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Political Realignment, Part 1: What Hasn’t Worked [1]

['Dr. Ash', 'Blue Choir Singer']

Date: 2026-09-20  

In my recent diary—The Psychology of Conservatism: Why Do People Keep Voting for Republicans—I argued that there are a core set of cognitive reasons that motivate people to vote for Republicans again and again despite their objectively worse record on virtually every metric that can be measured.

The common liberal response to this voting behavior involves some version of this conclusion: “Republican voters are greedy, idiotic, and willfully-ignorant bigots who are motivated more by hate than their own interests.”

Can republican voters be greedy, ignorant, idiotic, and bigoted? Sure, many are. It’s no surprise that racial resentment is one of the strongest predictors of voting Republican (although that doesn’t explain the consistent base of minority Republican voters).

But I wanted to know why. What is it in the conservative psychology that leads people to think in this way?

It turns out the answer isn’t so simple as racism or greed. For many conservative voters, politics is bound up with identity, belonging, status, culture, community, and a preferred social order. Social change can therefore feel less like an abstract policy debate and more like a threat to who they are, where they belong, and how they think society should work. Once political allegiance becomes part of that larger identity, contradictory evidence becomes easier to dismiss, inconsistencies easier to rationalize, and changing sides much harder than simply changing one’s mind about a policy.

Republican operatives have also spent decades reinforcing these connections—linking race, fundamentalist Christianity, gun culture, nationalism, hypermasculinity, heteronormativity, and rural identity into an increasingly coherent political identity, while a large right-wing media ecosystem continually reinforces narratives of threat, loss, and resentment.

That process first accelerated during the great partisan realignment over civil rights in the 1960s. Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965; over the decades that followed, the formerly Democratic white South became increasingly Republican. Republican strategists deliberately pursued disaffected white Southern voters and later incorporated evangelical Christianity, opposition to feminism, and other cultural issues into the same political coalition—a process historians Angie Maxwell and Todd Shields (2019) describe as the “Long Southern Strategy.”

What emerged was more than a collection of policy preferences. Indeed, in recent years, we’ve seen that policy consistency often doesn’t matter all that much to the GOP. It was an identity: a collection of cultural, religious, racial, regional, and social identities increasingly tied to the same partisan choice. And the Republican party became experts at manipulating these identities while constantly provoking the conservative fear response to perceived social threats—thus, the never-ending “culture wars”.

This helps explain why people keep voting for Republicans over and over again, despite their consistent failures, lies, and corrosive impact on the common good.

Okay, so, what do we do about it?

First, let’s understand what we mean by that question. We want more than to win any given election, or even election cycle. After all, the Dems are likely to make substantials gains in the upcoming midterms. But not really because of anything we’re doing—it’s almost entirely a response to the massive unpopularity of Trump and MAGA. Unless something changes, this is likely just another temporary oscillation in the political churn.

Consider: Democrats won control of Congress back in the 2006 wave and expanded their majority while winning the presidency in 2008, only to lose 64 House seats and control of the chamber in 2010. They gained 41 House seats in the 2018 midterms, then lost ground in 2020 and lost control of the House in 2022. We need to stop this cycle, where Republicans in power eventually screw everything up bad enough that people put Dems back in to clean up the mess, and once things are stable again voters go back to the GOP. In effect, we want what we had prior to 1995, when the GOP finally broke the continuous 40-year Democrat domination of the House.

To get that back, we need a durable political realignment.

By a durable political realignment, I mean something much bigger than winning a wave election—a lasting shift in which groups identify with which political coalition, what issues define that alignment, and which party voters regard as their natural political home. The important word is durable: the new alignment survives changing candidates, scandals, recessions, and individual election cycles, reshaping the electorate for years or even a generation.

In practical terms, this means something like a 3–5% shift in the electorate. Of course, we see movements of that size from one election to another all the time. Trump, for example, won 48% of Latino voters in 2024—a huge increase that they hoped represented such a realignment—but by spring 2026 his approval among Latino adults had fallen to just 22%, and even among Latinos who actually voted for him, approval had dropped 27 points. C’est la vie.

So we aren’t looking for a temporary 3–5 point swing produced by an unpopular president, inflation, a recession, a scandal, or charismatic candidate. We are looking for several million Americans to change their political default—and stay changed after the immediate reason for switching has disappeared.

And it’s possible that Trump and MAGA are giving us that opportunity. The growing national disgust with them could be analogous to the civil rights acts in the 1960s that threw Southern Democrats into the arms of the GOP. But only if the Democratic Party and liberal/progressive activists prioritize this specific goal and use effective tactics to manifest and maintain it.

