The Myth of a Rightward Realignment

Let’s discard some stubborn misconceptions about Trump’s support and what happened in the 2024 election that are obscuring our understanding of a profound de-alignment

By Thomas Zimmer, November 26, 2025

It is Thanksgiving week – so let me start by expressing my deep gratitude to everyone who reads and supports Democracy Americana. Two months ago, I took a big leap into a new life as a full-time independent writer. It is still very much an open question whether this newsletter, which is my main source of income, can generate enough support to make this a viable career. But whatever comes next, I am grateful for the opportunity to think and write about the issues I care deeply about – and you honor me with your time, your trust, and your engagement.

To those of you in the United States: Happy Thanksgiving! I’m afraid I can’t offer anything that is particularly Thanksgiving-related. But I do think today’s essay might be helpful around the Thanksgiving dinner table, as I am taking aim at the most persistent myths around Trump’s support in American society and about what happened in the 2024 election. Perhaps you’ll feel better equipped to push back against and discard these pervasive misconceptions when you’ll inevitably encounter some of them in conversations with friends and family over the weekend.

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Donald Trump is historically unpopular. Only about 40 percent (Opens in a new window) of Americans approve of the job he’s doing as president, and that number is trending down; about 55 percent disapprove. In modern U.S. history, only one other president (Opens in a new window) had equally dismal numbers just months after being elected: That was Donald Trump himself, during his first term. The Republican Party suffered a devastating defeat in the November elections, losing ground almost everywhere, across all demographics (Opens in a new window). Especially working-class voters, young people, and Latinos, whose larger-than-expected support had fueled Trump’s 2024 victory, strongly moved away from the president’s party. Those are facts.

But wait a minute, what about all the talk about a rightward realignment, about the American people sending a clear signal they preferred Trump’s agenda, about Trump having a broad “mandate” (Opens in a new window) to impose his vision on the country?

If you’ll recall, the 2024 election was actually very close. Trump won with a narrow 1.5-point margin in the popular vote. And yet, the idea that America had experienced a political “earthquake” (Opens in a new window) that demanded far-reaching interpretations became gospel almost immediately. Within days, the country’s leading newspapers and most influential commentators attempted to outdo each other with ever more sweeping narratives, mostly built on vastly inadequate, unreliable data – and a whole lot of personal preference. Trump’s victory, we were confidently told, was the result of lasting societal shifts (Opens in a new window) and signaled a profound reordering of American politics, an “American realignment” (Opens in a new window) – perhaps even the end of political liberalism (Opens in a new window) and the beginning of a permanent Trumpist era in U.S. history.

Such narratives have proved stubbornly persistent. A year after the presidential election, they continue to shape the political discourse – in the United States and abroad – even though they have been thoroughly disproven empirically. We now possess comprehensive data that suggests a very different interpretation of what actually happened in November 2024. It is high time we revise our understanding of the political, social, and cultural dynamics that are defining the country. This question is far too important – we cannot afford to rely on myths and misconceptions: What is actually happening in this society that vaulted the man who had led a multi-month campaign to nullify the result of the previous election and incited a violent insurrection, the man who had campaigned on rage, intimidation, and vengeful violence, back to the most powerful political office in the world? 

Let’s tackle three building blocks of the misleading “realignment” narrative: 1) The idea that U.S. society moved right in accordance with the broader outlines of Trumpism’s vision; 2) that Trump is the tribune of the working class, the champion of “regular folks”; 3) that he is building a stable multiracial coalition.

Misleading Myth No. 1: “American society moved significantly to the right”

Influential commentators are dogmatically clinging to the idea that the Democrats are a party of detached elites (Opens in a new window), aloof and arrogant; that they have “lost their base” (Opens in a new window) because they are captured by radical leftwing activists and their vastly unpopular demands; that they ignore the interests of the working class and regular folks. America, we were told after Trump’s victory, had just witnessed a “populist revolt” (Opens in a new window) against an elitist leftist project, a rejection of the aggressively encroaching “wokeism” (Opens in a new window) the Democratic Party was supposedly propagating. Even a few weeks ago, right before the November 2025 elections, Ross Douthat proclaimed from his perch as America’s number one “respectable” conservative pundit in the New York Times that the Trump election had been “an ideological referendum, and progressivism lost.” (Opens in a new window) The next day, Ezra Klein used his New York Times platform as one of America’s best-know liberal voices to call on Democrats to finally accept that “much of the country disagrees with them.” (Opens in a new window) 

