the Nashville Maxwell House Hotel. They and other “night rider” terror groups unleashed lynchings and political violence against Republicans until the Confederacy won back through political terror in 1876 what it had lost in the actual war.

To cement their power, the Southern white aristocracy ginned up racial hatred and turned a blind eye to lynchings, which would peak before election time, particularly in counties where Populist Party challengers posed an electoral threat. This vigilante violence with the tacit support of the state ended only when political leaders realized they could achieve their desired results through repressive voting measures. Once power was firmly in their hands, Democratic politicians no longer needed political violence to win; electoral manipulation, backed by the credible threat of violence against Black voters, was sufficient. Lynchings swiftly declined. But the electoral manipulation left the United States with an “authoritarian enclave” of single-party rule backed by law and the threat of violence throughout the 11 states of the former Confederacy and beyond.

New Structures or New Parties?

This is not a history we want to repeat. And yet, socially dominant groups reasserting their power through laws and blood is the most common fate of riven democracies. When so much power rests on the decisions of such a small number of voters in small areas, and with vastly different policy futures at stake, it would be surprising if such a system was peaceful. Given this incentive structure, how can the United States exit the current turmoil and move this ship of state past the maelstrom of authoritarianism and violence so that we achieve a multiracial, inclusive democracy and a more hopeful future?

One way out is by changing the political structures. After all, if America did not have winner-take-all seats, and if there were fewer safe seats, there would be far less incentivization of violence and fewer extremist candidates. A number of efforts are underway to break what Lee Drutman of New America has called the “two-party doom loop”—from Unite America’s work to replace polarizing partisan primaries with other structures, such as ranked-choice voting with instant runoffs, to support for proportional representation and attempts to bring back fusion voting. These efforts are essential. The United States needs state-level experimentation into electoral change that disincentivizes running the most extreme candidates and allows for better representation of the majority of voters.

But these experiments will take time, especially in states that do not allow citizen referendums, given that incumbents don’t like changing the rules that gave them their seats. In the meantime, both of America’s major parties need to see a path forward where they could plausibly win democratically.

Some Republicans want to return to the traditional GOP base of small-government libertarians and pro-business moderates supporting policies that help the wealthy, backed by corporate funding and the Koch brothers’ engine of organizing. Nikki Haley’s presidential campaign showed the futility of this strategy. While such a fusion might well win in a general election, it can’t get enough votes in Republican primaries. As long as party primaries exist, any attempt to rebuild the Republican base along these lines will fail.

Republicans could try to dominate by sticking with their current, anti-democratic, authoritarian-leaning MAGA movement, of course. This strategy marries aggrieved working-class voters, particularly men, with evangelical organizing (which, as mentioned before, now includes non-Christian religious groups). The GOP is willing to lose the national security part of the traditional Republican fusion and jeopardize the support of corporate CEOs, hoping that the loss of corporate backing can be staved off by the CEOs’ self-interest in plutocratic tax policy or can be compensated for by small-dollar donations from the working classers themselves. But in addition to being a noxious, undemocratic philosophy, it’s not a winner: MAGA leaders other than Trump have a poor track record. They lose in battleground states, and while they can win against very unpopular Democratic challengers, they are largely just holding ground in places where they already had deep red control.

But some in the Republican coalition see a path to majority control, and the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee showed how they are moving toward it. It can be seen in Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance as a running mate, a pick that tilts the party toward populist working-class policies, and in his wooing of the Teamsters, whose president savaged corporations at the Republican National Convention. And it can be seen in the choice to have Trump welcomed by Kid Rock music and introduced by the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship franchise, and in Trump emphasizing in his speech that immigrants were stealing “Black and Hispanic” jobs. These were not random choices, and that was not a throwaway line: Republican political consultants can see that young minority men are moving toward their party. Right now, as with trying to maintain corporate support while speaking about populist economics, they are trying to straddle the line of attracting minorities while still giving racial dog whistles.

But there is a scenario in which these moves toward greater racial inclusion—supported by a different kind of Republican politician—could craft a newly broad tent that is multiracial and supports democracy and the rule of law. Pro-democracy activists, who disproportionately lean left of center, should consider whether part of their role is to help build the recruitment structures and candidate assistance that would help propel an inclusive pro-democracy Republican Party into existence.

