The coalition that sent Donald Trump back to the White House in 2024 marked the culmination of a long-term political realignment that conservative authors and activists had anticipated since the 1970s.

Fifty years earlier, right-wing commentators like William Rusher, then the publisher of National Review, were busy sketching a blueprint for the new majority that they hoped would finally bring them to power after decades of Democratic rule. That majority, according to Rusher and other “New Right” thinkers, would be built around the same working class that had long served as a pillar of the New Deal coalition. In his own words, the Right would construct a “Great Coalition” made up of the “producers of America,” in which he naturally included “businessmen, workers and farmers.” These “producers” would be united in their hostility toward a “rapacious new non-producing class” of “liberal verbalists” and their “huge welfare constituency” — that is, liberal members of the professional middle class and the poor.

Back then, Democrats were still widely considered the party of the working class and Republicans the party of the affluent and college educated. By 2024, these voting blocs had largely flipped. While Kamala Harris captured an impressive 56 percent of voters with a college degree, she lost those without any college education by 13 points. Just twelve years earlier, Barack Obama had narrowly carried noncollege voters by 3 points, while Mitt Romney had won college-educated voters by four. The same trends were apparent for income: Harris won a majority of voters who earned over $100,000, while her Republican opponent won 52 percent of those making between $30,000 and $100,000 (once again the opposite of 2012, when Romney won 54 percent of upper-income voters).