The claim that Trump’s victory was a clear-cut expression – an immediate manifestation! – of the will of the people always stood in obvious tension with the narrow election result. Based on the empirical evidence we now have, the assertion that the electorate shifted right in accordance with Trump’s agenda is simply untenable. Let’s look at the picture that emerges from the latest American Values Survey (AVS) (Opens in a new window), for instance. Since 2010, the AVS is conducted annually by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) in partnership with the Brookings Institution. It’s a high-quality survey that stands out because it is not so much concerned with the day-to-day political business, but aims at exploring the underlying attitudes, values, and shifts in national identity. The latest AVS makes very clear why Trump is so unpopular: His economic policy is judged as a disaster (something basically every serious poll confirms (Opens in a new window)) – and his authoritarian ambitions are widely perceived as acutely dangerous. Even two thirds of self-proclaimed independents, those roughly 40 percent of the electorate who are not registered with either party, view Trump as a “dangerous dictator.” (Opens in a new window)

A stable majority (Opens in a new window) of Americans – consistently between 55 and 65 percent, according to the AVS – are not only critical of Trump, but also reject core tenets of the rightwing agenda, preferring the vision of a pluralistic liberal democracy instead: They support a right to abortion (Opens in a new window) in most cases and envision a country that is defined by religious pluralism rather than Christian domination; they reject Trump’s assault on the modern state and the free university; they believe immigration ultimately strengthens America and demand a path to citizenship even for people who entered the country illegally. On all of these issues, it is not just Democrats who stand against the Trumpist vision: About 60 percent to two thirds (Opens in a new window) of independents do as well. Regardless of how many times the commentariat insists the Democratic Party is losing touch with “real America”: On substance, it is very clearly Republicans who are increasingly out of touch with the mainstream.

Misleading Myth No. 2: „Trump is the tribune of regular folks and the champion of the working class”

In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump narrowly won voters with a household income (Opens in a new window) under $50,000 per year as well as those under $100,000 – while Kamala Harris got slightly more votes from people with a household income above $100,000. Those are important numbers. They have provided the basis for the assertion that “the working class” united behind Trump out of a deep-seated frustration with the dysfunctional system, animated by disdain for the “woke” elites, and fueled by a pervasive economic anxiety.

But look more closely and the empirical evidence doesn’t actually align with the “economic anxiety” interpretation – probably the most persistent and most consistently wrong narrative to emerge from the Trump era. Studies have long indicated (Opens in a new window) that Trump’s most ardent supporters do often not come from the poorest social strata: In areas that are struggling economically, we tend to find them among those who are relatively well off by local standards, even if they are not wealthy compared to the national economic distribution. They are “nationally poor,” but “locally rich.” That points to fear of a relative loss in status (Opens in a new window) as a motivation for supporting Trump – and a widespread sense that the system / the state is allowing the “wrong” kinds of people (immigrants, people of color, women) to ascend, at the expense of those in positions of established power who supposedly “deserve” their privilege. In their 2018 book Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America (Opens in a new window), the definitive account of what happened in Trump’s first election, political scientists John M. Sides, Lynn Vavreck, and Michael Tesler convincingly outlined how cultural and racial resentment shaped the perception of the economic situation: Economic anxiety was downstream from cultural/racial/gender anxiety, not the other way around.

The idea that the “lower class” exists as a relatively homogeneous voting bloc that has moved right is simply not plausible either. Trump’s support is heavily concentrated among the white working class (Opens in a new window), which studies and polls, for the sake of simplicity, tend to define as people without a college degree; in 2024, Trump received about two thirds of their vote. By contrast, a little less than half of Latino voters without a college degree voted for Trump last year, and only about 15 percent of the Black working class. Race evidently shaped voting decisions as a crucial factor. As did religion: Trump got about 86 percent of the white evangelical working-class vote (Opens in a new window) – but only about 45 percent of non-evangelical white working-class voters chose to support him.