First, let’s review what hasn’t worked so we don’t keep using failed tactics.

The Failure of Centrism

To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with being more centrist, moderate, or bipartisan when that reflects the values and political realities of a particular district or constituency. A Democrat representing a conservative or highly competitive district may reasonably take positions that differ from those of a Democrat representing a deep-blue urban seat. The problem is not ideological variation. The problem is when centrism becomes a general governing philosophy rather than a response to local voters.

Democrats have pursued two different forms of centrism over the past several decades, and they fail for different reasons.

Departisan centrism is the belief that voters will reward Democrats for appearing reasonable, compromising, and above partisan conflict. Obama was the clearest modern example. He repeatedly sought Republican participation in major legislation and made substantial efforts to negotiate across party lines. But the basic assumption was flawed: bipartisan cooperation does not necessarily weaken partisan identity, and the opposition party often has strong incentives not to help the governing party succeed. Frances Lee (2016) shows that when control of government is genuinely competitive, partisan conflict increases because denying the other party achievements can itself be electorally useful.

Corporate centrism is the second form: economic moderation shaped heavily by affluent constituencies, large donors, and business interests. Research by Gilens and Page (2014) found that economic elites and organized business interests had substantial independent relationships with federal policy outcomes, while the preferences of average citizens had much less independent influence once elite preferences were taken into account. Barber (2016) similarly found that senators in both parties were ideologically closer to their donors than to the average voters in their states.

The failure here is different. Corporate centrism can blur the economic distinction between the parties, particularly for working- and middle-class voters. A party may remain socially liberal while becoming less clearly identified with material gains for ordinary workers.

So centrism has two recurring weaknesses: departisan centrism assumes compromise can dissolve partisan identity (which it doesn’t), while corporate centrism weakens the economic identity of the party itself (thereby pushing away economic allies). Both forms have failed to result in a durable political realignment we are looking for.

And so, unless it’s required to win and hold a particular district, centrism must be abandoned as a governing philosophy.

The Failure of Ideological Moralization

Liberalism is largely defined by a commitment to equal rights and the celebration of cultural diversity. This is consistent with political-psychology research showing that liberals tend to place greater value on egalitarian social arrangements, while conservatism is more strongly associated with social dominance and acceptance of hierarchy (Jost et al., 2003). And beyond the moral case for equal treatment, inclusion has practical benefits, too: research links inclusive workplaces with greater innovation and healthier organizational outcomes, while meaningful contact across social groups reliably reduces prejudice and improves intergroup relations (Nault et al., 2026; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). In short, when diversity is accompanied by genuine inclusion, it can strengthen workplaces, communities, and the broader society.

However, we must differentiate between a commitment to equal rights/cultural diversity—which isn’t negotiable within the Democratic coalition—and the means by which we pursue those goals.

Equal rights ultimately require political power. When liberals are out of power, as they largely are now at the federal level, the consequences can be severe. Since January 2025, we’ve seen a massive attack on civil liberties hitting virtually every minority population there is in addition to the rising tide of fascistic tactics used to terrify, oppress, and divide. I don’t have to tell any of you this—you know. But it must be pointed out that this is a consequence of being out of power. Elections matter.

So any serious commitment to equal rights and cultural inclusion must also include a serious commitment to obtaining and maintaining the political power necessary to protect them.

And by that measure, the Democratic Party and the broader social-justice movement have struggled over the last twenty years. We have made enormous cultural and legal gains, yes, but we have not converted those gains into a comparably durable governing coalition that can protect and expand on them. The reasons for this are complex, and can in part be explained by the expert manipulation of the Republican party and its mouthpieces in the right wing media ecosphere. But it’s also the case that we went all-in on two failed approaches that need to be reformed or jettisoned if we are to build a durable political realignment.

Woke 1.0

Being “woke” originally meant being aware of the systemic ways our institutions can unfairly disadvantage racial minorities. Most Americans understand this. An April 2025 Ipsos survey asked Americans which of two definitions of “woke” came closest to their understanding of the term. Sixty-five percent chose “informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices,” compared with 35% who chose being “overly politically correct and policing others’ words” (Ipsos, 2025).

Supporting social justice maintains strong public support. But “Woke-ness” does not. An Economist/YouGov survey from August 2026 found that 27% of Americans described themselves as “woke,” 24% as “anti-woke,” 36% as neither, and 13% were unsure. Among Democrats, only 54% called themselves woke (Orth, 2026). Americans are thus considerably more receptive to the underlying ideals associated with “wokeness” than they are to the label itself. Why is this?