What would that party look like and believe? We analyzed data from the Cooperative Election Study, a large national survey of voter opinion on a variety of political and policy questions that has been run since 2006 and provided us with over 600,000 unique survey respondents. We explored shifts in vote choice in presidential (2008-20), gubernatorial (2008-22), and congressional (2006-22) elections among various demographic groups, comparing the findings to those from Gallup and Pew surveys for confirmation. (By looking at races prior to 2016 and at gubernatorial and congressional votes, we were able to ensure that Trump’s personal effect on voters did not skew the results.) We then looked at how shifts in voter preferences among demographic groups related to their opinions on various policy issues surveyed in the 2022 Cooperative Election Study to determine along what lines new electoral coalitions might form. We found that a two-party, pro-democratic, racially and ethnically inclusive system is in fact close at hand, but bringing it to fruition will require tough choices by democracy activists and partisan leaders alike.

A More Racially Inclusive Republican Party

The Milwaukee convention is not a sole data point: In 2022 and 2024, Republican consultants made a concerted effort to recruit candidates of color and to elect them even in majority-white districts. Since 2016, Republicans have been gaining among Black and Hispanic men—especially those under 35 who lack a college degree. While Democrats still win a majority of these voters, the trend lines are moving decisively in a Republican direction. (After Black voters hit historic highs for Obama in 2008, when he won 95 percent of their vote, it is predictable that some voters would trend back toward Republicans. To account for this, we considered whether Black Democratic support has dropped below pre-Obama levels. It has: Biden won around 90 percent of the two-party Black vote in 2020, the lowest share for any Democratic presidential candidate in recent history.) For Republicans to solidify their gains among these demographics—and among other groups within their reach, such as older Hispanics and Hispanic men—they would need to do two things: drop the racist dog whistles and support higher voter turnout to get these low-turnout groups to vote for them in significant numbers.

Based on the answers to survey questions, Republicans could fuse more than a third of Black and Hispanic men under 35 (who together compose about 6 percent of the voting population) to their current base of working-class whites, particularly men and older white voters of both genders. This would give Republicans a coalition large enough to win the popular and electoral votes outright—if they embraced a platform that:

• called for more restrictive immigration policies—but in a less race-baiting manner;
• promoted traditional family and gender roles but allowed for limited abortion;
• supported law and order, but with messaging that did not stigmatize Black Americans and instead appealed to the desire for security among both Black and white voters;
• opposed welfare spending, with an explicit appeal to the working class rather than the non-working poor;
• promoted manufacturing;
• eschewed white nationalism and other polarizing rhetoric and symbolism that currently make many younger Hispanic and Black men feel the party is too far right.

This is not our party of choice, to be clear. But a racially inclusive, working-class party of the right would have some very positive features for American democracy, particularly compared to the current MAGA ascendancy.

Most important, it would require Republicans to court a multiethnic coalition to hold onto power. A seminal study of the BJP in India (the Hindu nationalist party now led by Narendra Modi) shows that even parties built on social division moderate those views to win elections when they depend on voters from a previously maligned group. Given the centrality of race to American life, anything that forced both parties to compete for the votes of minorities would likely lead to policies that did more for minorities and worked toward healing the racial divide.

Such a shift might also force both parties to actually serve minority men better. For instance, law and order is not only a strong vote winner among working-class whites, men, and older voters. Majorities of Black men under 35 who lean Republican also support increased spending on law enforcement—though fewer support more police on the streets. That’s not surprising: Black men are at vastly disproportionate risk of being shot by police. But they are also at great risk for homicide (which is the greatest cause of death for Black men under 45). The loss of years of life is the ultimate issue of equality, and though Biden has created a White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention that is quietly supporting policies that would reduce homicides of Black men, neither party has attempted to speak simultaneously about both police brutality and the murder of young Black men by other civilians in an effort to elevate the ideologically mixed nature of proven solutions. Efforts from a right-leaning law and order mentality could meet with left-leaning efforts at police reform, yielding the sort of surprising policy success achieved with criminal justice reform.

