The great alignment: race, party transformation, and the rise of Donald Trump

Alan I. Abramowitz has emerged as a spokesman for the view that our current political divide is not confined to a small group of elites and activists but a key feature of the American social and cultural landscape.

The polarisation of the political and media elites, he argues, arose and persists because it reflects the state of American society.

Here, he goes further: the polarisation is unique in modern US history.

Today's party divide reflects an unprecedented alignment of many different divides: racial and ethnic, religious, ideological, and geographic.

Abramowitz shows how the partisan alignment arose out of the breakup of the old New Deal coalition; introduces the most important difference between our current and past eras, the rise of 'negative partisanship'; explains how this paved the way for the Trump presidency; and examines why our polarisation could even grow deeper.