One of the classic blunders of pundits is to write about politics just before the election. So let’s take a look at what politics could look like after the election. One prediction is simple: expect much more political inconsistency and hypocrisy.

The term “rearrangement‘ is widely used and abused because people have agreed to use it without agreeing on a definition. Traditionally, realignments would have occurred when majority and minority parties change places. Beginning in 1932, FDR attracted black, white, working-class, and immigrant voters to the Democratic Party, making it the majority party for generations. It is a sign of how big that coalition was that it has shrunk since the elections 1960s without the Republicans ever becoming the clear majority party, although the story is complicated by the rise of voters who call themselves independents.

For the past twenty years, the parties have essentially been that way tiedand it seems unlikely that this will change in the short term. But there is still a lot of realignment going on. Donald Trump has accelerated the trend of the white working class fleeing the Democrats. Meanwhile, college-educated and suburban voters have shifted significantly toward Democrats.

In other words, while the parties are stuck in an impasse, the coalitions that make up the parties are changing dramatically.

And that’s where the inconsistency and hypocrisy come into play. Parties reflect the interests of their electoral coalitions. You see signs of the adjustments everywhere. Republicans like JD Vance sound a lot like the anti-war Democrats of two decades ago, railing against warmongers, chicken hawks and “neocons.” Democrats haven’t changed as dramatically, but they are much more comfortable talking about American global leadership and the importance of our alliances than they used to be.

Parties also reflect their candidates, which is why the party of the philandering Bill Clinton now talks a lot about good character, while the Republicans focus on Trump’s alpha dog.masculinity.”

Democrats have been much more consistent on abortion because it is a winning issue in a post-Roe environment. But Trump has moved the Republican Party toward a de facto pro-choice stance, denouncing “heartbeat bills” while also insisting that states should be free to do as they please on the field of abortion.

Neither party is coherent – ​​or good, in my opinion – on trade and industrial policy, but Trump has certainly made the Republican Party more protectionist and conductor than at any time in my life. Given the movement of rank-and-file members of private unions toward the Republican Party, it is not difficult to imagine a new partisan divide between public and private sector unions.

Perhaps the most interesting change concerns the question of democracy itself. I don’t mean the arguments about Trump’s pernicious election fraud lies (the kind of lies that… ever associated with it left-wing Democrats like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), but the broader debates over the electoral college and so-called voter suppression.

For decades, both sides shared the imperfect assumption that higher turnout in national elections mainly benefited Democrats; In major cities, Democrats took the opposite view elections. Voter ID laws and tighter restrictions on early and absentee voting were seen as a way to ensure that high-propensity voters—that is, disproportionately Republican, college-educated suburbanites who could be trusted to vote—were overrepresented and a low propensity to vote. voters—black, Latino, and non-college-educated white voters in rural areas—were underrepresented. The overheated rhetoric about “voter suppression” or “election integrity” was not justified. But the dynamics were real, because the election calculation was real.

After 2016, many Democrats doubled down on claims of an electoral college racist or undemocratic, which in itself was remarkably hypocritical given their previous boasts about it Democrats had an almost-lock about the electoral college – as the expression goes “the blue wall” to arise. Boasting about your advantage in the Electoral College, only to call it racist and undemocratic when it goes against you, is not a nice look.

The Harris campaign relied on high-propensity voters, while the Trump campaign relied heavily on low-propensity men. Assuming that these trends are real and that they become the new normal, it will be interesting to see whether the parties will change their rhetoric on democracy.

Again, I’m writing before the many states start counting votes: Imagine a scenario in which Harris wins the Electoral College but loses the popular vote and the hypocritical switcheroo that could cause. Suddenly, Democrats may applaud the wisdom of the founders, while Republicans may dismiss the Electoral College as a rigged and racist relic.

@JonaDispatch