Election Review: Moving Beyond “Permanent Majorities”
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on January 11th, 2009 5:34 am by HL
Election Review: Moving Beyond “Permanent Majorities”
Michael Barone’s latest column is an important one. Its central thesis is that in a diverse country with a long tradition of competitive two-party elections, trying to build a permanent majority is a fool’s errand. This is a point worth amplifying - as it relates to our ongoing series on the election. The classic view of realignments is that they occur in roughly 30-year intervals. Under this framework, the elections of 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, and 1932 represent realignments, or sharp breaks with the elections that preceded them, resulting in the birth of new, lasting majority coalitions. The popularity of realignment theory has spilled over to the general punditry. Hundreds of blog posts and columns have already been written on the question of whether 2008 is a realigning election or not.