The number one argument deployed in defense of the economic anxiety/elites vs working class interpretation – and against prioritizing “cultural” factors like race, religion, and gender – is “education polarization.” This is probably the closest thing we currently have to a widely accepted master narrative (Opens in a new window) of what is happening in U.S. politics and society; it is supposedly the root cause (Opens in a new window) underlying everything else that happens. And it is true that the percentage of people with a college degree among Democratic voters has steadily increased since the 1970s; since around the year 2000, they have been making up the majority of the Democratic coalition (Opens in a new window). By contrast, since 2016, Trump has consistently won the white non-college-educated vote (Opens in a new window) by significant margins.

Once again, however, we need to look more closely and differentiate: To think of people with a college degree as a socially, politically, and culturally homogeneous group that is synonymous with a “liberal elite” makes no sense when that same group also includes people who graduated the many Christian-conservative colleges in the country. And once again, the phenomenon of education polarization is evident mostly among white people – while there isn’t much of a correlation between educational attainment and voting decision among Blacks and Latinos (Opens in a new window).

Most importantly, studies that don’t simply correlate educational attainment and voting decision but include and control for other factors clearly indicate that the “education polarization” narrative vastly overestimates the impact of education. Study after study suggests that education functions mostly as a proxy for other factors that have a much greater impact on political attitudes and decisions. The most important among those by far is racial resentment (Opens in a new window). As a concept, racial resentment is not necessarily the same as biological racism (meaning: the assumption that some races are biologically inferior/superior). Since the 1980s, for instance, the American National Election Studies (ANES) attempt to measure racial resentment by asking people (Opens in a new window) whether they believe the significant wealth and income discrepancies between Black and white Americans are mostly a result of racist discrimination or rather a function of Black cultural deficiencies (a lacking working morale, perhaps, or pathologies of the Black family; or maybe Black people simply don’t try hard enough)? Based on their responses, people are placed on a scale from lower to higher levels of racial resentment. The correlation between where people fall on the racial resentment scale and their voting decisions is vastly stronger than that between voting and educational attainment. In the 2020 election, for instance, almost 90 percent (Opens in a new window) of the people with low racial resentment scores voted for Joe Biden; over 90 percent of those at the higher end of the racial resentment scale supported Donald Trump. Talk about “polarization.”

(By the way, if you want a brilliant dissection of the “education polarization” narrative, and why it falls short, with plenty of graphics and graphs to illustrate everything I am trying to describe here, please check out this excellent analysis of what he calls “The Limits of Education Essentialism” (Opens in a new window) by Michael Podhorzer.)

If you control for racial resentment instead of simply correlating education and voting decision, something remarkable happens: Education polarization, supposedly the root cause that explains everything, almost vanishes. In the 2024 election (Opens in a new window), people with high racial resentment scores strongly tended to vote for Donald Trump, regardless of their educational attainment; by contrast, people with low racial resentment scores strongly tended to support Kamala Harris, whether they had a college degree or not. Put differently: In a group of voters with the same educational attainment, their respective level of racial resentment allows a very strong prediction of their political leanings. But in a group of voters with the same level of racial resentment, we can’t really make an assumption about their voting decisions based on their respective levels of educational attainment. 

If that is so (and it really is!), why does educational attainment correlate with support for Donald Trump – why does he consistently perform better among people without college education and worse among those with a college degree? Because statistically speaking, racial resentment and educational attainment are inversely correlated: As you go up the educational attainment scale, you tend to go down on racial resentment, and vice versa. It is a correlation that is documented beyond reasonable doubt, even if it has proven very difficult to fully explain it.

It really is remarkable: So much talk about the “diploma gap” – when the education polarization of the American electorate actually doesn’t support the notion of Donald Trump as the tribune of the working class and the champion of regular folks. Instead, it strengthens the interpretation against which it is usually deployed as a key witness: The political conflict in the United States is shaped and defined by fundamentally incompatible attitudes towards racial and cultural pluralism. It’s not the education, stupid – it’s the racism (and strictly hierarchical vision of how society should be ordered that comes with it).