Because these new Republican voters are less frequent voters, this new base would also require Republicans to support more inclusive voting measures. They may still support voter ID rules (which have the backing of 77 percent of people of color)—but get-out-the-vote efforts would likely rise, while easily abused processes like signature matching would fall out of favor. Republican Party incentives would be aligned with getting people with a lower propensity to vote to make their voices heard.

Finally, Republicans would probably court more unions—particularly police, construction trades, and those with male-heavy memberships, such as the Teamsters. The GOP’s current straddle of appealing to the working class while union-bashing and offering corporate giveaways will be harder to maintain if the gap between rhetoric and policy widens. Just as the Democrats chose civil rights over the votes of Southern whites in the mid-twentieth century, Republicans might decide more firmly in favor of the working class, giving the party an incentive to press for policies like unionization that would truly help those voters and lessen income inequality.

Currently, MAGA has such control over the Republican Party that politicians who refuse its flirtation with violence, authoritarianism, and race-baiting politics can’t get internal airtime. So while the party tiptoes toward ideological and demographic realignment, the politicians carrying more populist economic ideas are temperamentally unable to also build an inclusive, pro-democratic future. Instead, decent people are being forced out of the party by thugs willing to enforce intra-party conformity. Racial minorities are being courted through a virulent misogyny that unites a particular group of men across race. And even knowing that they are trying to attract Black voters, MAGA Republicans can’t stop themselves from invoking racist tropes. To get from the current Republican Party to this theoretical one, Democrats are going to have to win decisively and frequently in the short term. Only decisive losses might force the Republican Party to give up MAGA polarization and move toward a popular winning coalition.

A Winning Democratic Coalition

But are significant Republican losses in the cards? The Democratic Party as it is currently aligned cannot score the kind of overwhelming wins that force a reckoning, because the group of voters willing to back a party that combines extremely pro-choice and pro-immigrant views is highly educated, wealthy, and small. (To be sure, we are both rabidly pro-choice and pro-immigrant ourselves—but that, unfortunately, proves the point.) While groups supporting these positions are very likely to vote, they simply don’t exist in great enough numbers to push Democrats to victory, especially in battleground states. This leaves Democrats with a nail-biter coalition that depends on whether they can get out the vote among people who often don’t vote, many of whom also don’t particularly like or trust some of the policies and postures the Democratic Party is proclaiming most loudly.

A winning platform would push the Democratic Party further toward what it is already becoming: a party that unites educated middle- and upper-middle-class professionals with the very poor. It would maintain the demographics that Democrats currently excel in: college-educated whites and Hispanics, older and educated minorities, young women, and Americans who are professionals with means, but not at the nosebleed top. It would also increase support from cohorts of voters who already lean Democratic, but would lean further with some platform tweaks—such as young voters of both genders. This platform would include supporting:

• Abortion—but only up to 20 weeks, with exceptions for medical and other necessities;
• Legal immigration and granting status to tax-paying undocumented migrants who are already in the country and have no criminal record—but also strong border security measures. It would reduce support for undocumented immigration to alter the common belief that Democrats favor the free flow of immigrants into the country with little border control—a view with which most voters disagree.
• Spending on education, health care, and to a lesser extent on transit, making the case for public goods and infrastructure that help all Americans;
• Realistic action on the climate, such as supporting the development of renewable energies, investing in and encouraging the use of electric vehicles, and establishing financial penalties for top corporate polluters;
• Popular gun control measures, such as banning assault rifles;
• Policies that protect transgender rights, while reducing the salience of this issue by significantly dialing back rhetoric on and attention to it. (Nearly two in three Americans favor protecting trans people from discrimination, but such policies enjoy less support from Black Democrats than from the rest of the party, and they are far from the top of most voters’ agendas.)
• It would reduce the focus on identity synthesis issues that make some voters feel the current party is too far left and are driving some—particularly young minorities—toward the right.

While non-college-educated Americans—and especially whites—would make up a core constituency of a new Republican Party, Democrats should not view them as a lost cause. A substantial portion of this group could continue to provide crucial support to Democrats, provided the party approaches them in the right way. Democrats may wish they could compete for the working class simply by choosing candidates who strike a more working-class tone. Yet even “Scranton Joe,” perhaps the most attractive possible candidate for the white working class, won only 37 percent of the white non-college-educated two-party vote in 2020. That’s just 1 point better than Hillary Clinton scored with this demographic, suggesting that the candidate is not a major voting variable.

