The great American realignment

What connects a former vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), a scion of the Kennedy family turned prominent anti-vaxxer, a Big Tech billionaire and a large chunk of rank-and-file trade-union members? Until recently, all were solid Democrats. But they have decided to jump on the Trump train in 2024.

In the run-up to today’s election, the Democrats and their media allies have made much of the political diversity of Kamala Harris’s endorsements. Her ‘improbable coalition’, as the Atlantic describes it, spans from popstar Taylor Swift to ‘democratic socialist’ Bernie Sanders to neoconservative Republicans Dick and Liz Cheney. ‘Fiscal conservatives, social conservatives and foreign-policy hawks’, notes Politico, are firmly in the Harris campaign’s sights. According to the New York Times, in the Democrats’ courting of ‘moderate’, anti-Trump Republicans, lies the ‘seeds of American renewal’. But Trump is also building a support base that stretches far beyond traditional Republicans. A major realignment of US politics is happening in plain sight.

Trump’s presidential transition team includes Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy Jr – two prominent former Democrats. His second-biggest donor is X owner Elon Musk, one of Joe Biden’s largest donors in 2020, who also supported Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s election campaigns, financially and vocally. Organised labour, once the bedrock of Democratic Party support, has become at least Trump-curious. Most notably, the Teamsters union broke with tradition by pointedly refusing to endorse the Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in decades.

Each of these former Democrats has their own reasons for abandoning their old party and throwing their weight behind Trump, although a common theme is a disillusionment with the Democratic party elite.

Tulsi Gabbard was a Democrat for 20 years. She was the Democratic House representative from Hawaii and served as vice-chair of the DNC. She now says her old party has become unrecognisable. ‘When you look at the party of Kamala Harris, for example, she is anti-freedom’, said Gabbard at a Trump rally in North Carolina when announcing her defection to the Republicans. ‘[Harris] is pro-censorship, she is pro-open borders, and she is pro-war without even pretending to care about peace.’

Gabbard’s shift didn’t happen overnight. She
had long made a name for herself as an independently minded Democrat willing to criticise her own side. A fierce critic of woke, she has railed against the Democrats’ abandonment of women’s rights in the name of trans inclusion. Although her detractors paint her as ‘socially conservative’, thus supposedly making her a natural Republican or Trump supporter, she has long challenged the Democrats from the left, too. She resigned from the DNC in 2016 in order to endorse Bernie Sanders’s campaign. She then ran herself for the 2020 Democratic nomination. In a primary debate in 2019, she eviscerated Kamala Harris’s record as California’s district attorney – not for being lax on crime, as the Trump campaign has portrayed her, but for her zealous jailing of mostly black men for minor offences, such as marijuana possession. Having served in the military, Gabbard has also been a vocal critic of America’s overseas wars. After the defeat of the Sanders campaign in 2020, Gabbard now sees Trump as the most credible anti-war candidate and the Republicans as less hawkish than the Democrats.

Trump’s foreign-policy stances have also played a big role in encouraging RFK Jr into the fold. The son of Robert F Kennedy and nephew of revered late president John F Kennedy, RFK Jr began his own 2024 presidential bid by seeking the Democratic nomination. In October last year, he quit the Democrats and decided to run as an independent, before suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump in August this year.

RFK Jr is justifiably painted as an oddball conspiracy theorist for his decades of anti-vax activism (he still maintains, despite all evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism). Critics say it is this conspiratorialism that led him to endorse Trump. But there is far more to it than that. RFK describes himself as a ‘Kennedy Democrat’. When he was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, he said ‘we need to bring the party back’ to the values of his father, his uncle, Franklin D Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr – and away from the racial identitarianism, illiberalism and globalism of the woke Democratic establishment. The anti-war, anti-woke and anti-censorship messaging from recent Trump converts, like RFK and Gabbard, undoubtedly resonates with many traditional Democrats.

Ever since his victory in 2016, Trump has demonstrated an ability to reach working-class, former Democratic voters in a way that traditional Republicans never could. Last year, working-class voters polled by the Progressive Policy Institute said Trump had done more than any other president for the average working family of the past 30 years. Yet it has taken until 2024 for organised labour to give the former president a proper look. Back in July, Sean O’Brien became the first ever president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to address a Republican National Convention. Like most trade unions, the Teamsters union, which represents workers in transport and logistics, usually endorses the Democratic ticket without question. But after consulting with members this year, it announced in September that it would not be endorsing any candidate for US president. Internal polling revealed that just under 60 per cent of rank-and-file Teamsters wanted their union to endorse Trump, with only 34 per cent backing Harris. Most union leaders are nevertheless still toeing the Democratic Party line, even if their members are keener on Trump’s economic populism than on Democratic welfarism.

Perhaps the most notorious defector this election season has been Elon Musk. The billionaire SpaceX and Tesla owner was once admired by progressives for his unfailing support for the Democrats. Like most Silicon Valley oligarchs, he was a strong backer of Biden, Clinton and especially Obama (Musk once queued for six hours to shake the former president’s hand). He was even seen as an environmental hero for Tesla’s success in making electric cars seem cool. Yet in the eyes of the liberal elite, since his takeover of X (formerly Twitter), and his 2024 endorsement of Donald Trump, Musk now surely ranks as the second-most-reviled man on Earth. His ‘free speech’ policies on X (as limited as they may be) are often single-handedly blamed for an alleged rise in ‘disinformation’ online, which is in turn blamed for boosting Trump’s chances.

Musk biographer Walter Isaacson traces his rift with the Democrats back to the Covid pandemic of 2020. This was when the supposedly ‘liberal’ side of politics placed millions of people under house arrest and the alleged ‘party of workers’ shut down the economy and threw millions out of work. ‘To say that they cannot leave their house, and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom’, Musk said in spring 2020, blasting the lockdown orders in California.

The trans issue has also played a critical role in Musk’s political journey. He says he was ‘tricked’ into allowing his son to transition and to take puberty blockers, which are ‘just sterilising drugs’. This prompted a broader questioning of what he describes as the ‘woke mind virus’, which has been aggressively spread by the Democratic Party.

In elections past, these independently minded Democrats might have coalesced around a contrarian candidate during the party primaries – say, a Bernie Sanders or an Andrew Yang. In the presidential election, they might have backed a centrist Democratic nominee reluctantly, voted for a third-party candidate or supported no one at all. Yet now we see a grouping as eclectic and diverse as Musk, Gabbard and RFK Jr have signed up to Team Trump.

What this suggests is that the realignment that became clear in 2016, as working-class voters broke for Trump, is broadening. The old dividing lines of left and right are becoming obsolete. In their place, we see a fight between the establishment and anti-establishment candidates; between populists and liberal elitists. Whether voters are more repelled by elite Democrats or more attracted by Trumpist populism, one thing is clear: the rules of American politics have been fundamentally rewritten.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.