The election results were decisive in their clarity, yet they didn’t settle much of anything. The historical forces at our conjuncture have simply not resolved themselves. Donald Trump’s popular vote victory was decisive but narrow (around 1.5 percentage points as of this writing), and America’s 50-50 politics endures. Indeed, the uniformity of the shift toward Trump—across nearly all demographics, age cohorts, and regions—only underscores the degree to which 2024 was less a seismic realignment around new issues and cleavages than it was the American iteration of a rolling worldwide anti-incumbent wave driven by post-COVID inflation. (The strongest argument for the Democrats’ record is not the improvement-over-time story they strained to tell, but an impressive comparative one that is, alas, better suited for charts in the Financial Times than 30-second ads in Erie: The performance of the U.S. economy, with inflation tamed and growth resurgent, has been superlative measured against all other rich democracies.)

Looking forward, the likelihood of Republican overreach under unified control—however momentous its impact on fiscal policy, the administrative state, and the judiciary—is high. So, in turn, is a subsequent “thermostatic” swing of public opinion against the party in two years. Amidst the inevitable careening chaos of the Trump show, in other words, classic political patterns will also continue to assert themselves, just as they did in the quotidian electoral dynamics that brought that show back into power.

For all the stasis evident within the fundamental American political divide, however, the 2024 election also confirms the ongoing force and momentum of the key political transformation of the modern era: class dealignment, as Democrats fare ever better among voters at the top of the income as well as the education ladder and Republicans ever better among those at the bottom. The “diploma divide” has grown into a chasm, and according to exit polls (better data will arrive in the spring) Trump won voters with family incomes under $100,000 while Kamala Harris prevailed among voters with family incomes above $100,000. The inversion of party support along class lines, however defined, is another American manifestation of a global phenomenon, felt especially acutely by center-left parties whose strongest support used to come from low-income, low-education voters. And with growing Republican support across lines of race and ethnicity, these patterns are no longer limited to white voters.

But our pure party duopoly gives these widely shared developments a distinct peculiarity in the ever-deepening contradictions between constituency and program. Whatever else Trump pursues, for example, fiscal and redistributive questions will take center stage next year. Most of his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is set to sunset, while the Inflation Reduction Act and possibly Obamacare are now at risk. The fights over these matters will repeat, on a grand scale, arguments the parties have had for decades, with their positions essentially unchanged. But underneath, as working people’s disaffection from Democrats continues apace, the disjuncture between the parties’ longstanding priorities and their reoriented coalitions will only grow sharper.

The Republican Party has remade itself as a vehicle for Trumpism. But November 5, 2024, only followed from the pivotal decisions the GOP made at moments when it might actually have chosen differently. In 2016, the party acceded to Trump as its nominee with no organized attempt to stop him, and after January 6, 2021, it shrugged its collective shoulders. Everything since has flowed from those choices. The party has nullified its function as an institution above any individual’s ambition and empowered instead a personalistic politics that splays its anger out far and wide, denouncing all manner of enemies and calling to break down procedural limits to wield state power against them. In so doing, the GOP has brought the country itself to a precipice.

While the roots of Trumpism run deep in the American right, it is at the same time a genuinely new political formulation—and one that now has renewed claims of political viability. MAGA’s stew of lib-owning resentments, gonzo antics, and general irreverence toward ideological shibboleths and political norms alike has now won Republicans the popular vote for just the second time since 1988. That Trump’s GOP is also more of a rainbow coalition than anything the modern party had managed to achieve before is an extraordinary development of our political era, one whose scope liberals only now, at long last, seem truly to be grasping.

The 2024 version of Trumpism is more programmatically ungainly and rhetorically slashing in its wild negativity than its 2016 predecessor—an altogether more dangerous brew. “I alone can fix it,” Trump famously promised eight years ago. By this cycle, the promises were not just to fix but also to punish. “I am your retribution,” Trump told CPAC in March 2023. For years, scholars batted around parallels with fascism. By the time John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff and no left-wing intellectual, wielded the f-word himself—followed in short order by the infamous rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27—the fascism debate was effectively over. Now, after voters shrugged, what remains is to assimilate the conversation about fascism into the ongoing give-and-take of American politics.

And so we come to the Democrats. As an electoral operation facing profound headwinds this fall, their performance was creditable. Party messaging in ads down the stretch hammered home tried-and-true themes around health care and tax hikes for the rich. Democrats’ decline in vote share from 2020 was much smaller in the battleground states than it was in the rest of the country—evidence of a campaign doing effective work. Likewise, Democratic overperformance down-ballot, in Senate races most notably, testifies to a party that can generate high-quality candidates more effectively than its Trumpified opposition. But political renewal will require more than tactical execution to exploit the manifold fissures in the Trumpian edifice. It will come in learning to do politics better.

The party’s most important achievement, the lessons of which should not be forgotten in the crisis of defeat, came in the agonized, halting, but ultimately successful push to get Joe Biden to quit the race. Had it failed, a decisive but narrow loss might well have been a bloodbath up and down the ticket, with at least four more Senate seats gone and perhaps 60 GOP votes in sight. (A post-debate internal poll by the Biden campaign reportedly showed Trump winning 400 electoral votes.) By all accounts, Nancy Pelosi takes pride of place in the effort, and it’s worth dwelling on why. Though only two years older than Biden, Pelosi, the daughter of Baltimore’s D’Alesandro political dynasty, belongs to a different, earlier political generation, one steeped in organizational politics and hardnosed coalition-building. It would mark a profound loss to Democrats if that ancient political wisdom goes with her when Speaker Emerita Pelosi finally departs the scene.

More generally, with the single exception of the summertime post-debate emergency, the Democrats over the last four years made a rather different calculation about how best to forge a viable political project—one centered on policymaking. Biden-era Democrats have hardly been in denial about the challenge of class dealignment. Ambitious and progressive economic measures to remake markets, they believed, could simultaneously shift politics back to material questions and, through what political scientists term “policy feedback,” win back the allegiance of wayward working-class voters. This was hardly a far-fetched or unserious theory. But as a political bet, it didn’t pay off. In a bitter lesson for liberal technocrats’ ambitions, the attempt to make electoral hay out of well-designed policy alone must be counted as a failure.

That suggests a daunting conclusion about the task to reforge the frayed bonds between working people and the party that governs in their name: to focus, instead, on long-term organizational renewal in the local centers of civic life—union halls and party headquarters among them—that have in the past joined people together across class and educational divides. Parties in their organizational heyday, at the apogee in the nineteenth century and continuing long into the twentieth, did not merely draw electorally from that thick civic life; they embodied it directly. They served as training grounds for thinking politically, as they did for young Nancy D’Alesandro. And their vibrant public face made politics fun.

We have no illusions about the difficulty of such renewal. At the heart of the drift of working people away from the party that once called itself “the Democracy” are deep changes in the civic and social fabric of community life, seen both in the collapse of cross-class organizations of all stripes and the disappearance of working-class spaces that once inculcated Democratic identity and allegiance. Yet for the deeply intertwined fates of capital-D Democracy and small-d democracy alike, there’s no alternative to confronting those changes head on, and pushing forward the work to do something about them.