Misleading Myth No. 3: “Trump is building a stable multiracial coalition”

The idea that Donald Trump has managed to unite a stable multiracial coalition (Opens in a new window) is the third pillar of the narrative that proclaims a landslide “realignment” of American politics. Once again, there is a kernel of truth. Between 2016 and 2024, Donald Trump increased his support among people of color, especially among Latinos. In the last presidential election, he got almost half the Hispanic vote (Opens in a new window) – up from about a third in 2020.

Yet people often overestimate – or actively overinflate – the extent of Trump’s multiracial support. Even in 2024, about 80 percent (Opens in a new window) of his voters were white. And already in the spring (Opens in a new window), frustration among his Latino voters was high, many had quickly turned away from him once he took office. By the time of the election earlier this month, Trump had squandered (Opens in a new window) all his 2024 gains among Latinos that had significantly contributed to getting him back into the White House.

The most plausible interpretation is that Trump’s strong support among Latinos in 2024 was the result of an acute frustration with the economic situation that many voters, whatever macro-economic indicators might have suggested, subjectively perceived to be very bad: A majority listed the state of the economy as one of their main concerns (Opens in a new window) entering the election. Furthermore, Trump benefited massively from the fact that a significant number of people, including many people of color, simply refused to believe (Opens in a new window) he was serious about his mass deportation promises – or chose to believe they wouldn’t be targeted if such plans were ever put into practice.

There is one group of Hispanics where Trump’s support has not cratered: Among protestants (Opens in a new window), who make up about 25 percent of all Hispanics in the United States, Trump remains relatively popular – and especially among evangelicals. Yet again, this points to the crucial role that cultural and religious factors play in shaping political identities.

(At the risk of beating a dead horse: Isn’t it remarkable how much the mainstream discourse settled on education polarization as the preferred narrative, which supposedly refutes the idea that America’s political divisions are mostly about race, religion, and gender – when so much of the empirical evidence points precisely to those as the central organizing principles? This is a very strong case of the narrative taking precedence: Education polarization, in the way it is commonly understood and presented, serves to support the “Democrats so detached / Libs so elitist / wokeism running amok” tale to which so many center-right to center-left pundits are publicly committed. And so that’s what they are determined to stick with.)

What we are observing among America’s non-white population is a process that has fundamentally reshaped the political landscape for decades and is much further along among white people: A belated partisan sorting along ideological lines (Opens in a new window). Among people of color, it is two groups, in particular, that have been trending towards the Republican Party: First, it is people whose religion connects them to the GOP institutionally – that is the case for evangelicals especially. Secondly, immigrants and people of color who – as counterintuitive as that may sound – are skeptical towards the idea of pluralism or even reject the vision of liberal society outright have found their political home in the Republican Party. Among Hispanics, especially (Opens in a new window), those who display a relatively high level of resentment towards Blacks (Opens in a new window) and prefer a draconian immigration control tend to support Trump.

What comes after the dissolution of the old order?

Trump does not have a stable conservative/right-leaning majority behind him; he does not represent the “will of the people.” America remains deeply divided, with a numerical majority rejecting the reactionary agenda and generally supporting the vision of liberal pluralism.

However, it is striking that both major parties are vastly unpopular. Less than 40 percent (Opens in a new window) of Americans currently have a positive opinion of either party, the percentage of people who register as independents (Opens in a new window) because they don’t want to identify as either Republican or Democrat is rising. There is significant discontent across the political spectrum – a resentment towards the political elites. And trust in established institutions (Opens in a new window) more generally has been declining massively.

America is not experiencing a rightward realignment as much as it is going through a de-alignment of the established order.

Those are precisely the conditions under which Donald Trump has been able to thrive. Significant parts of the rightwing base have been bound to him – not the Republican Party. It is the personal loyalty of his supporters who do not feel allegiance to the GOP that has enabled him to dominate rightwing politics for a decade; institutionally, the Republican Party has been far too weak to offer meaningful resistance.

Perhaps that is changing now, as Trump’s power seems to be eroding, his hold over his own movement is weakening. For the first time since he became the standard-bearer of the Right, Trump has lately faced open, public resistance from within MAGA; his power to integrate the different factions of his coalition seems to be waning.

But if and when Trump leaves the scene, the country will still face a daunting task: Who can channel the disruptive political energies of a society in which the established institutions have lost the people’s trust into a (small-d) democratic direction?