Many Democrats hope that this group could be attracted back with policies that support manufacturing and unions. Such was the Biden Administration’s bet. But economic appeals to self-interest may not be a vote winner either. For one thing, the working class as a whole is actually doing better than is commonly believed, and can afford to vote on non-pocketbook issues. The median working-class voter has experienced wage growth since the mid-1990s, and enjoys a bigger home, a higher standard of living in general, and a safer working life than in the supposedly golden 1970s. (Of course, it’s worth remembering that many might not feel better off—especially compared to other groups. Wage growth for the entire working class has grossly lagged behind increases for the top 10 percent of Americans.) Even if working-class Americans do vote on purely economic concerns, that might not help Democrats: Although wage growth started under President Clinton and got a big bump under President Biden, some may credit Trump with the growth and blame Biden for the subsequent inflation.

Regardless, it is important to recognize that the white working class’s distrust for Democrats involves a deep reservoir of resentment against the professional class who compose the Democratic base. Many working-class Americans admire the rich but dislike upper-middle-class professionals, whom they perceive as ordering them around, looking down on them, and conflating them with what they see as the undeserving poor. It is likely that Democrats can only hang onto 35 to 40 percent of these voters. That’s not terrible: The percent of the white working class that seems winnable by Democrats is about the same as the percent of the Black and Hispanic young male demographic the new Republican coalition would be taking from the left—and it would represent far more total votes, since the white working class is a significantly larger demographic. The voters in this group who have stuck with Democrats so far seem to like core Democratic policies. More than 60 percent of working-class whites want more spending on health care and education and protections for the right to choose. A majority support banning assault rifles and investing in infrastructure. While they may not see climate change as a crucial issue with the same intensity as young, college-educated voters, about 60 percent still say that “Climate change is taking place and some action should be taken” to address it. And the poorest decile of working-class voters, who still earn far too little to cover a basic family budget, are more likely to vote on pocketbook issues.

Thus, a new, competitive Democratic Party could hold onto a shrinking group of voters in what was once a stalwart part of the coalition and add them to its newer core constituencies. Doing so brings benefits beyond votes alone. This coalition would preserve some union support from groups like the AFL-CIO, as well as pink-collar service unions and public sector unions. In this way, Democrats would retain a part of their fundraising and get-out-the-vote infrastructure that they cannot afford to lose.

A New Economic Order

The realignment we describe would leave corporations with no natural political home. Many of their policy desires regarding issues such as immigration and infrastructure would be met by Democratic politicians, but those politicians are unlikely to support the low-taxation, low-regulation policies that corporate leaders cherish and that have enabled the extreme levels of inequality in American life.

Corporations would likely face an end to the Milton Friedman-esque, deregulatory trickle-down policies that had taken hold across both major political parties by the 1990s. They would instead see a return to the sort of regulatory policy environment of the 1950s, when both parties were more Keynesian. They could expect a generally pro-markets stance that was moderated by a greater amount of government intervention in the market to address externalities and monopolies, and a stronger social contract. If both parties supported a new economic consensus around policies that built the middle class, inequality would decline. So would its correlates: violence, social distrust, reduced GDP, lower levels of entrepreneurship, and other ills.

Corporations would undoubtedly try to fight this change, using their resources to elevate pro-corporate politicians and throwing money at advocacy campaigns to win tax and regulatory goals. But as Republicans turn to small-dollar donors, corporations will have less influence on the right, and ideologically, they are unlikely to gain serious ground with the left beyond the support they already enjoy. Perhaps some would see, as Andrew Carnegie did in the nineteenth century, that a somewhat more redistributive economics is necessary to avoid the pitchforks and retributive policies characterizing populist uprisings on the right and left in other countries. If so, this, too, would have positive ramifications for democracy.

