The Republicans and Democrats have been trading places atop American politics, and trading constituencies, for 168 years. A person departs after casting their early ballot on the last day of early voting in Michigan on Nov. 3.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
The outcome of the deadlocked, down-to-the-wire American presidential election defies confident prediction, but the contours and consequences of the bitter, sometimes rancid, and seemingly endless campaign already are clear.
Americans’ choices in Tuesday’s presidential race will continue the dramatic transformation of two major parties that, like the country itself, are in massive transition. In unlikely and uncomfortable tandem, both parties simultaneously have rejected their pasts, reconfigured themselves, and together are foreshadowing a political future completely different from the one that has dominated the country for generations.
No matter who prevails, the voters who are trooping to the polls to choose between two candidates who have adjusted their profiles in the past several years also are engaged in a separate, far-reaching process: consolidating, even accelerating, the changes in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, which nominated Donald Trump and Kamala Harris respectively and sent them into this year’s campaign.
“There’s definitely been a transformation of the party coalitions along income, geographical and educational lines,” said Matt Grossman, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University in one of the critical seven swing states. “This election is cementing those coalitions, and it is especially evident here in Michigan.”
The final New York Times/Siena College poll puts Michigan, which has 15 electoral votes and has been an especially ardently contested battleground in the closing days of campaigning, at a 47 per cent-47 per cent tie. The Times/Siena poll puts Pennsylvania, with its 19 electoral votes the biggest swing state prize in Tuesday’s voting, at a 48-48 tie.
In both places, as across the country, the content of American politics has been infused by questions of identity and culture.
“The mainstream media constantly wants to attribute voters’ preferences to economics but what may really matter this time is voters’ identities beyond economics, especially education levels and gender,” said David Shumway, an expert in cultural forces who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “We sometimes think that the Democrats are defined by identity and culture, but the whole Trump movement is rooted in identity and culture.”
The Republicans and Democrats have been trading places atop American politics, and trading constituencies, for 168 years – since the time the nascent Republican Party first took on the established Democratic Party in 1856 in an election that was one of the precursors to the Civil War.
The two parties have been in a virtual standoff for the past quarter-century, one party following the other in the White House, with the Congress generally divided so closely that major legislation has been rare. In the past 25 years, vice-presidents, who have the power of breaking ties in the Senate, have cast the deciding vote in the chamber an astonishing 55 times. In all of American history, that has happened only 301 times.
Along with the presidency, control of both chambers of Capitol Hill will be decided Tuesday, with the likelihood that the Democrats will end GOP rule in the House of Representatives and the Republicans will displace the Democrats in control of the Senate.
Though Mr. Trump speaks about making America great again, his emergence as a formidable force in American politics is as much a sweeping rebellion against the recent past as it is a movement determined to shape the American future. It represents a rejection not only of the Democratic Party but, just as important, of the Republican Party as well.
By drawing blue-collar Americans who once swore unswerving allegiance to the Democratic Party, he shattered a ruling coalition that controlled the House of Representatives without an interregnum for four decades; that gave the United States presidents such as Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, whose images were hung on the parlour walls of coal miners, steel workers and urban strivers for decades, portraits that in some cases are there still; and that presented the country with Social Security for the aged, the Great Society for the poor, and Medicare and Obamacare for the unhealthy.
By repelling the country’s traditional conservative elite from its customary home in the Republican Party of Calvin Coolidge, Dwight Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush and even the disgraced Richard Nixon, Mr. Trump has claimed the disenfranchised, the alienated and the blue-collar voters who once were the Democrats’ bedrock. He also shattered a GOP tradition of caution, prudence, personal and public responsibility, and sound judgment that acted as a brake on liberal excesses and, with the Nixon exception, demonstrated the power of character in American civic life.
As these shifts roll out – bringing the likely alterations in Capitol Hill leadership along with the replacement of Joe Biden in the White House – the changes in the character and composition of the parties come into sharp relief.
“Parties change over decades – that’s normal – and we accept the idea that there are swings,” said Tom Corbett, a Republican who was governor of Pennsylvania from 2011 to 2015. “Both parties are going to their extremes. The MAGA people who are leading my party are too far to the right. The Democrats are too far to the left. I don’t recognize the people who have taken over my party.”
At the same time, former Democratic Party chairman Paul Kirk looks at the composition of the party he led from 1985 to 1989 with astonishment.
“The Democratic Party was full of the people who loved FDR, Harry Truman, JFK and Lyndon Johnson, and, in his two elections, Ronald Reagan stole them and a lot of them never came back,” said Mr. Kirk, who served in the Senate from Massachusetts 14 years ago. “Now add to that the onetime Democrats who now are voting Republican because of cultural issues. They don’t like what they see in the party and think it wasn’t what made them or their parents and grandparents Democrats for decades.”
The result is that the Democratic Party has lost its legacy base, the Republican Party has been shorn of its sheen of sobriety, and the country, clinging to a political system that creates a collision of only two parties, seems adrift, sailing into the kind of uncertain, dangerous waters that the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow spoke of when he wrote in 1849, when the country was riven by the slavery issue a dozen years before the Civil War, “Humanity with all its fears,/ With all the hopes of future years,/ Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”
Ms. Harris, too, will be remembered as a consequential, ground-breaking figure even if the results of Tuesday’s election don’t lead her to the Oval Office, the nuclear codes and weekend retreats at leafy Camp David in the Maryland mountains.
In this campaign there has been scant talk about whether “America is ready” – the phrase attached to each breakthrough moment, whether successful or not, in the country’s history – for a Black woman president. It is manifestly clear that America is ready for a candidate with Ms. Harris’s gender and ethnic profile. The remaining question is whether Ms. Harris is the one to break the barrier. When the polls close Tuesday, the answer will begin to take shape.
Editor’s note: A previous version incorrectly attributed poetry quoted in the article to Walt Whitman. It was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This version has been updated.