While there can be many expressions of wokeness, the Woke 1.0 movement that AOC recently called “crazy” is reflected in the activist culture that became especially prominent during the 2010s and around 2020. Common elements included:

specialized language that changed rapidly and was stridently policed;

public shaming of violations of emerging social norms;

disproportionate attention to the ideological shortcomings of imperfect allies;

a tendency to interpret disparate outcomes (e.g. standardized math scores) or conventional standards (e.g. timely attendance at work) primarily through the lens of racism without reference to individual capabilities and values;

assigning virtue to oppression and status competition over relative marginalization—i.e. the “Oppression Olympics”;

rhetoric treating whiteness as conferring systemic privilege and moral complicity regardless of individual character or behavior; and

a tendency to frame disagreement not merely as error but as evidence of ignorance or moral failure.

It is not my purpose here to critique the merits of these particulars. What’s relevant here is the total failure of this program to build a coalition large enough to win stable political power. And no surprise, the reasons are psychological—

As I outlined in The Psychology of Conservatism, many conservative voters are especially responsive to perceived threats involving social hierarchy, cultural change, and group status. That creates an obvious political danger for any movement seeking rapid social change: the way equality is framed can activate the very psychological forces that make people resist it.

This is particularly true when racial progress is presented in explicitly zero-sum terms—as one group gaining status at another group’s expense—or when ordinary members of the majority group are told that their identity itself makes them complicit, privileged, or morally suspect. Craig and Richeson (2014), for example, experimentally found that simply making impending racial demographic change salient increased conservative identification and policy preferences among White participants, with perceived group-status threat helping explain the effect.

The same problem appears when antiracism is communicated through coercive moral pressure. Legault, Gutsell, and Inzlicht (2011) found that messages emphasizing that people should suppress prejudice because society demands it actually increased measured prejudice relative to no intervention.

And there is a larger partisan consequence. Mason (2015) found that as social and ideological identities become increasingly aligned with party identity, partisan bias, anger, and activism intensify—even when Americans have not become equivalently polarized on the underlying issues.

These are some of the psychological mechanisms that can cause well-intentioned efforts at social change to generate exactly the kind of resistance they are intended to overcome. Woke 1.0 strengthened the perception that politics is a conflict between demographic tribes, intensified status threat among people already sensitive to it, and pushed those identities into even tighter alignment with conservative politics. While Democrats have remained largely unified on the underlying goals related to social justice, it is telling that 46% do not identify with the “woke” label.

In other words, the approach is divisive, not unifying. Regardless of the intent or the merits of Woke 1.0 activism, as a movement it failed to create a sustainable base of power and influence. Because of that, and the ease with which conservative activists could weaponize its rhetoric, “woke” largely became a political albatross for Democrats, creating a damaging wedge between the party and the activist base.

Purity

There is a tricky balance between upholding foundational principles of a coalition and utilizing tactics that keep the tent large enough to wield real power. There is an inverse relationship between these two concerns—the larger the coalition, the more tolerance it requires for differences in beliefs, priorities, and tactics; the stricter the demand for ideological agreement, the smaller the coalition is likely to become.

This dynamic has plagued social groups since time immemorial. The classic comic example comes from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, where members of the anti-Roman People’s Front of Judea bitterly complain about the “splitters” in the Judean People’s Front and chastise the solo member of the so-called Popular Front sitting but a few yards away.

The scene is funny, but social-movement researchers have documented the same dynamic repeatedly. Broad movements inevitably contain factions with somewhat different ideologies, priorities, tactics, and constituencies, and those differences can gradually become identities of their own. Barbara Ryan’s (1989) study of the early women’s movement found that ideological purity actually helped transform disagreements among feminists into antagonistic group divisions. Research on movements ranging from SDS and SNCC to environmental and peace organizations has found the same basic problem: factions that ostensibly share a larger goal can become increasingly preoccupied with defining themselves against one another.

The challenge for any successful coalition is therefore not eliminating internal disagreement—that is impossible—but preventing disagreement from becoming the basis for rival identities and schism. When done well, the coalition emphasizes persuasion, adopts methods of respectful disagreement and debate, consistently reinforces shared values and goals, and tolerance for multiple tactics and subgroup identities. Kretschmer (2025), reviewing conflict within American peace movements, concludes that factionalism is essentially inevitable; effective movements succeed not by eliminating it, but by managing its consequences, tolerating different approaches, and keeping common purposes salient. Research on movement coalitions similarly finds that shared interests alone are not enough: members need credible expectations that partners will cooperate, contribute, and resolve the tensions that inevitably arise (Levi & Murphy, 2006).

