Review of "The Lost Majority" by Sean Trende
In this book, Sean Trende pours cold water over “permanent partisan majority” theories. He argues that party successes on the presidential and congressional levels are contingent on party choices, and that any necessary division between “sun” and “moon” parties in 32-40 year party systems simply does not hold up -”we now have two parties that are able to win nationally” (p. 197), “This whole System of 1896 that Burnham hypothesized is nothing more than a collection of good and bad choices by parties, mixed with a bit of luck.” (p. 193). Trende ends up being half right -right in that party choices and luck are vital in determining U.S. elections’ overall victors, wrong in that individual candidates are always able to buck the issues and constituencies they live under and that 32-40 year cycles have no practical importance.
The key error Trende makes is rejecting the whole concept of party systems -in his words, “realignments do not exist” (p. 182). The idea party coalitions contain in themselves contradictions the resolution of which heightens other contradictions is made implicit, but never explicitly elaborated upon. One never sees a graph in the book like the above or those below:
Clearly, one can distinguish in the first of the above graphs six (the first party system was before 1828) distinct party systems, each amounting to eight to ten presidential elections. Trende’s interpretation of American presidential politics as pure chaos applies only through the 1950s-1970s.
Trende (p. 28) makes a big deal of Eisenhower creating a new party coalition (although he somewhat understates just how important segregationists in South Carolina, Louisiana, etc. were to it). Ike’s gains in the Deep South were part of a logical resolution of the contradiction created in 1936, when FDR became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the Black vote. There could have been no coalitional dealignment of the 1950s without the ideological realignment (which at least Trende notes on p. 25-44) of the 1930s (see the above VoteView graph). Trende does correctly point out that the LBJ coalition of 1964 had next to no resemblance to the FDR presidential coalitions, which (I note) continued to resemble Wilson’s win in 1916 (see chart above).
Trende also considers 1992 at least as legitimate a “critical election” as 1896 (again, see the first graph in this newsletter). And, indeed, as Bill Clinton presaged the seventh party system, so did Eisenhower presage the sixth. But never is it stated in the book that the 1952 and 1956 presidential election results, as Steve Sailer noted, were the least correlated pair of the same presidential candidates running against each other in American history -and that the incredibly tight correlation between the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections (.9748) was the highest between two consecutive presidential elections in 60 years (it was .9853 in 1940-1944). Just as the Eisenhower era began a process of coalitional dealignment, so did the Bill Clinton era, with massive Democratic gains in the Northeast and substantial Democratic losses in the states around Wyoming coincide with the start of a coalitional realignment -something that would have likely happened with any other Democratic president. Recall that even Joe Biden, with his remarkable primary performance among White Working Class Democrats, came nowhere close to stopping the reality of general election trends.
A key problem with the book (or at least the Kindle edition) is that it’s quite poorly edited (e.g., “thinking in the 1990s” on p. 61, “never won more than 30 percent of the White vote” on p. 70, neglecting 1972, “late 1920s” on p. 182, “1972” on p. 189, “wealthy suburbanites across the country (the backbone of the non-southern Goldwater GOP) were discomforted by the GOP’s rightward lean in the 1970s” on p. 118 [the GOP continued to perform excellently in rich Southern and Western suburbs until the George W. Bush era], etc..
In a surprise for a book by a “Senior Elections Analyst, RealClearPolitics” is that while it’s pretty good at description, it’s not at all good at analysis. Only that the economy is not the be all and end all of vote choice can be called serious analysis maintained for more than two pages. Perhaps its most prescient warning is that “The white working class and the upper middle class are two groups that will always be difficult to keep in the same coalition. Their interests are wildly divergent, and policies that appeal to one group are likely to push the other group away”.
Rating: four out of five stars