The Democratic Party is not in a good place: Its political agenda is stalled, its president is historically unpopular, it’s suffered a string of policy defeats at the hands of the Supreme Court, and it looks like it’s headed for an unfavorable election result this November. If that weren’t enough, it also seems to be losing its traditional voter base.

There was some alarming news for the party in the latest New York Times Upshot/Siena College national poll earlier this week, with white, college-educated voters making up a larger share of Democratic support than non-white voters for the first time in the survey’s six-year history. This contrasts with the pattern seen over most of the last few decades, in which the GOP tended to preserve its traditional advantage with white college graduates, while Democrats relied on the overwhelming support of non-white voters.

This somewhat startling result is the fruit of a long-term process of political realignment that’s been going on since at least as early as Barack Obama’s presidency, but accelerated with Donald Trump’s emergence onto the political scene. On the one hand, Trump slightly scrambled typical voting trends in 2020, winning over a surprisingly high share (though still small in absolute terms) of groups like Latinos, Asians, Muslims, and even some Native Americans, and the GOP has since then been concertedly working to bring more of those voters into the fold.