Alas, the larger Democratic/liberal/progressive coalition has failed this test in recent years. Just like the People’s Front of Judea, the more passionate advocates on the left frequently emphasize ideological purity over power. Remember, this isn’t a critique of having clear moral standards—something we should all have—nor of giving a passionate defense of one’s political priorities. Those do not break coalitions. The failure comes from off-putting finger wagging, harsh moral condemnation, and drawing hard in-group/out-group lines even when based on single disagreements despite shared values and goals. These do break coalitions.

Social media makes this dynamic especially potent, because moral condemnation is no longer confined to disagreement between two people. It can become a dogpile in which demonstrating that you recognize someone else’s impurity becomes part of proving your own.

There are psychological reasons that the purity approach exists, which is why it is hardly new. Social-identity research has long documented the black sheep effect: people can judge undesirable members of their own group more harshly than comparable outsiders when the behavior at issue is relevant to the group’s identity (Marques, Yzerbyt, & Leyens, 1988). In other words, policing 5% of disagreement can actually become a way of protecting and demonstrating one’s membership in the 95% consensus.

There is also a status component. Grubbs and colleagues (2020) found that moral grandstanding—using moral discourse partly to gain prestige or standing within one’s group—was associated with greater ideological extremity and affective polarization. Social media then adds an accelerant. Brady and colleagues (2021) found that positive social feedback for expressions of moral outrage increased the likelihood that users would express outrage again in the future, consistent with reinforcement learning. They also found that people adjusted their expressions of outrage to conform to the norms of their social networks. In other words, online environments do not merely provide a venue for moral condemnation; they can actively reinforce and normalize its expression.

Psychologically, this all makes sense. Condemning an imperfect ally does more than punish the offender; it publicly demonstrates the condemner’s own moral credentials to the group. The more visible the transgression and denunciation, the greater the opportunity for everyone else to prove that they understand where the boundary lies. And if the offender has a good argument for their position or offers demonstrable facts to back them up, the purist merely needs to resort to attacks on their character (which is not a necessary requirement for purity, but is nevertheless a common tactic).

No, purity is not a universal orientation in the Democratic/liberal/progressive cohort, so I don’t want to overstate it. And I suspect that the shared horror and disgust of Trump/MAGA has dampened it in the last year or so. But it has nevertheless played a corrosive role in our politics, and online ecosystems will make it all to easy to come back strong when the conditions are right. And it hasn’t disappeared—explore any DKos comment section and you are bound to find it (I predict there will eventually be several examples below).

At the same time, I want to underscore the difference between purity and dissent. Research has shown that dissent is a normal and potentially healthy feature of group life (Jetten & Hornsey, 2014). It can expose bad assumptions, force a group to reconsider ineffective strategies, and prevent conformity from becoming an end in itself. Indeed, this diary is itself an expression of dissent against longstanding features of the political left that I believe have been counterproductive to our shared goals. The aim is thus not ideological unanimity (and certainly not mushy centrism, which has also been a failure). It is to create an environment in which we can engage in vigorous but respectful debate about goals, priorities, and tactics without turning disagreement into a test of belonging—and still stand together when confronting our shared problems.

Summary

Let’s recall the goal: manifesting a political realignment that results in a durable shift toward the left for a majority of Americans. We want the Democratic Party to become the natural political home for enough voters that it is no longer perpetually playing defense or functioning as the cleanup crew after the inevitable Republican disasters. Right now, we are very far from this goal.

We know what doesn’t work.

Mushy centrism as a governing philosophy has been a failure, whether the aim is to soften conservative partisanship or to accommodate the donor class in order to maintain access to money and institutional influence. Both have left the party appearing weak and elitist.

On the other end, the tactics of Woke 1.0 and purity politics have proven to be off-putting, divisive, and energizing for the right. Moralized language, public shaming, rigid ideological boundaries, and the treatment of disagreement as evidence of bad character are poor foundations for maintaining a winning coalition.

If we are interested in a durable 3–5 point shift rather than another temporary electoral swing, these are the mechanisms worth understanding: How does a political coalition become part of someone’s identity? What makes people reconsider an old political allegiance? How do policies create lasting constituencies? How do new issues reorganize old coalitions? And, once political identification changes, what makes the new affiliation stick?

Those are the questions for the next diary.

References

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/9/20/800100451/community/political-realignment-part-1-what-hasnt-worked/

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