The New Gender Divide

For all the potential benefits of such a realignment, it also brings a serious risk. One way we determined who would be open to being part of a new Republican coalition was based on answers to questions designed to assess hostile sexism, such as agreement with statements like “Women are too easily offended” and “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.” In other words, we baked in making gender a more decisive partisan fissure than race. We did this because hostile sexism is already clearly part of the allure of the Republican Party for current voters. We also felt that the gender divide in America could not segregate the country as deeply as race. After all, physical, racial segregation with minimal interaction was the law of the land in multiple states for generations. But 86 percent of Americans identify as straight, meaning that most men and women want to physically be with one another. They must thus come to some level of mutual understanding and accommodation. That is not a given with other forms of identity divide.

However, the young Black men and non-college-educated Black and Hispanic people who are moving toward the Republican Party have even more elevated levels of hostile sexism than most white Republicans. Many of them have also sat out recent elections. Attracting them to the polls might lead this party to take stronger stances in favor of traditional gender roles, or outright misogyny, than even the current MAGA coalition.

A war of the sexes in which increasingly liberal women battle politically against men seeking to reassert their sense of control through radically conservative family policies is not good for women, the American family, or our society. Moreover, violent misogyny is growing and is already being weaponized politically by the right in the United States and by authoritarians globally. It could lead to increased domestic violence and political violence, as well as the kinds of policies that kill women in childbirth and harm them more generally. The threat that the United States could heal its racial divide by throwing women under the bus is real. That risk is an even stronger reason for pro-democracy organizations to become involved in shaping a future party of the right.

Positive Leadership

It is hard for the pro-democracy community to envision molding a new, potentially electorally successful Republican Party as part of its agenda. Most of us involved in pro-democracy activism lean left in our politics and personally want an ascendant Democratic Party (something that has not been lost on Republicans trying to ally with us on pro-democracy aims). But America is going to have a right, and that right-wing party, whatever its policies or character, is going to dominate many states and will sometimes gain national power. It is thus of great interest to democracy organizations what kind of right-leaning party it is.

A realignment is already underway. So long as the country remains stuck in a messy stalemate, we will face greater political violence. If this realignment simply progresses organically, the country could find itself with a radical right organized against women and immigrants and willing to use violence, regulatory retribution, and vote denial to quell voices of dissent. Forcible deportation of immigrants could be combined with policies that caused women and liberal minorities to leave their states if they could, in a new Great Migration, while the poor would be left behind. Meanwhile, a rump party of left-leaning, highly educated elites and the poor would be left to shake their heads, read their journals, and decry what had happened to their country. This is, after all, what has occurred in Hungary in modern times and was the fate of Germany in the 1930s.

Alternatively, pro-democracy groups could work to accelerate a realignment that resembles what we have outlined. They could support candidate recruitment efforts that attract a new breed of Republican—people who support populist economics and racial inclusion along with respect for democratic institutions and the rule of law. Candidate pipelines, donor groups, and intellectual efforts could be built to help this faction gain ground, alongside support for structural reforms like ranked-choice, instant-runoff elections that would avoid MAGA primary voters and allow realigned Republican candidates to compete directly for the votes of a general electorate.

At the same time, pro-democracy organizations could also work culturally to mitigate the potential that this realignment would amplify gender divisions and hostile sexism. Many young men appear to be seeking control over women because of underlying feelings of deep despair and loss of social belonging. Older men fear loss of status and a respected role in society. Pro-democracy organizations and philanthropists could thus accompany their more political work with cultural efforts that address men’s needs. These could include work to elevate pro-social visions of masculinity, as vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz’s “Midwestern Dad” values are doing; policies that help men succeed educationally and in their family lives; and programs to fight misogyny, such as those being proposed by members of the new UK Labour government.

Finally, pro-democracy groups could seek out and assist the political standard-bearers who would alter the tone of our current politics. While outside groups can support, strategize, and assist, ultimately, it is politicians who galvanize this sort of realignment, using charisma and political acumen to realign their parties. The violence, assassinations, and hate of the last realignment petered out for many reasons. But the change was cemented when Ronald Reagan proclaimed his sunny, positive vision of “Morning in America.” In doing so, he attracted significant numbers of “Reagan Democrats” to switch sides.

Which side will be the first to find a leader who can bring about a full realignment? Will that leader offer a positive, inclusive view of America, or deepen our divisions? The answers to those questions will determine whether the United States remains mired in threats, violence, and systemic distrust for another decade, or moves into a new chapter of multiethnic, multiracial, inclusive democracy.